Conway’s Law = …organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Some good examples of what this might look like, based on the original thesis, can be found on Wikipedia but you can get a more up to date view from 2008 work at Harvard Business School and at Microsoft Research. To understand the interest and why it comes up at times when technology innovation leads to business change, let me provide my own experience relating first to what it meant at the time of PCs and networks, then what it means now in the context of clouds.

The progression of ‘I listen’, ‘I read’, and ‘I watch’ is inevitable, providing the connectivity, devices and content are available. Things are progressing nicely with all of these new devices featuring video capability not just in terms of being able to do it, but being able to do it well for several hours owing to the new generation of batteries. In terms of content, on the one hand there is YouTube, but on the other there is a more serious business purpose as increasingly websites replace huge text posts with more and more video clips.

It would have been fair question to ask why client-server based IT was so hard to understand back around 1990. Indeed for those of you who remember this time, there was a similar kind of confusion. The benefit of hindsight shows that because client-server covers the entire breadth of business requirements from ERP on one side, through to various ways it can be implemented (thin or thick client, single, or n tier) on the other side. If in 1990 your experience was based on mini computers with terminals, this was a whole new concept, and you pretty well had to learn everything all over again. At the same time the confusion was increased by mini computer vendors making out that they had a role in client- server in various bizarre ways. Anyone remember the MicroVAX desktop machine that was designed to compete with PCs? And of course don’t forget that PC networks and client-servers lay behind the rethinking of business models through business process reengineering and matrix working.

Just reflect on the on-off nature of things between Oracle and Sun, and Oracle and HP to see this. First it was Oracle and Sun, who partnered, then there was a split and Oracle partnered with HP. One of the powerful fruits of this was Exadata 1.0, so a year or more back this would look like a great high performing combination to install. Then it was Oracle and Sun back together again with the launch of Exadata 2.0, perhaps an even higher performing combination. But what if you have already built around Exadata 1.0? I am not suggesting that any of these players aren’t going to support their technology, but there is a question about just how realistic this is in terms of resources and time spent.

Some time ago there were a series of classifications made, dividing up the behavior and working characteristics of different age groups. The result was to define four major groups: Traditionalists 64 yrs +; Boomers 45 to 63 yrs; Generation X 26 to 44 yrs and Millennials 18 to 25 yrs. The classifications used age as a broad basis to define attitudes to work, technology and many other issues, including communication styles, problem solving techniques and decision making. These are three major traits that business intelligence is designed to support. Each age group shows vastly different styles (see diagram below).

Let’s start with a relatively old piece of research by Gartner published at the beginning of the year. It’s on their public website so I think I can share it with you. It’s a worldwide survey of more than 1500 CIOs and look at what they said very carefully. Unless I am mistaken every priority on the business side, with the exception of cost cutting, is about front office activity designed to help a business to win customers and grow revenues. Now look at the technology priorities. There are two, possibly three, that match the business priorities, and all the rest focus on the traditional role of IT as a back office cost-reducing mechanism.

The article quotes a number of well-known companies that claim to be making use of Jugaad and points to training by Indian management gurus. Actually the term goes deeper than this. It means making do with scarce resources, or ‘getting it done’ anyway you can. Stretching the definition, this may even include illegal or dangerous means. To me this is an exact summary of the risks that enterprises are running by allowing ‘shadow IT’ within their business, a term that refers to employees outside the IT department building and deploying their own DIY technology solutions under the radar.

And so the challenge was to provide an ‘open’ survey that would focus on how CIOs felt in the current economic circumstances, and what role IT was playing in their enterprise. That led quite naturally into a conversation about how well this role was being played, should, or could, IT be playing other roles, and perhaps most crucially of all, a comparison between how IT was used and how successfully their enterprise was weathering the current conditions.

The results showed three common profiles of the CIOs surveyed:
Technology Utility (24%) = IT is managed as a pure utility
Service Centre (39%) = IT assets are packaged to provide specific services
Business Technology (37%) = IT is a key asset in the leadership of the business

Essentially, it was the same question asked twice, but one that has been coming up in various ways all year. What stuck out in one of the meetings was the way the question was positioned by the CEO. It was clearly designed to be a challenge to the CIO: ‘I want to know the real activity in our key markets and across our product lines as and when I need to focus in. However, I can’t trust either the P&L reporting, as this is a smoothed and massaged set of figures, or the conventional reporting, as this doesn’t give me the flexibility to slice and dice what is actually behind the figures’.

Is cloud computing the next generation of IT systems offering tremendous cost cutting potential? Is it the ability to create new markets and marketplaces? Or is it an entirely new business model to enable innovation in smaller companies and start-ups by reducing capital, time and skill requirements? Moreover, beneath each of these statements sits differing attitudes about the core approach to the technology elements involved.

During the presentations and the debates something simple, yet quite surprising, hit me. The three major regions – North America, Europe and India’s perspective on clouds are all quite different, and all based on the business models of the leading commercial organisations in their regions. This may be an oversimplification, but it is both recognisable and, I would argue, understandable. So how do I see the drivers that are defining clouds in each region?

Economic models: nothing more than a thin illusion of being in control. The moment you set one step outside your ivory tower, you will probably be hit by low flying Black Swans. Currently, discussions focus on what shape the economic growth will have. Is it the ‘V’ or the ‘W’? Have we passed the lowest point – recovering slowly but surely – or are we in for yet another dive down? Or – alternatively – are we in for a steady, on-going flow of little ‘W’s? Who knows, perhaps, maybe.

Personally, for 2010 I propose the letter ‘Q’: that recalcitrant character that nobody can get a grip on. Perfectly pigheaded, turning left or right, from the top to the bottom, vice versa and then – suddenly – lunging into the open space. Typical behaviour for 2010, the year that cannot be prognosticated.

Right. So that’s agreed.

Bu then again, we are only human. So let’s try to have quick peek into next year, against all odds. Nothing fancy with tapping the power of the crowd, as we have seen to what accuracy that lead, last year December.

One thing is for sure. In the year of the Q we will end the 2.0 terror. To all IT people trying to impose their version number thinking on everything and everybody around them: enough is enough. Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Identity 2.0, Government 2.0, Health 2.0, Family 2.0: we got the point by now. Honestly. Stop it. Thanks.

Over recent years it’s been Australia that has held my interest about what government can gain from its online services. It was not easy for the Australians who initially took a tough line on Digital Rights Management some years ago. However they swiftly adjusted their stance to a more liberal view of DRM to suit today’s environment. It attracted its fair share of comments but overall the outcome has been a ‘workable’ balance. It seems that this experience, and involvement with a new younger ‘online’ generation, might have been the springboard towards recent events.

My usual reply is quite simple. If you evaluate cloud technology solely on the business case behind replacing the existing technology operations layer, it’s hard to see the value. That’s not to say that you can’t make a great case for ‘virtualisation’ to improve internal utilisation of your current investment, as you certainly can. But that’s a different argument to the one most people are trying and failing to make around their perception of clouds as a new external enabling environment.

Well, three things have indeed come along at once and the first ‘bus’ is, I suspect, the result of the pressure of ‘passengers’ needing advice on how to travel the new road. In advance of their Enterprise Architecture (EA) summits being held in Orlando and London, Gartner has published a report entitled a ‘New Approach for Enterprise Architecture’. The analyst firm recommends a shift based on the ‘growing variety and complexity in markets, economies, nations, networks and companies’, which it describes as ‘middle out EA’ or ‘light EA’. This is all about using new technologies around the edge, or externally, that are based on some principles and business purposes different to traditional IT, with the focus on ‘state full’ business transactions in tight coupled integrations for mainly centralised core enterprise processes.