]]> Three things this week have individually and collectively really made me think I was seeing something both interesting and important. Two of them are down to Oracle and the third was at the Open Group meeting inSan Francisco. Let’s start with a press release by Oracle last week, which as far as I can see didn’t make any headlines in the industry press. I guess that’s because being the huge operation that is Oracle today, it announced so many upgrades and new versions of its massive product portfolio that individual notices get lost, or as in this case the significance gets overlooked.

The title of the press release was “Oracle Announces Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management 2.1 and Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Analytics”. The upgraded Utilities Mobile Workforce Management simplifies the complicated and complex job of scheduling the right people with the right skills to the right jobs with cost, time and other management objectives.  There are now tools for collaboration and sharing between the field staff using a variety of digital devices to take photos, record strange noises and share experiences etc. A really nice example of the shift towards mobility and big data outside the firewall, or ‘outside-in’ as we call it in the new Capgemini Point of View, which shows how clouds, mobility and big data create a new set of business capabilities outside the firewall of conventional IT.

But look at the second product in the announcement. This adds the ability to take the ‘big data’ that the workforce creates and analyzes it for new ‘insights’ to provide performance improvements. What Oracle have done is, on one hand, ‘orchestrated’ the workforce to create new streams of previously unavailable data on the realities of their work, and, on the other hand, created the ability to use this data to improve the performance and management of those same workers. Brilliant! This creates a real virtuous circle of continuous process improvement. It’s a real win-win of a type that I presume Oracle will continue to introduce into other releases as well.

The same joined-up thinking was present in the Oracle webcast around ‘reinventing the customer experience’ that took CRM to the stage of a completely integrated front office incorporating its acquisition of Cloud CRM company the RightNow. Mark Hurd, President of Oracle, introduced the webcast stating that “it’s core to us” and talked about the “reinvention of CRM” by bringing together the RightNow CRM applications with other Oracle applications for eCommerce, customer analysis, natural language search, etc to populate operational maps. These were produced to illustrate how all the front office processes should be integrated to work together cohesively. The opening statement said it all: “in a very real sense the basic rules of business have changed” as “Globalization has increased customer choice and supply exceeds demand for most products” but “consumers will pay extra for great customer service”. PC World captured the general outline of the webcast very well on their website.

It’s worth taking some time to look at the materials from this webcast  to see their process flow charts for the front office as it’s one of the first maps I have seen of all the major processes. And that links to the Open Group event whose mission statement is the creation of the capabilities for improved business effectiveness through ‘boundaryless information flow’,  leading to their role in creating the widely accepted industry standard approach to Architecture, TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework.

The opening plenary presentations included Lauren States, the IBM CTO for the Cloud and High Growth Markets,  placing a firm marker on this whole shift in capabilities that the combination of clouds, with mobility and the use of big data bring to create a new front office revolution in doing business with the external world. It was well presented and argued material, and together with a plenary of my own on the same topic, (plus those from an MIT Sloan Business professor and the global CIO of Renault Nissan), resulted in Allen Brown, the President and CEO of the Open Group, calling this an ‘inflexion point’ in both business and technology.

The result, as I understand it, will be an extension of the mission statement to include external boundaryless information flows between businesses. And therefore it’s an extension of TOGAF into providing what I think will be the first move to actually create what is required to make the capabilities into real business solutions, i.e. an architectural framework for cloud-based services. Yup, three really thought-provoking moves towards using technology to really make a difference in a new way in the business and it’s only the start of this week so far! Wonder what else could happen in the rest of the week!

]]> It’s not often that there is a genuine ‘green field’ opportunity, a real chance to start from scratch without the handicap of legacy, both in systems and working practices. Oddly enough it’s happened for me several times recently and the circumstances could be more common than you would expect. In the global market more and more enterprises are moving into ‘new’, or ‘emergent’, markets for their products or services, and establishing your local operations in these countries is essentially a ‘green field’ opportunity, or at least it could be. In the last two months this has meant companies establishing major operations inChinaandSaudi Arabiathrough to setting up small operations across Asia in markets likeVietnam.

The CEO of a building products company made the big point with the simple statement: ‘Why would I continue to design my business model around the limitations and expenses of a 1970s mainframe model?’ He went on to say he could not afford the time (yes, that was his first point), or the cost, to set up his current IT support structure in these new markets, and surely it is possible now to approach this in a different way with ‘as a service’ technologies?

We have all complained about the limitations that many years of building our IT systems with the technologies and processes that were the best at the time, and how we are trapped by the results. And we have also tried to make sense of how to make a business case to upgrade and replace with newer technologies, and frankly it’s difficult, even risky in some cases to achieve. But here is a real chance to design and deploy, in relatively low-risk, small-scale markets, and test the results, but it does mean setting out to challenge the automatic reaction, which is to deploy the ‘standard’ IT systems.

Working out what and how to do this starts with designing the business model that will be supported with the business from the market side back into the enterprise operations and administration, rather than using the traditional ERP and mainframe approach which is to work from the limitations of the computing systems and their transactional capabilities towards the edge of the business. Doing this with a clean sheet of paper around the best ways to compete for and win business, deliver and service customers, can be a real insight. In fact, it might just form the basis for a new working relationship with the business in the existing companies towards new goals in what ‘good’ should look like, and establish new benchmarks for improvements and upgrading.

New people, new ideas, new working patterns combined with freedom to use new technologies to enable is the ‘let’s think out of the box’ and ‘let’s be innovative’ moment that many of us are striving to introduce into our enterprises. So if you are in an enterprise making moves into new countries don’t waste the opportunity!! And no, I am not going to offer a prescriptive approach on how to do this and what ‘good’ would look like because that would be returning to the old IT approach where technology capabilities have been the limiting factors on the businesses capabilities to redesign their business model to be much more flexible and effective.

However, if you want to get the creative thinking started here are some recent articles on how new technologies have changed traditional markets and approaches:

Starting with an article on the technology market and some familiar players published by Fast Company’s Website that I really recommend for its analysis and thought-provoking content on how Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are engaged in a competitive battle to create new global market positioning around getting their technology to be ubiquitous.  Equally thought-provoking but based on a very simple theme is 50 things that we don’t do anymore because technology has either changed the mark, the way we decide, or actually do things. Finally, the latest thinking of author Don Tapscott can be found at Forbes online in an interview about whether traditional build-to-sell industrialization/standardization is coming to the end of its competitive age.

]]> Did you read last week’s CTO Blog post which noted and linked to the views of Gartner, Forrester and IDC that we would see 2012 as the year in which a really recognizable shift would be underway to deliver new front office business capabilities and that these would not necessarily be under the CIO or IT? The point being made was that these new business requirements and enabling technologies are not part of the IT environment as we know it today. Add to this the existing confusion over clouds and you are probably trying to work out exactly what these stunning new game-changing capabilities are!

Below is both an extract from the new Capgemini Point of View on how clouds, mobility and big data create a new set of business capabilities (the Point of View will soon be published on www.capgemini.com), and a use case that Capgemini technology communities and practices have been using to determine the skills and capabilities required. The terms and definitions ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ can be found in full in this paper or in summary on a previous CTO Blog post.

I produce it here in full with accompanying diagrams to help make at least a little clearer what this is all about! I hope it helps, and yes it is high level, but various technology elements are discussed in more detail on the Capping IT Off Blog.

A use case for understanding new capabilities

The operating authority of a major airport is facing demands to improve the operational management of its increasingly congested airport, both to improve real-time efficiency in the face of the increasing number of unplanned events (late arriving aircraft, lost baggage, etc.), and the expectations of passengers and airlines that information flows will be provided both in a more timely way and in different people-orientated formats, or feeds. Already in the airline industry there have been several announcements of airlines individually deploying large numbers of tablets or smartphones to improve ‘operating efficiency’ to frontline staff. In plain language this means using mobility to allow staff to deal with the many unplanned events, from missing passengers to lost luggage, finding the passenger steps to replenishing food and drink for a last-minute change in the gate an aircraft arrives at.

The existing and traditional ‘inside-out’ IT systems of all the various members of an airport ecosystem; airport operator, airlines, baggage handler, food services, etc. will show each separately their individual enterprises’ planned activity from their secure and closed enterprise IT. In each enterprise the data comes from the central ERP systems out to the edge of the enterprise in the form of structured non real-time information to show what should happen, and if it does happen then the whole ecosystem will be synchronized and ‘resource planning’ will have succeeded. Deploying mobility based on existing enterprise applications may allow more freedom to permit staff to work away from fixed desks, but still limits the information to the supposed ‘schedule’ of activity.

The operational improvement challenge that needs to be addressed is that in the ‘real’ world a series of unforeseen events occur that, to be solved, require the staff of the different companies involved to be notified of each event and to be able to interact together to solve each event in an optimal way. The better any business can do this the higher their customer satisfaction and most likely the lower their costs through optimizing their responses. However, to do so is both highly people-centric, and uses real-time data ending in a ‘work around’ solution, or process, to suit the circumstances, and a shift in the technology or IT model. This is where the crucial difference between ‘inside-out’ enterprise IT and its governance and security needs, and using a new business and technology model based on clouds, mobility and big data to enable ‘outside-in’ provides the answer.

Shifting the ‘on tarmac’ front office operational staff outside the firewall and supporting them on a common shared cloud with the other members of their working ecosystem (shown in the diagram of servicing the aircraft on the ramp between flights) creates a revolutionary improvement in operational capability in their prime function. The individual enterprise employees are now able to function as a collaborative team, sharing information, communicating, planning and organizing in real-time using information and data that is not part of their enterprise’s internal IT systems and therefore bypassing the necessary restrictions imposed by ‘inside-out’, traditional IT. Neither does this approach require any of the people involved to be present in each other’s existing enterprise IT systems, the current barrier to addressing this kind of transformation.

There is still a need for those working ‘outside-in’ to handle the ‘in’ part even if it is a secondary focus, for instance, to see what was planned to happen for comparison purposes, or to update records on what has been the final outcome. This does not necessarily mean providing a full enterprise application on their machine with the corresponding concerns of access and security; instead it means the adoption of thin client models working solely in the presentation layer of the browser. Browser-based ‘representation’ of data avoids the issues concerning moving enterprise data outside the enterprise and placing it at risk.

‘Outside-in’ workers are free to use new sources of information from the cloud/big data environment too, such as the very successful iFly app. iFly can be loaded onto a smartphone or tablet, and on initiating connects to the iFly cloud service, which in real-time orchestrates the unstructured information on any particular flight and answers queries that airline staff are unable to answer through their own internal IT systems. There are many stories of passengers using iFly to inform airline staff of the status of their own aircraft and flights at chaotic times such as winter storms creating havoc with the planned schedules.

]]> I was deliberately pretty conventional in my comments about technology for 2012, but after reading Gartner’s views that up to 35% of expenditure will move from IT by 2015, that 2012 will be the year of big data, and also that enterprises will struggle with these topics in 2012, I think I can afford to provide some of my own personal views.  There is a big point in the Gartner predictions relating to the topic of big data, which is that the term ‘unstructured’ should be applied, and for me that is at the very core of the whole change we are all facing. IDC, in its 2012 predictions, refers to a current industry-wide shift to what they term the ‘third platform’ in 2012. This is built around the combination of clouds, social networks and mobility. At Capgemini we will soon release a new Point of View paper defining the shift in much the same way but replacing social networks with big data, which seems to align more with Gartner’s view.

So we all seem to be pretty well in agreement with the technology elements, but exactly what is it that they deliver and why is it the business revolution that I drew attention to in a previous post? Possibly even more important is why are many IT folks struggling to understand what is happening? This post is about the ‘unstructured’ nature of this new ‘environment’ and its applicability to the front office to do business with the external world. By definition this means being flexible, and agile, to match what you want to see to what others want to buy or, in a more popular turn of phrase, being able to optimize ‘events’. This is set out much better in the latest book from John Hagel III and John Seely Brown under the title ‘The Power of Pull’, which features dust cover endorsements from Bill Clinton and, perhaps more constructively, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, Hasso Plattner, the founder of SAP, and Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google. That should align to the strategy and thinking of some pretty powerful players in the technology market whose products are installed in many enterprises!

However you look at it, the front office is basically an unstructured operational area built around talented people who are mostly not sitting at a fixed desk trying to make insightful decisions around whatever facts are available. So there is the basis for ‘mobility’ as the smartphone and tablet (iPad) fully enable this, with the ‘big data’ part of the new environment – meaning how to search for relevant data from the huge amounts available. And that’s not the same as using the internal data produced from the back office applications with conventional Business Intelligence. The back office is where the environment is ‘structured’, and indeed it has been the journey of the last twenty years with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to fully automate the processes to ensure that the structure is optimized! There has been little success in front office automation simply because the core values creating activities are not structured!

So there is the challenge for the IT folk; the last twenty years of good practice in IT has been to introduce structure into processes and ensure that all data is categorized and structured ending up with Master Data Management as the Holy Grail. The chaotic event-driven world of the front office based on these new technologies and a strong externalized (meaning risky and dangerous to any good IT person) set of activities is not something that it seems right to embrace. In a previous posting, I explained that, in fact, these are two separate, and indeed separated, environments that the new Capgemini Point of View covers in some detail. We call these environments ‘inside-out’ for the traditional IT environment based primarily on internal applications using client server, close-coupled, state-full architecture, and ‘outside-in’ for the new environment focused primarily on external ‘services’ using a browser-Web architecture, which is loose-coupled and stateless.

Not much similarity between the two is there? Business requirements are different, the area of use is different and above all the technology is different too! So how do we make what this means clear? The answer partly lies in Conway’s Law, which states that if you change your business model then you will need to change your communication and decision making methodology. In the new ‘outside-in’, ‘unstructured’ world of the front office that means shifting from email to social networks. Examining this in more detail is a great way to explain the difference, and to understand why senior managers are mystified by the topic.

In many ways social networks are the glue of this new ‘unstructured’, ‘outside-in’ environment of the front office with the role of finding alignments between events, people, and big data to ‘organize’ collaborative responses to market opportunities. The market opportunities are unlikely to align exactly with the way that the enterprise would like to do business and the role of marketing has always been to figure out what the market wants. At the same time the role of sales has been to convince the customer that they want what the enterprise wants to ‘push’ to sell. In the new online world the customers have choices at their fingertips and power reverses to the customer ‘pulling’ their exact choice from the potential suppliers (remember the book ‘the power of pull’ mentioned above). The enterprise has to quickly find answers to all the questions and be ‘agile’ in its ability to match the requirements of the market and its customers in the online globally competitive environment.

Social networks inside the enterprise allow skilled people to identify themselves by their skills, and receive and answer questions on that basis – there is no need for the sender to know the names of the people individually, or to do mass mailings, both of which are required by email. Furthermore, used skillfully, social networks allow the receiver to filter the messages and so reduce them to only the relevant messages, rather than with email where the sender has control and can rapidly fill email boxes with unwanted messages. The generally expected figure is that if an enterprise can make a social network function properly then users will see a 40% reduction in their email, which in turn gives them the time to respond to their social network requests.

This front office unstructured activity is primarily focused on the ‘outside’ and is rich in market, product or other aspects that make up the ‘value’ of what the enterprise sells. It contrasts totally with the structured back office on the ‘inside’ that is about how the enterprise operates its procedures in order to manage its ability to run the order-to-cash processes. In the back office the names of the people responsible for the various elements and processes are clearly defined, and, as such, email works perfectly as indeed it was introduced to do in the last Business Process Re-Engineering in response to the business model changing following the introduction of PC technology in the early 1990s. Accordingly, senior managers in the back office see quite correctly that they have no need for social networking in their activities!

This is a small part of the overall picture, but one that does make a good point about the difference in the front and back office roles and the use of technologies. Next week I plan to post a ‘use case’ to try to extend the understanding of the way the front office is being changed by adopting the combination of cloud, mobility and big data with social networks to create a wholly new set of capabilities that are based on the ‘outside’, unstructured nature of the front office’s activities in the market and with its customers.

]]> The Christmas slowdown always gives me the opportunity to catch up on my reading list and I was surprised how much of it related to mobile technology. Perhaps I should explain that my systematic approach is to keep a running list of URLs with the title of the piece in topic groups. And heading the mobility list was the promising-sounding online Harvard Business Review article ‘Building a Mobile App Is Not a MobileStrategy’. I expected the article to make the distinction between a ‘mobile application’ i.e. making a traditional cloud server application available on a mobile device by overcoming the variable nature of synchronization, and the newer meaning of ‘mobility’ referring to any device, at any time, making any connection through a variety of services which are broadly likely to be wireless. In this case there is total mobility between, and at, every layer of the interaction, which is usually based on Internet services.

To my fascination, Jason Gurwin, a cofounder & CEO of venture-backed next-generation mobile coupon company, Pushpins, wrote back at the end of November 2011 an excellent piece that confidently assumed that a Harvard Business Review online (business?) reader fully understood this and therefore needed no such definition. Instead, he offered four clear points to remember when creating mobile apps to be used by potential customers as part of your company’s cohesive marketing strategy. As he says at the beginning: ‘everyone wants their own mobile application, I have heard this consistently’. Me too, Jason, but the big point I want to make is how does the creation of a series of mobile apps to be placed in app stores, or on the enterprise’s own Website, to be downloaded by customers and offer them ‘a brand experience’, fit in with the development skills of internal IT?

Read the article again with this point in mind, and how this should or should not be linked with social CRM and governance, a point I touched on a previous post in which I suggested that social CRM would cause IT project failure to be much more visible. SAP added nicely to this topic with a recent article on the topic of ‘app stores’ in which they asked the question as to what exactly did the term mean. SAP stated: ‘there are multiple, somewhat-overlapping definitions of the enterprise app store floating around in the minds of techies and business-types. All of them borrow heavily from the original Apple App Store – that is, a Website or mobile portal serving up apps to users. But they differ in how they work and who they are intended to serve.

The article goes on to list four types of app stores with different characteristics in their use/users and governance:

• InternalEnterprise– accessed and used by enterprise users for their work
• Externally Facing – providing enterprise apps for their customers, market, and partners
• Third Party – operated by Apple, Google, etc, public with little control over downloads
• Vendor Operated – generally associated with apps to expand enterprise packages such as SAP.

There is a really important principle in this around splitting up the whole mobility topic from the point of view of who is using what app, from where and under what governance and controls. The marketing people may well want to use a specialist company to produce their ‘viral’ apps that will go on the Third Party app shops, and in this case the quality of the technical build will be tested by the app shop operator and therefore the risk of a poor execution is low, and the decision on the experience created is solely a marketing concern. At the other extreme, it’s pretty clear that the IT department should be fully in control of the Internal Enterprise app shop in every sense from technology to content. More difficult is the Externally Facing app shop, running from an internal resource where marketing may wish to be free to do what they want, but the reality is that the IT department needs to have control over the technology and governance of the apps at least.

As with all of these things it’s not too much of an issue if the principles are recognized and established at the beginning before deployments start. It’s a big issue after something has gone wrong, with blame and the challenge of examining and reworking a significant number of apps! So in the words of the title to this piece; mobile enterprise applications have their own model in the internal IT governance and it’s clear, but mobility owes nothing to this model, has no pre-existing governance model, but does have a lot of demanding powerful internal advocates to get apps out into their market. So beware they don’t have to come to see IT about it, any more than they did when seemingly every department started to create Websites!!

]]> I expect you will have read Ron Tolido’s post on seven very specific IT areas to watch in 2012 .  Well, there are some things which are traditional and one of them in this industry is to start the new year with a set of predictions about which new technologies will be important in the year ahead. Well here are my thoughts on the topic that takes us beyond the current three terms that are enjoying attention as being at the center of the hype cycle: ‘cloud’, ‘mobility’, and ‘big data’. None of these three is a single technology, instead there is a clutch of new technologies that are behind these three headline grabbers.

However, there is one mega trend to remark on, but it does have various names that make it less easy to identify exactly what it is; some talk of the ‘bring your own revolution’, ‘the tablet revolution’, ‘the consumerization of IT’, or even ‘the post-PC era’. It can be summed up as the shift from the computer being at the core of technology development to people becoming the central focus. Here are ten technology-centric groupings of activities, products and themes that support this change:

1. The Core Change: People rather than IT are the new focus

New forms of connection and delivery enable users to drive their own choices about where and how they work, find information, indeed even choose what software they download and use. This intensely personally focused use of technology underpins more intellectually based and decentralized activities and in particular has started a revolution in how the ‘front office’ activities of a business and its staff can function free from the restraining infrastructure of an enterprise desktop and office.

Examples: the consumerization of IT, bring your own, the post-PC era

2. Intuitive presentation and usability

The shift away from the PC and its attendant keyboard and mouse towards more portable devices used whenever and wherever to suit circumstances has introduced new interactive techniques based on touch screens and gestures that also suit a change in using wider media for interactions beyond mere text using a keyboard. The drive to display information in optimal ways for the interpretation and interaction by a human rather than data for a computer is underpinning a new generation of ‘services’ usually called ‘apps’.

Examples: smartphones and tablets, gesture-driven, increasing multi-media

3. From big IT to small services

The shift towards personal choice and assembly of small granular services rather than enterprise level deployment of monolithic applications changes the development methods and methodology. Large numbers of small services can be rapidly orchestrated into chosen processes, and equally quickly changed again. Solutions can be small, experimental and innovative, while deployments don’t have to be big bang everyone-at-once affairs. These new services will present new challenges and organizations need to make sure they don’t underestimate the numbers of services or the complexity of managing this environment.

Example: the creation of App Shops and creative developers of services

4. User-driver environments

The three previous groupings have given rise to completely new user-centric environments as the origins of Web 2.0 people rather than content-centric technologies have matured and grown. Social networks allow the person to define their topics of interest and involvement with the ability to ‘receive’ selectively, as opposed to email where the sender is in control. Huge networks are developing around the ‘topic’ linkages as information moves to include ‘collective consciousnesses of the social network’.

Example: social CRM, social networks, external Web-based services

5. Big data means more than a lot of data

Location and context-aware rich Internet applications are bringing both new requirements in the collection and use of information which, in turn, means a wide range of data formats including blending multi-media in with existing traditional data definitions. Intelligence takes on a new meaning around the rapid searching and assembly of unstructured data triggered by an event or circumstances.

Example: NoSQL databases; search engines, image recognition

6. Tight-coupled computers to loose-coupled people

Computers and applications ‘push’ structured process data integrated through a predetermined set of fixed ‘tight-coupled’ connections defined by client-server architecture. In contrast, people interact and ‘pull’ unstructured information and services on a cloud or Web architecture, which is defined as ‘loose-coupled’. The former is supported by technology-based integration of computer systems through enterprise architecture. For the latter, the user and devices become the focus, with management of ‘services’ the new integration issue. When using the ‘loose-coupled’ Web/Cloud the user chooses where to go, versus a traditional enterprise application environment, which offers only predetermined transactional paths.

Example: the ‘true’ cloud based on the Internet/Web, second generation browsers

7. Development and deployment methods

Small, personalized services that will run on cloud platforms, and are therefore simple scripting assemblies, require a radically different approach to development than traditional, monolithic applications which need to interface with operating systems to ensure performance and security. The

length of time for development and deployment is also a reflection on the length of time it will stay in service, i.e. a six-month traditional application development may stay in service for many years with ongoing maintenance requiring full documentation, whereas a week-long service development and deployment may have a life of only a few months and then be scrapped rather than maintained.

Example: agile development, Force.com, and the rise of platform-as-a-service

8. Next generation data centers deliver true cloud

The shift from deterministic numbers of applications and systems in a deterministic, traditional IT environment to the ability to provide totally flexible allocation of computational resources on demand defines the ‘next generation data center’, an industry-recognized term. In addition to the obvious flexibility required to support the people inside the enterprise working in new ways, the radical shift in requirements towards participation in a common external environment with other enterprise data centers as part of the ‘true’ cloud environment creates the need for a new ‘cloud services’ layer. The work of the Open Data Center Alliance, and other similar bodies, focuses on developing common standards for next generation data centers to host services whether from internal or external sources.

Example: standardized and online, ‘bare metal’ based running cloud layer, increasingly green

9. Mobility in every sense of the term

The rich variety of devices using wireless connectivity, either 3G or WiFi, sever the old ‘fixed’ understanding of what and how a device – usually a PC – is connected into a corporate enterprise network. The term ‘mobile’ has tended to be used to describe delivering a traditional client-server application onto an external device with intermittent connectivity requiring complex synchronization and resulting in data held on the device outside the enterprise. Mobility is usually referred to as being browser cloud-based with little or no data being held on the device, allowing any browser connectivity and interaction with any cloud service at any time by any connection type e.g. total mobility in all the elements.

Example: Android smartphones and tablets, Apple iPod, iPhone and iPad and SAP Mobility Platform

10. The redefinition of security

Security is clearly a major issue as the expansion of activities moves outside the enterprise invoking wider interactions in semi-public environments with many unknown combinations of people and services. However, traditional IT based on transactions i.e. enterprise, data-rich environments inside the firewall, demands its own approaches to protecting the enterprise data center model around firewall techniques. But the new external world cannot function if its devices are subjected to the locked down, VPN-connected demands necessary to protect both PCs and enterprise data. A new and very vibrant set of approaches and technologies is delivering a new and appropriate governance and security model.

Example: Jericho Security, closed App Shop models 

]]>  

You didn’t think we would let you go into the New Year without at least one top 7 list from our side, now would you? After all, it may be a time of economic pressure in some parts of the world, only very rarely we are on the threshold of exciting, promising developments in Enterprise IT like we are now. So without further ado – before they already start celebrating in New Zealand – here are 7 areas that you really should watch in 2012.

1. Success Factors. It’s not about the specific HRM cloud-based solution, really. And also not about SAP making strategic acquisitions. We could have mentioned Oracle and RightNow. Or ‘just’ Salesforce.com. Or NetSuite. The thing is, with SaaS now very rapidly entering mainstream – including ERP and other core applications – we are seeing new benchmarks for how quickly, simple and cost-effective new solutions can be deployed. It will change organizations and their IT departments just as much as it will change the business models of the major, incumbent software vendors.

2. OpenStack. It may be an oxymoron, this ‘private cloud’, but rest assured that many enterprises and governmental organizations will be building their own cloud platforms next year. It will be in an attempt to start enjoying some of the obvious benefits of the cloud without full exposure to the (alleged) uncertainties of the public scenario. With this, it’s time for the evolution of open standards – always an indication of a maturing industry – for cloud-based infrastructure and we’d say that OpenStack has a pretty good position.

3. Windows 8. The upcoming year might very well be the year of Microsoft, as many of its new, promising developments will take centre stage (illustrated by this list). Windows 8 particularly is interesting, because it might be the very last version of a major desktop operating system or one of the first of a next generation of operating systems that target the new reality of tablets and other smart devices. In practice, it is likely to be both. Hang on for the METRO user interface: it’s truly different and people will love it or hate it. Always a good sign.

4. Oracle NoSQL. It’s not about Oracle, really. Or about NoSQL, for that matter, as  Hadoop and Exalytics fit just as much into the picture. Among other things. We could have mentioned SAP with HANA – and many others did, rest assured – or HP with its risky, expensive bet on Autonomy. But yes: we should take notice when the world’s most influential database company starts to move in the world of Big D and we are actually seeing new, unexplored ways of doing something useful with All That Data.

5. Cloud Foundry. Ready to develop your first real cloud applications in 2012? You may want to have a good look into the world of Platforms as a Service in order to leverage all the potential of scalability, flexibility and productivity. For sure, Salesforce.com created the archetypical cloud development platform against which others are measured. But obviously, you need to be into the Gospel according to Benioff. If open source is more of your comfort zone, you may be very interested in the ‘upstream’ move of VMWare (ostensibly endorsed by HP) or Red Hat’s entry with OpenShift. Windows Azure is a safe, surprisingly mature bet. The dark horse of 2012 in this space might be Amazon. Oh, and if you are considering new development for the cloud anyway, you may as well want to consider applying more simple, more elegant programming languages that will save you time and frustration. Ruby, for example.

6. Sybase Unwired Platform. It’s not about Sybase, really. Or about SAP putting its strategic acquisition to very good use. We could have mentioned Antenna, Appcelerator, Kony or Adobe’s PhoneGap. Or simply point to Microsoft, still a potential leader in this space. But in any case, next year will see a strongly increased demand for enterprise-level mobile applications. And with that, new challenges need to be met around security, manageability, lifecycle management and integration. But having said that, your enterprise mobile apps better look just as good as their frivolous cousins from the Apple and Android app stores. After all, we are all so consumerized by now.

7. Kinect for Business. For real. Just have a look.

]]> Ah yes, testers and me. We go back a long, long time. It’s much like love, really. We had our high a few years ago, when I wrote an article series for an IT magazine. In this series I used practical observations and some basic anthropology to describe the psychological mind set of various practitioners in IT.

Experiencing many different IT organizations across the world, I had noticed that there is a strong correlation between the personality of an individual and his or her role in the IT profession.

It is for example quite easy to distinguish between Java and .Net programmers. The first category has strong analytical tendencies, typically hates practical solutions and prefers a painfully slow process of thinking and rethinking before producing anything (if you’re lucky). Their ADHD brothers and sisters in the Microsoft camp on the other hand, are particularly interested in short-term results. This is reflected in flimsy prototypes, a trial-and-error style of developing and an aversion to anything that tends towards structure or documentation.

As you by now start to realize, the article series generalized just a tiny, little bit.

Some truths however were uncovered that turned out to be difficult to deny. About the megalomania of some ‘enterprise architects’ for example that won’t mind a bit to invent their own Oath of Hippocrates to emphasize the presumed importance of their activities. Or about the self-assertion of project managers who all – almost without exception – have suffered in their childhood from a more successful brother, a particularly critical father or both.

I must admit that within the series, testers were easy targets. From my own experience, I had learned to know testers as rigid, over-serious people. Never a smile, even if errors were found. On the contrary: instead of being happy about detecting bugs, testers would tread the instigators (quite often .Net programmers, obviously) with cold disdain. Clearly, this did not add to the popularity of testers, who often could be found in clusters in the company cantina, isolated from all other people.

But that was then. Much has changed in the meantime. The role of testing in the entire applications lifecycle is much better understood nowadays. It is part of the earliest stages – often right at the core of requirements management –so that developers are not unpleasantly surprised at the end of a project by suddenly appearing wall of testing. Also, testers nowadays immerse themselves much better in the context of a project, which has – step by step – adjusted their initial perspective on the world (“testing is the one and only purpose in life”).

And that context is changing quickly, putting extra demands on testers. A powerful wave of ‘business technology’ solutions is enabling an entirely new generation of applications that are developed quicker, have a shorter lifecycle and typically are implemented in close alignment with the business side of the organization. Often, easy-to-use tools and platforms are applied (think BPM and business rules suites, model-driven development, cloud services, mobile and social platforms, open data and app markets, mash-up tools, self-service BI) that are much better understood by business people as well. It creates an ‘outside-in’ perspective, in which many of the newer innovative solutions are developed far outside the central IT department, or even outside the organization.

It means requirements management is in for some changes – if there is still any requirements management left – with an obvious impact on testing as well. Agile thinking and acting will be the default. And more than ever, both insight in the needs of the business and the power of the next generation of tools will determine success. It will make the role of the tester even more situational. One day, you may be testing a robust, mission-critical ‘Train’ application (check our introduction of the concept in this white paper) that is built for multiple decades of uninterrupted use. Predictability and controllability will be the virtues. The other day, you may be handling an opportunistic ‘Scooter’ application and it may all be about speed, agility and the willingness to accept a certain level of risk.

So in the world of 2012 in which mobile, social and the cloud impose a new rhythm on top of the established, core applications landscape, schizophrenia is not a prerequisite to be a good tester. It would certainly help, though.

]]> Launched back in the good times of the summer of 2009 with the mission of helping organizations manage the business value of IT, with a fanfare of videos from several CIOs and the support of Intel, the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) received a somewhat cool reception on the grounds of ‘yet another framework’. I got interested when I read an article a year later on how early adopters were talking about savings of up to 20% on the IT budget. That seemed to me to make it worth following the progress of IT-CMF as it developed with more attention, and in February this year Chevron published a case study of their success with the framework indicating IT-CMF can be seen to work over a sustained and difficult period.

But why is this interesting right now? Surely this is old news and those who are interested will have already looked at the framework, etc., etc. True, but was the pressure back then the same as now? Well, it’s the same pressure on the IT side to continue to reduce costs, but at the same time there’s the expectation to do more, and in particular to do more in the form of using new technology in new ways, which makes the need for a better understanding of business value even more important. Enterprise IT is almost always based on the ability to invest in order to reduce costs and improve operating efficiency of a particular element of the ‘back office’. This is the area of an enterprise which by its very nature is an overhead and cost effectiveness is a given, therefore most business cases have got a certain basic clarity about them!

The investments are usually definable, in fact have been pretty large and therefore visible in the business element they support, but operationally are difficult to separate from other activities and therefore to allocate costs to. Instead, most have to be lumped together and make the whole IT budget an ‘overhead’ in the enterprise’s accounts. Over a period of time the dependencies and integrations grow more and more complex – the classic spaghetti problem – and it’s harder and harder to be able to work out the business value of any single item. That is the problem that IT-CMF sets out to solve and it’s all neatly laid out at their main website.

It’s all about new tools, techniques, and methods, as development and deployment may be on a virtual machine on a hosted site, and the costs, including ongoing operations, will be on a charge per use basis. In short, it’s going to be a very different and perhaps very difficult model to justify in terms of business value using current means. And that’s where IT-CMF comes into play. It describes its core approach as ‘Managing IT like a Business’ and provides the following statement:

Managing IT like a Business means running IT like any other business and that involves shifting the focus from technology and production to a focus on customers and services. The IT-CMF describes the internal processes required to move an IT organization from a technology to a service orientation that provides customer-driven solutions to business problems… The transformation is complete when IT moves from a cost to a value center.

Okay, we got the message that alignment to the business is critical and needs to be measured a long time ago but it’s not that easy, and having to face up to doing this in the constantly changing environment of many small services of short development, deployment and retirements based on using new technologies and methods is daunting. I believe we are all going to need to consider more deeply exactly how we achieve this and, unlike other frameworks, IT-CMF is more up to date, has proven itself in some tough, large enterprises, and offers some new thinking.

This is not a claim that this is ‘the best’ as there are other established frameworks and of course ITIL is rightly considered the most widely applied methodology to ‘manage’ IT, but it is a recommendation to investigate the topic more widely, and to recognize that the existing challenges are going to change. And in a way that is both going to make ‘value’ management more complex and very different.

]]> I attended HP Discover in Vienna with some sense of wondering what it might bring. It turned out to be the old HP back, but with a clearer understanding of their core strengths and a new energy and focus on how they are delivering them. As with all such events there was a number of bloggers present providing good coverage of the event overall including an official HP blog.

But that’s enough publicity for the event and onto the topic that interested me, and my colleague Manuel Sevilla, who is the CTO for Capgemini Business Information Management, and who is right in the middle of the whole topic of big data. The term ‘big’ might also be taken to apply to the size of the topic itself and indeed to the amount being written on it! Manuel has written some interesting stuff on this in the Capgemini Capping IT Off blog which includes coverage of SAP HANA and Oracle Exadata, so sitting together through the presentation of the HP approach and products to compare notes was really very useful.

We were both quite thoughtful on why and how HP plans to merge Autonomy and Vertica on one side and the performance and power of the new HP storage and back-up products on the other side. We both felt it could be a game-changer and I will now steal a line from the excellent presentation given by Dr Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, which also provides the title for this post. He reckoned that the ‘T’ standing for Technology in IT had changed three times in terms of the technology in use, but that the ‘I’ for Information had not changed at all, until now. His point was that we are still visualizing big data as an extension of the machine-driven data model, just thinking there is more of it, whereas in fact the change will include substantial amounts of human-centric media data.

He illustrated this point by showing how media-based information would be stitched together in response to recognition of an image and it was pretty impressive demo stuff for such an event, but it was serious in its point too. We recognize that this most useful information is all unstructured, so is not suited to a relational database, but is Hadoop making enough of an accommodation for what it means? Certainly it scales, but with a not-impressive performance in delivery, and human eyes are very sensitive to obvious latencies in responses. So his insights into big data and human use of information, meaning that the data is not just unstructured but is actually made up of all different media types, was excellent, but his demo really did prove that an ‘answer’ could and would be an integration of media together.

At this point do take the time to watch the demo as it really does make you think differently on how things will be, and of course in its own right it is an example of ‘media’ being the best way for a human being to understand a complex topic. So it’s well worth watching this, and when you do try to work out how much time and text it would take to describe this in writing.

It’s an interesting combination that you need the ability to search unstructured data for your unobvious alignments that deliver real insights, hence HP’s acquisition of Autonomy for this rather than to go and compete with existing players in the Business Intelligence market. But you also need extremely quick capabilities to deliver from storage, which brings in the new hardware. However, before I go there I should point out that not everything will be unstructured and it’s probably not going to work to assume that you can separate the activities of use of structured data and unstructured media. That brings in the merging of Autonomy with HP Vertica and its online analytics of structured data, so the HP plan to merge this with Autonomy looks like a real ‘differentiator’ in this all-important big data segment of the market.

For me it made sense of the HP acquisition and for Manuel it excited him greatly with the capabilities!