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Strategy
Technology Populism versus Worthy Development equals Twine
We all know the concept of ‘watching a train wreck in slow motion’, but I am not sure what the opposite effect is called, however this week I suspect that is what I have been watching. At one end of the track has been the publishing of a new report by Forrester, one of the most respected analyst firms, in my opinion, entitled ‘Technology Populism; risks and rewards’; pretty self-evident what it's about. A good comment on this report and aligned topics can be found at the readwriteweb, which I find an interesting site generally.
The other end of the track and coming towards the Populism was an event last week in Atlanta by the TTI Vanguard group, one of those fascinating groups that have a board of some seriously smart and experienced people, and are focussed on disruptive change by technology. Not sure how long they will keep up the proceedings of the event on their site, but this was all about ‘Smart(er) Data’, and some pretty details looking into the whole notation that data and relationship has to get changed in the ‘Google’ generation.
Again I don’t want to go through the event in detail, better you should read the details for yourself, but pick out the comment that ‘data acquires its reputation from the search engine’ and the subsequent comments on structure, versus a picture is worth a thousand words, etc. It’s all about context, and my belief is, based on asking people I meet who read my blog posts, that you are using me as a context filter. The links I have just given would not be immediately apparent to a search engine, but may be useful if you are following my own trail of exploration through how these new technologies are changing things. If Web 2.0 is anything it’s about people and relationships adding value to content.
That leads me to Twine, currently still under trials, and a move to introduce another generation to Social Networking, to which I should perhaps add a little history and say that MySpace, Facebook, etc, did grow out of an earlier generation that stretches back more than ten years. What seems to have made it happen for them was a mixture of timing, in terms of people, web use, broadband, etc, but most of all execution. So Twine is at this stage an interesting development with a long way to go!
Twine attempts to bring semantic understanding built around learning your interests, and actions, to then automatically organise information, and relationships for you. Just pause for a minute and reflect on the populism, which also means creation of data/content, the point above around needing to know more about the data origination, and consider just how much of … well everything, that’s going to produce. Keyword searches are not going to be enough, nor tagging either; we are going to need a lot more help then that. So if the above is happening, and I think we all know it is, the new log jam won’t be bandwidth, it will be ability to comprehend. That’s what interests me in Twine and developments in Semantics, though I am not sure right now that I would want to adopt another populism and call it Web 3.0!
However if you go back to using a search engine then you will find an awful lot of blog comments on Twine, there is a good summary here, and even Nicolas Carr had something good to say about it, I suggest that you make up your own mind by visiting Twine yourself!
Change me
I have a theory. It seems that most people learn something in their early to mid 20s, and then spend the rest of their career happily doing the same thing over and over again. This might be anything ranging from developing a certain type of software application (thee tier Java web shops, COBOL transaction processing solutions, Zachman …) or IT desktop management and support through to retail management or running a typing pool. Once they’ve established what it is they do they just want to keep doing it, hoping that the world will remain as it was in their early adulthood.
People don’t like change, usually as change often forces them to redefine what they do, their role in an organization and the value they add. People are hired and rewarded for what they did last week, not what they might do next. Change also involves a lot of effort. If an IT department defined itself as an asset management function (buy/build application, install application, run application, retire application), then how will it react to the introduction of software-as-a-service? Salesforce.com, Workday and and the like will probably fall into the responsibility of the CFO or under general manager for a line of business, appearing as a line item for employee support costs rather than as a major CAPEX expense. What does an IT support department, defining themselves in terms of the certifications they hold, do when we decide to give up our reliance on owning the desktop and help employees buy their own PCs? People often think that change is a threat, forcing them to go back through the pain an effort of finding out what they will do for the organization going forward.
There is a lot of talk of Gen Y, digital natives redefining how we work and live our lives, and how this makes older generations redundant, or even irrelevant. This just doesn’t ring true; wasn’t the same thing said about about Gen X and (gasp) even the baby boomers. The current changes we’re seeing do not represent the final transformation of society. Who would have thought of smart phones 50 years ago (though they are scarily like the communicators for the first series of Star Trek)? Who knows what technology will look like in the next 50 years? While Gen Y has more than a whiff of the arrogance of youth at the moment (something every generation is guilty of), pointing out that many folk in the older generations are reluctant to change, just wait a decade or so when Gen Z (or whatever we end up calling it) arrives on the scene and Gen Y realizes that their digital native skills no longer matter. The world will have moved on, but most of Gen Y (or Gen X, or the baby boomers) will not have.
Our problem is that change has become a major business driver, and the pace of change has increased to the point where we are seeing radical change within a single generation. We’re all racing to find the edge that will get us on top of the competition. This ranges from small innovations, tweaking and optimizing our business or creating new product categories, through to wholesale market creation; remember that Microsoft came out of nowhere to blindside IBM in the 80s, and then Google did the same thing to Microsoft in the 00s.
If change is the driver in our organizations, but our organizations are resistant to change, then the biggest challenge we face in not technical but the strategy we use to manage change. It’s quite easy to define a technically and economically possible solution that would provide a boost to our business, or even deliver a step change in capability. But if we cannot get our organization to deliver and then adopt the solution, all our work will be for naught.
The first thing I think we need to do is realize that change is an ongoing processes, and so should change management be. It’s not a one shot affair where we hire some external organization to come in and transform us, and it’s not something we should only worry about every two to four years. The second is that we need to make change something our people want to do rather than something we do to them.
Crisis? Hurray, Crisis!
Think about it: many spiritual, self-help, motivational gurus first have been through a period of devastating crisis before becoming the source of all energy and light. Whether you are Louise Hay, Tony Robbins, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Rhonda Byrne, or (forgive me) even Buddha, apparently you have to face your deepest moments of agony and depression first and only then you may break on through to the other side.
No renewal without a proper catharsis first. I guess we may have found an interesting lesson for many CIO’s too. Our Business & Information Strategy unit is currently finalizing its annual worldwide CIO survey. The main focus is on innovation and although I haven’t seen any results yet (more about it on this blog soon), we can safely assume that more and more CIO’s will need to innovate in 2008. Clearly, business leaders expect solid growth from a new wave of emerging technologies, inspired by many opportunities in the world of web 2.0, networked co-creation and extreme collaboration. And they will turn to the CIO, who may or may not have a pile of good, innovative ideas.
Here’s another prediction for a CIO survey 2008 insight: also more than ever, IT executives will feel impeded in their ability to innovate, constrained as they are by a myriad of heterogeneous, overlapping systems that are difficult to integrate, manage and access in a secure way. These systems typically contain legacy, bespoke applications but there may also be highly customised, multiple instances of ERP packages, 4GL solutions from the roaring nineties and ad-hoc, hacked web solutions from the past few years.
Outsourcing the intranet
I’ve been thinking for some time that a logical conclusion to the plethora of free (or at least cheap) social web applications will be companies simply outsourcing their intranets. Delivering a few portlets (or Open Social applications) into iGoogle or Facebook would seem to solve the problem of connecting your employees with the business, and has the additional benefit of helping employees connect with other employees. However, I was still surprised when I woke this morning to find that Serena has adopted Facebook as their intranet. The technically feasible has entered the realm of the possible.
Strategy and differentiation
A lot of us place a great deal of hope in enterprise applications. After all, applications have been a great source of differentiation in the past. In a world where globalisation has firmly taken hold and we're all under intense cost pressure, everyone is searching for that edge that will push up margins or grab a little more of the market.
The poster child for this is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart made a massive investment in a data warehouse during the early eighties (somewhere around US$110 in 1980's money), mining the data for insights into supply chain behaviour that enabled them to create the most efficient supply chain in their industry. Half the savings this delivered was passed directly to the customer in terms of every day low prices, and the rest if history. The application enabled Wal-Mart to differentiate, while the investment required (not to mention the delivery effort) was a barrier to competition. IT strategy was, effectively, application selection strategy.
Today, a lot of companies are taking a similar approach, pinning their hopes on a best of breed solution that will help them stand out from the crowd. I find best of breed to be a funny term though, as it carries connotations of being better than the rest when it really means no worse than anyone else. That application-centric approach to IT strategy doesn’t work any more.
R is P times I
IT Auditors. I used to have an image of them. Not particularly a romantic image. More like a well-defined image, really. I sort of associated them with IT Security Experts: slightly more serious than average, a bit of the worrying type and with an insistent urge to analyse and structure.
All of these are important, crucial capabilities that I sadly do not possess.
Nevertheless, in the past few months I was asked several times to engage with IT Auditors. First as a keynote speaker on a national event and just a few days ago as the chair of the annual networking event of governmental IT Auditors.
And then, as a relative outsider, you learn quickly.
Web 2.0; Build your own or take it integrated?
Interesting question, and the first reaction to it will be around traditional applications and suites, but that’s not the issue here as that part of the topic is well understood. It’s the moves by IBM through Lotus Connections contrasting with those by Yahoo, Google and others that interests me. Three days separated the announcement by IBM on their integrated approach to what they head lined as the business case for moving social computing into the enterprise, and the Yahoo announcement of opening the API for 249 million users of Yahoo mail.
IT Specialist, eBay Style
Is it just the usual, cyclical phenomenon or are we actually dealing with a true revolution? One thing is for sure: more and more IT specialists leave the bigger corporations. They establish their own specialized bureau or become self-employed. Nothing clever there: in the current, red-hot market you don’t need to be a reckless entrepreneur to take the plunge.
From the outside, you might tend to see shifts like this as something temporary. With the next economic downturn, all the freebooting adventurers will queue up again at the gates of the big companies and IT suppliers. Right?
Well, maybe not this time. There is an important change in demand taking place. Companies are looking more and more for external IT specialists, leaving their own internal population at best at a stable level. The bad days of the Post Internet Bubble Dip are still well-remembered. With the new strategy, companies create an elastic cord that will save them from overcapacity and having to dismiss massive amounts of people.
But on the supply side, change is imminent too. And the interesting things happen in the more extreme age categories.
Google and SalesForce.com speculate on the future – together
So the rumours are true, the marriage has happened, or maybe at this stage it’s less of a marriage and more of an engagement. Actually I suspect it’s more like an apartment share between two people who seem to be compatible, and are looking forward to widening each others outlook by seeing more of each others interests. In this case the living space is the Internet, and the shared interest is in a new approach to developing a new generation of capabilities. There is undeniable logic in this basic supposition, which probably accounts for the lack of surprise in them coming together, the surprise seems to have been that they didn’t have anything more revolutionary to announce.
The CIO Dog Food Wikinomics Experience
They say that dogs eventually start to look like their masters. Would this pertain to CIO’s too? You tend to think so. More than ever, the CIO is reporting to the Chief Financial Officer again. Shocked by the economic downturn and the increasing pressure of regulatory compliance, management seemed to have good reasons for that.
I wouldn’t dare to stigmatise anybody, but we can safely assume that CFO’s have not been selected for their uncontrolled, wildly imaginative and innovative ways. Otherwise, they would have become video clip directors or fashion designers. And it’s easy to see how an understated, restrained view of the world cascades through the chain of command: sooner or later, some CIO’s start to look and act like accountants.
Dreadful indeed.
Especially when recent research proves that boardroom executives once again see the innovative value and growth potential of IT. And they are relying on the CIO to provide the spark of inspiration. In practice, I see many CIO’s struggle to articulate a compelling technology-enabled vision, let alone that they successfully reach out to the business side of the company and convince it of the transformation potential.
‘Intimacy’ is the new Acquisition strategy
We live in interesting times as the Chinese say when it comes to industry consolidation moves. The New York Post followed by the Wall Street Journal reported discussions were in an early stage for Microsoft to buy Yahoo, or at least find some formal relationship for joint activities in the market. Yahoo and Microsoft are respectively the second and third players in the internet search business behind Google and this in theory would bring some balance into the market by creating a more equal player.
Does the desktop matter anymore?
It seems that Web 2.0 has entered the business main stream now that established business dailies—such as the Australian Financial Review which had an article on wikis (light weight, online, blackboards) the other day—are publishing on the topic. For a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media only in 2004, referring to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users, Web 2.0 seems to have already established itself as a force to be reckoned with.
One of the dramatic changes Web 2.0 brings with it is a shift from desktop applications to shared spaces—collaboration delivered as a service over the internet. This is a dramatic break with the desktop centric world we’re all used to. Rather than installing an application and then typing in obscure strings of characters to contact other users, with a few mouse clicks on a web page we’ve created a new shared space (wiki, project room, blog, …) and invited friends and colleagues. We might be starting a new project with an online project management tool, bringing a virtual team together across time zones, countries and even organisations to design a new product. Or perhaps the space will be only used for a couple of hours to resolve an organisational issue. Web 2.0 has obvious attractions in the enterprise, as the capabilities it provides go directly to some of the root causes for some of the most vexing problems we’re faced with collaborating across time and space, or even across the room.
So, does the desktop matter anymore? If our work moves online, then what happens to the applications installed on the laptop that I have balanced on my knee? A lot of the old productivity applications are being embedded in Web 2.0 web sites. Word processing documents, video, audio, spreadsheets and even presentations are being moved off the desktop and onto a service that lives out in the cloud that is the internet. We’re even seeing the emergence of what are being called WebOSs, which promise to provide something like the current desktop experience complete with productivity application but all delivered via a web browser.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
We talk about the end of business as usual, mash-ups and how the ground rules in our respective industries are changing. But how do we use these technologies to change our own business? When it comes time to replace that core banking system or enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution and we cannot see any other option than creating another major project and application. These systems are big, and it will take big projects to replace them.
Our current approach to IT is the product of how we have engaged with IT in the past. Projects were large, which makes sense when applications needed to support a lot of business functionality. Delivering even a simple solution was a major challenge, and we quite rightly engaged IT as a major engineering task. The size of the problems we would tackle—the amount of functionality in a solution—was simply a product of the economics of software development. While that original valve and punch-card solution used to predict a U.S. election (correctly, despite what the critics thought) didn’t deliver a lot of business functionality by today’s standards, at the time anything smaller wouldn’t have produced a useful solution. IT is a lot more capable today but the same rules apply; significant slabs of functionality take a correspondingly significant effort to deliver.
And now we have reached the nub of the problem: we’re still thinking of IT as an engineering challenge when the rules of the game have changed around us. As Albert Einstein eloquently put it, we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them! Approaching the development of a new core banking or sales and operations planning solution from the familiar engineering viewpoint will result in a similar engineering centric approach. We need to do some thing different.
Thoughts on innovation. Straight from Siberia.
What were they thinking, the strategists from Wal-Mart, Intel and British Petroleum when they were putting together their tiny little plan for a new electronic health records system? Or let’s rephrase this: how are innovations created in the first place? A relevant question, especially on the threshold of a new year in which – if we read the ostentatious signs right - innovation tops the agenda of many business strategies again. A good subject to contemplate in this blog a couple of times. So definitely keep watching ‘innovation’ in your personal tag cloud.
One thing is for sure: we all seem in need of rediscovering the ‘how’ of innovation, crushed as we are by years of cost reduction, regulatory compliance and refining the art of spreadsheet management (the latter simply not being cool anymore, even not of being practiced in a collaborative way through hip software-as-a-service or through green, hyper-democratic applications).
On the rebound of such an abundance of structure, you might tend to think that innovation is mainly a matter of chaos and free association. Drive that group of silly, sort of creative people into a workshop room filled with chocolate, furry animals and fatboys. Boot up the water pipe, uncork the red wine, play that CD with singing dolphins and just go with the flow, dude.
Innovation happens elsewhere. Doctor’s prescription.
I truly like to watch it: companies that during the course of the years transform into incarnations that just do not resemble the original any longer. Often, it is a sign of a strong urge to innovate. Also, it can be the demonstration of a grinding lack of realism or simply a proof of an inflated ego. Or all of that. Either way, there’s always something exciting happening near companies that are reinventing themselves.
Business led integration
I’ve heard “business led integration” mentioned a few times in the last month or so, usually as part of a presentation at a conference or trade event. The idea seems to be that getting the business directly involved in our integration projects will make the projects more successful. The problem is that this seems to describe a desire from IT rather than a real solution to a problem. If the business was actually interested in integration, then they would already be involved.
French Revolution
Let’s be honest, it’s not exactly the storming of the Bastille. But it caused global headlines all the same: the French parliament is dumping Windows on its desktops and is replacing it by Linux and other open source components. We’re talking here about eleven hundred workstations affected, which probably explains one of the comments on the Internet: “this must be a .00000000000000000001% hit on Windows”. And come to think of it, there’s some resemblance to what happened on that revolutionary 14th of July, 1789 after all. No less important in the history of France, the glorious image of courageous French patriots that stormed a towering fortress to free hundreds of oppressed peasants was in practice a bit more prosaic. Actually, there were only seven inmates held in jail at the Bastille (including two madmen) and the defending garrison consisted of eighty invalides: old soldiers that were no longer capable of service in the field.
We should not get caught up in discussing what exactly could be a metaphor for what. Unfortunately.
SAP TechEd '06 takeaways (I)
I thought it would be nothing more than reasonable to share some takeaways with you from the European SAP TechEd ’06 conference which is currently being held in Amsterdam. The TechEd has this typical SAP-style flavour of being, let’s say very elaborately organised. That includes a massive plug & play event infrastructure, which is obviously rebuild many times a year across the world to transform venues into genuine SAP conference buildings. The title of this year’s TechEd is ‘Empowering an Ecosystem of Innovation’ and I guess you will agree it contains all the politically correct words you can possibly imagine in 2006, except maybe for ‘an inconvenient truth’ (but that’s off-topic).
From Medieval to Pre-Fab Software
I've been using the metaphor of managaging enterprise software as something akin to city planning for some time now. It started when I happened across a McKinsey article called The Paris Guide to IT Architecture, which takes the position that we need to manage IT in a similar way to managing a complex city like Paris. This is well and good, but recently I've been thinking that the really interesting thing is the similarity between how cities and enterprise IT have evolved over time.
May we live in interesting times!
There's a common meme floating around IT circles about the end of applications in the enterprise. There's definitely a change in the enterprise software environment that we're all picking up on; however, I'm not sure that this is the end of applications as much as it represents their maturation as a tool in enterprise software.
Panel Debate 2.0
Imagine blogging like it's supposed to be. Not minding too much about the correct wording. Just trying to be crisp and focused. Possibly building on blog-items of others, or trying to provoke new feedback, exploring the edges of an argument or concept. Imagine blogging like that, but then performed in real life, using spoken word. Don't confuse this with podcasting: it's not about writing a blog-item and then simply putting it 'on tape'. It's much more about improvising, albeit in this blog style of making a clear point in just a few sentences.
IT Department: Eat your Own Dog Food!
There’s no better way to show commitment than eating one’s own dog food, or – as some of my French colleagues would call it – drinking one’s own champagne. I can imagine why that Ford plant manager in Michigan recently announced that only Ford- or subsidiary-built vehicles are allowed to park on the plant premises: it must be discouraging to see the place swarmed every day by Daihatsu’s, Suzuki’s and Toyota’s. If even the creators themselves don’t use their own products, why would customers even consider buying?
In IT, the slogan is probably even more true. And it doesn’t only pertain to software manufacturers (we can safely assume that Microsoft is not using Firefox too much in their offices, nor that SAP uses Oracle Financials for their book keeping, nor that Siebel account managers prefer salesforce.com to keep track of their sales opportunities): every IT department can use the Dog Food Principle to bridge the gap with their clients at the business side of the organisation.
SAP comes from Venus
I am ready to leave for Paris, where I will be participating in the Enterprise Architects Council meeting, one of the many, many sessions at Sapphire 2006. Must be a new audience to SAP, these enterprise architects. Ever since NetWeaver and Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) became the pillars of SAP’s innovation strategy, unidentified objects from all over the IT profession have begun to swarm the skies around Walldorf.
The Augmented Running Experience
Innovation Happens Elsewhere. Now that companies are searching for the way back to innovative value, it’s worthwhile chewing a few introspective minutes on this tiny, little message. Yes, companies can spend their entire IT budget on consolidating the infrastructure, simplifying their systems and even on introducing service-oriented architecture. Thus they become lean, mean and completely flexible and adaptive businesses.
But then – sooner or later, after having celebrated this apparent success enough – the big question will pop up: are we going to do anything useful with all that we created, or what?