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- Wave! You are live and online!
- New Game Changers for the Internet; Opinions differ on value!
- Do Turkeys vote for Slow IT?
- The Internet of Things just got a little closer
- The Washington Template
- Secure ID – gets a work around with support from key vendors
- The Ideality of the Cloud
- Situational Software - The ‘Killer Application’ for Enterprise 2.0?
- Guest post on Sustainability by Colette Lewiner, Global Leader of Energy, Utilities & Chemicals, Capgemini
- Where the work should be put? Time for Phase 2 in the Off Shore debate
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Strategy
Do Turkeys vote for Slow IT?
Metaphors are dangerous. A talented thinker once even stated that “using a metaphor is like carrying water in a bucket with a hole in it; there is a limit to where it will take you”. But anyway, the link between my earlier pleas for a more careful approach to technology (‘Slow IT’) and Slow Food is stronger than just a metaphor.
After all, the Slow Food movement started in Italy as a reaction to a quickly degrading food culture in which more and more of the taste and experience was sacrificed on the holy altar of Agitated Speed. When a McDonalds restaurant was even opened at the Piazza Di Spagna in Rome, it was the last drop that made the cup run over (good metaphor, yes). Carlo Petrini founded the Slow Food movement and even made it to one of the Time Magazine 2004 heroes, just because he promotes the love for original food that is prepared and tasted with the time and attention it deserves.
Seems that the current approach to IT is ready for some tender loving care as well. Especially in this period of downturn, the anxiety for short-term patches may drive us in the arms of hasty solutions that only partially satisfy. Then they will leave the organisation hungrier and unhealthier than it ever was. Proper timing and focus can help us to rediscover what value we actually want to deliver through technology and what foundation we need to achieve that.
David Sprott, the well-respected founder of CBDI forum (“a think tank specializing in practices for SOA and architecture led software delivery and management”), recognises this too. He makes a good analysis of why doing things right – in Slow IT style – is necessary in an industry in which offshoring, agile development and Web 2.0 are promising, but all too often hysterically abused tools. He doubts however that organisations will be ready for Slow IT, as he sees many of them already ‘slowing down’ in terms of cutting budgets, reducing headcount and – in general – doing more with less. The emphasis is now on quick, effective results and advocating more ‘slow,’ he says, nowadays seems a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas.
The Washington Template
I just might be repeating myself a little bit. But clearly, the Obama administration is setting a worldwide example of how to change a business through technology 2009 style. It went through my mind again when preparing for a panel on Tech Transformation, next week at the Forbes CEO Forum in Scotland. You see, it is one thing to get inspired by new technologies and understand how they can radically change business models – which is more than ever relevant in this period of downturn. But actually execute on these ideas and bring the promise to life: that may be the tougher challenge of the two.
I think they are doing both in Washington and we should all watch and learn from the patterns that are unfolding.
Barack Obama himself, to start with, is an excellent role model for any CEO that wants to grasp the potential of technology to transform business. He is obviously technology-savvy (without being a geek) and shows how to apply information technology in a pragmatic way. Many would argue that he got elected because of his smart use of Web 2.0 to reach out to his potential voters and mobilise a community. And after becoming elected he is still actively using all Internet channels to stay in touch with that community. Already in his campaign, he referred to technology as one of the most important tools to address the phenomenal challenges that America – indeed a complex business - is facing. Healthcare, education, energy, R&D: in the plans of Obama, technology would provide the breakthroughs to make his country leading again.
And now he is executing on the vision. Together with an impressive team.
The Ideality of the Cloud
Genrich Altshuller, the father of systematic innovation, already concluded it more than 50 years ago: the best possible solution to a problem has all the benefits and none of the harm and costs of the original problem. This is what he calls the Ideal Final Result or Ideality. Altshuller should know. Or at least, he had plenty of time to think about it. Way back in the 50’s, he was a lieutenant at the patent department of the Caspian Sea Military Navy. This is where he developed the initial ideas for a revolutionary approach to innovation and problem solving. He was so enthusiastic about his findings that he wrote quite an open, blunt letter to Stalin, who was not particularly renowned for his flexibility or sense of humour. It took Stalin some time to think about it, but eventually Altshuller was banned to the Gulag Archipelago in Siberia.
A minor drawback indeed.
On the positive side of things Altshuller had all the time in the world to contemplate his approach. The rest is history and nowadays TRIZ (Теория решения изобретательских задач, well ok, Russian for ‘Systematic Innovation’) is one of the best known tools for anybody involved in innovation management. One of its key principles is that of Ideality. Applying it helps to overcome psychological inertia and find breakthrough solutions. This is done by focusing on the needed service, rather than on intervening problems or required resources.
Quite a useful approach when discussing the pros and cons of the cloud, so I found out this week when I was presenting a keynote at the very first Swedish cloud conference.
Wax On, Wax Off
There is something symbolic about it: organising an IT conference in the Central Hall in London. Right next to the Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference takes place in one of the landmark buildings of the protestant Methodist church. Established in the 18th century by John Wesley, the Methodist movement consists of people that aim to live a devout, serious life. Not some noncommittal philosophising about the heavenly glory and all that, but practicing faith every dag again, through dedicated, hard work. It’s only when you share your meal in the soup kitchen with the underprivileged of this world, that you start to experience the real essence of faith, so the Methodists believe.
Interesting thinking and at the very least, it gives an extra dimension to the panel discussion on the podium. The topic today is the eternal tension between the long term and the short term. In the panel team we find enterprise architects, IT strategists and a market analyst (no, not exactly the underprivileged). The hypothesis discussed is that the shallowness of today’s economic climate asks for a more careful, architected approach. That way, the requirements of the business can be much better aligned with solutions and it will be easier to achieve – and demonstrate – the value of IT.
A politically correct argument that nobody can really oppose to.
Freemarket
Cultural differences, every now and then it takes some time to explain. Being a Dutchman, wherever I come abroad I have to defend the infamous Dutch lunch. And believe me, there is very little ammunition. We usually stick to a miserable sandwich with some Gouda cheese. If we are in a daring mood, there may be a croquette. And always, there is buttermilk, the unnecessary cruel incarnation of what originally was meant as plain dairy. I have seen tough, Mediterranean business men cry like little babies when they had taken their first sip. The pain, the agony!
Compared to that, our annual Queen's Day celebration on the 30th of April is not even that hard to explain. A monarchy? Sure, why not. Charming. Celebrating the Queen's birthday when it’s not even her birthday? Probably some good pragmatic reasons for it. Grown up people dancing in the streets with orange wigs on their heads? Well, we have seen that before on live television, haven’t we. Might even get used to it one day.
Only the ‘vrijmarkt’ (freemarket), that’s still a question mark to many. An American colleague who accidentally witnessed it once did an attempt to summarise. “So if I understand this well” he said with a worried tone in his voice “your idea of celebration is to open up your attics, get the old stuff out of there and then sell it on the street to other Dutchmen?”. I confirmed, hesitantly. It did sound a bit strange, the way he put it.
On the other hand, I do support the concept. In business, that is. It is a good idea to periodically go through your belongings. Wipe away the dust and have a good, contemplating look. Some assets shine more than expected. Others, no doubt can be thrown away immediately. It cleans up and creates more room to breathe. Exactly the energy boost you need after a long, cold winter. And then even make money with it, why aren’t they doing the same anywhere else in the World?
Controlled Uncontrollability
Simon Caulkin wrote in the UK Observer recently that ‘inside every chief exec, there's a Soviet planner.’
Talking about the credit crunch, Simon writes ‘…with exquisite irony, while central planning had been largely discredited at macroeconomic level, at microeconomic level it remains alive and kicking in organisations…veteran systems thinker Russ Ackoff is not alone in noting that while at the macro level the west is vehemently committed to a market economy, at the micro level almost everyone works in "non-market, centrally planned, hierarchically managed" ones.’
Another way of looking at this is to ask, why have a boss if they aren’t going to, well, boss?
Douglas McGregor at MIT Sloan School of Management in the 1960s had something to say on bosses, describing what he termed as Theory X and Theory Y managers - with a foundational difference being about control – with the X managers employing systems of control, and the Y managers employing systems of enablement.
Younger organisations in particular seem to, at least for a while, have that Theory Y vibe. Perhaps this is both understandable and necessary. The point being that, when the undiscovered country of opportunity has first been discovered, there’s plenty of space to roam about free from fear of the competition. But as the paradigm shift evolves, and competition increases, that need for control seems to come back on strong.
These cycles have been going on for as long as there have been economies for them to cycle within, but the Web represents a shift surrounding these cycles which has changed the game, and which is shining a light on management’s approach to control.
Here, the shift is moving away from the large-scale organisation as the main focus of power, toward the individual and networks of individuals sharing, trading, collaborating, and competing for business goals and political beliefs.
Major organisations have a major part to play, but with the Web, we’re all information prosumers now.
If Michel Foucault is right that knowledge equals power, the business and government collectors, processors, producers and distributors of knowledge – organisations as we know them – had better get to grips fast with new balancing of power with the individual.
Is central planning bad? Not necessarily, but a lighter touch is perhaps what’s called for. And while no-one has all the answers, exploring a new set of questions can definitely help.
There are many new questions to be explored - and here are three which might prove useful in the new, people-centric, macroeconomic environment:
What to do in a situation which our experiences haven’t prepared us for?…
Chris Yapp on ‘Conceptual Emergencies’
What’s the Web all about?...
From WSRI, the Web Science Research Initiative
How does the Web work?...
Ryan Tomayko’s on ‘How I explained REST to my wife’
Stop the Drooling: this crisis needs technology
Guess we all agree by now: there is no point talking about an economic downturn anymore. It’s a straightforward crisis. Period. And it is an unprecedented crisis too, which is almost impossible to compare with earlier situations. There is obviously very, very little use in referring back to the great depression of the ‘30s. But even if we look much closer to home – the collapse of the Internet bubble happened just a few years ago – the differences are striking. Back then, many IT organisations had the doubtful honour of owning a portfolio of expensive projects that had no solid business case, combined with a pile of unmanageable legacy systems and a bunch of heterogeneous infrastructure solutions. No wonder that when the economy went down, it proved to be very rewarding to cut down on IT costs. Fancy hobby projects were stopped, offshore development and outsourcing exploded and the profession quickly learned how to rigorously consolidate applications and infrastructure.
All valid lessons indeed and nowadays many organisations will claim to possess an optimised, mean and lean IT household. Well done there and what it means, is that the old Pavlov reaction to economic headwind – cut the IT costs, just do it – won’t work this time. There is simply not enough fat on the patient, even if we turn to the newest advances in virtualisation, systems management and cloud computing. Besides, achieving some new savings on an IT budget that is at best a few percent of the organisation’s revenue, may be useful but certainly not remarkable.
And we want to do remarkable things with technology, don’t we?
We have found that our TechnoVision approach to creating a business / IT strategy is particularly suitable for finding these remarkable things.
The Enabling Layer; is it already out there through the White Wire?
I want to congratulate Andy on a most thought provoking post – The Enabling Layer; rapid change above and cost savings below.
And I want to see if we can continue this thinking in a post and progess a little further.
We know that a difference today than with the last power to the user cycle is that connectivity is the default, not the exception, and that as a result we are seeing genuine commoditisation in IT as it shifts out of a product based economy into a service based economy. To put it plainly, SaaS is indeed on the march.
And so I wonder if the Enabling Layer already exists – that is – the enabling services themselves are already out there that business and government can use - and that in fact, trying to develop one’s own in the traditional sense by buying and then developing on products behind the corporate firewall not only adds expense, but inhibits business operations and compliance.
As security – in its broadest sense of confidentiality, integrity and availability - seems to be at the heart of the matter – perhaps it’s worth reflecting on what the Jericho Forum’s White Paper on the business case for de-perimeterisation has to say:
‘Computing history can be defined in terms of increasing connectivity over time, starting from no connectivity and developing to the restricted connectivity we currently have today, with islands of corporate connectivity behind their managed perimeter.
The current perimeterised architecture is perfectly adequate for an organisation that simply wants to operate inside its own controlled environment, with e-mail to the outside world. Unfortunately this organisation ceased to exist ten years ago as business mandated wider connectivity; yet most businesses continue to use an architecture adapted from that era thereby exposing themselves to an increasing and often unwise risk.
Worst still, many business and IT leaders, who rightly understand that good security is mandatory to doing business in the 21st century, have become victim to the perpetuated myth that good security starts (and in many cases ends) with a hardened perimeter, and also the fallacy that a hardened perimeter is required by whichever audit regimes they are subject to.
It is essential that businesses and IT leaders relinquish this preconception, and understand what their businesses would be able to achieve if the perimeter was not there inhibiting innovation, wide collaborative working, expansion and speed to market.’
This is pretty unambiguous stuff.
A little while ago I found myself inspired by Chris Anderson’s blog on the topic of living on the Web which led to the formulation of ‘White Wire Strategy’
And with hindsight, perhaps this thinking didn’t go far enough.
So, I’m with Andy, The Enabling Layer is needed, and I wonder if the concepts and services are already out there – and that by starting with the White Wire first, we’ll discover just how to go about it.
What does externalisation really mean?
There’s a famous Douglas Adams quote along the lines of ‘Technology's a word that describes something that doesn't quite work yet’. For me, it’s been one of those quotes that was nice and gentle on the mind at first and then has proceeded to burrow its way slowly into the deep recesses, where it’s now made itself and home and is starting to throw up some interesting perspectives. Perhaps it’s taken a leaf from Adams’ own creation, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster ("The effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.")
In this guest post colleague Chris Yapp provides both a slice of lemon and a brick on what most of us find straightforward to use at home but remains to this day as one of the single biggest corporate IT issues. The PC.
What does externalisation really mean? - guest post by Chris Yapp
One of the things that IT folk are often accused of is talking in big terms such as “a trend to externalisation”, which actually is happening, believe me. Making it real for the market can often be the challenge without losing sight of the link between the idea and its delivery.
I was musing with colleagues on what externalisation means for corporate IT in the medium term and one of the cameos we came to seems compelling. I’d welcome your thoughts on this.
Let’s go back, to look forward.
Thirty years ago, company car schemes would be quite restrictive. Typically there might be a preferred supplier. Sales reps might get a Cavalier and support staff an Astra. Today, many organisations have flexible employment packages. They have outsourced fleet management. The schemes offered allow for the wide variety of family sizes and structures. Also, individuals can choose to supply their own cars, usually with stipulations about age and suitability. Flexible employment schemes now cover Health, dental, holiday, life assurance and many other factors. For instance, I know of schemes for pet insurance. These flexibilities are seen as needed to attract and retain talent.
The thought is that mobile phones and IT will in time move from company supplied to this kind of flexible arrangement.
People will either be able to join a company scheme or supply their own. How many of us today carry two mobile phones, one for work and one for friends and family?
Of course restrictions will be needed such as anti virus packages and other security arrangements.
However, for the MAC, Vista or Linux zealot, as standards develop, the need for the organisations they work in to run user IT (laptop and the like) and Mobile devices on a restricted basis will diminish with time. Giving the user greater flexibility makes sense. Talking to a final year student a little while ago, I was told “I will never work for an organisation that won’t let me use my MAC!”
In the short term when recruitment is stalled and many organisations are downsizing, this might seem unnecessary. However, look 2-5 years out with the ageing population and things will change. Skill shortages and the difficulty in recruitment will make growth difficult in many sectors.
I won’t call the upturn, but when it comes flexibility will be the key in securing the needed talent. In fact, the downturn is resulting in a rise in people being more flexible in their working habits. So the thought is that in the medium term, the key driver of externalisation may well be HR. That wasn’t what we initially expected.
What do you think?
We have Ataris and we are not afraid to use them
What happens when graduates come into their first jobs and find that the IT facilities at the office are an anachronism? What do you get when business users know exactly what innovative technologies can deliver and still get a ‘no’ from the IT department? Probably the same as what happened yesterday at the White House when Obama’s new iPodified staff entered its new offices for the first time.
Quite a reality check, to crash into a wall of old software, security regulations from an ancient past that forbid digital communication (Thou Shalt Not Email) and just a few lonely, pitiful laptops. The eager new-media team came in, only to find out that there were no Macintoshes within a range of 10 miles of the perimeter.
The horror!
Instead, they had to work with 6 year-old versions of Microsoft software (although that is not necessarily a bad thing nowadays, admitted).
‘It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari’ lamented Obama’s spokesman Bill Burton. And although the metaphor is a bit misplaced - what’s wrong with an Atari after all – we can easily sympathize with what the new staff is going through. Guess we saw it coming.
Interesting enough, people in the White House soon turn out to be just as creative as their fellow-victims in other organisations: they apply the same Bricolage-style pragmatics to achieve their goals. And we are only getting a flavour of what is destined to happen much more in many different businesses.
Apparently, the officials in the press office were already prepared: in addition to using their own mobile phones they set up Gmail accounts so that they freely could send and receive information. Quite a daring step. But then again, 2009 might prove to be a transitional year. Let’s keep a close look at the IT machinery in Washington for changes. Who knows, that old-fashioned pong game might indeed morph into a highly interactive, 3D multi-player experience.
Or not. In either case, we should learn.
You've Got Mail. Almost.
I have been arguing before why I think now is exactly the right time for a more careful, considerate approach to information technology. There are many arguments, many pros and cons, lots of blog-items to write. But every now and then, you bump into a devastating demonstration that renders all discussion obsolete. Fed up with e-mail overflow? Blaming e-mail for managing a 1000 issues in that same, shallow way? Using a tone in your e-mails that you would never use when talking person-to-person? Responding a bit too quickly to e-mails without taking the right time to formulate your answers?Your worries are over.
Now there is Real Snail Mail, the worlds first webmail service using live snails. The good people at boredomresearch, Bournemouth University, take care of a well-trained staff of 8 snails that each carry a 20mm RFID tag on their shell. Incoming messages are collected at the dispatch centre at one end of their closure. Once a message is loaded on the chip, it will be carried around by the assigned snail until it happens to reach the drop off point. Here the message is collected and forwarded to its final destination. The fastest average delivery time is currently achieved by Francis, a gorgeous brunette snail that only needs 2.22 days to bring the message across. This is in sharp contrast to the pathetic 10.43 days of her macho colleague Sean (codename ‘Agent 007’, guess his glory days are a bit over indeed).
I sure hope that the success won’t put too much pressure on those poor snails. Already, their bosses are thinking about scaling up. This will no doubt introduce the concept of industralised snail farms and before we know it management consultants will be applying Lean Six Sigma to eliminate even the last minute of waste in the tank. For now, champion snails like Agatha (agent 006) and Reginald (agent 012) couldn’t care less. One of them may be carrying my e-mail right now, but that freshly placed marigold looks so much more tasteful. Could be another hour of just bites, rather than bytes.
Technology Predictions 2009: the compilation
As we are entering the final stage of quite an interesting year, let’s see what the collective wisdom of the contributors to our CTO and Capping IT Off blogs has come up with. Here is our compiled list of 2009 Technology predictions:
1. Deliberately Disconnected. Confronted every day with an ocean of information and stimuli, we will more and more actively seek to disconnect ourselves from the madness whenever we need. See also 5, 13 and 14.
2. Cisco will be KLM – Air France biggest challenger. For obvious reasons, we will travel less in 2009 and instead use technology to communicate and collaborate.
3. First convict for hacking into a cloud. The cloud is destined to become main stream in 2009. And as the definite proof of it, hackers will become attracted by it. See also 4, 6, 8 and 11.
4. Stop this web 2.0 hocus pocus, we told you so. For that matter, next to the cloud, web 2.0 is finally becoming business main stream in 2009. Another definite proof of it: we’ll see the first monumental failures. See also 3, 6, 8, 11, 16 and 18.
5. Email is dead. Enough is enough! Outlook and BlackBerry will no longer rule our life. See also 1, 13 and 14.
6. Cloud-in-a-container. Business will start using the cloud. But some will prefer to experiment with a safer cloud ‘on premise’. It’s like having a cloud on the ground that you can look into. See also 3, 4, 8 and 11.
7. WebKit surpasses Flash Player penetration. WebKit is a piece of open source software that is so widely used that it even will surpass the device penetration of Adobe’s Flash player.
8. “Trust” is the new version of “Control”. Did we already predict that the cloud will be main stream in 2009? Anyway, as a result, we will rely more on trusting others (cloud suppliers for example) that on control by ourselves. See also 3, 4, 6, 11, 17 and 18.
9. Music-as-a-Service (…at last). Any music, at any time, in any way, at any device: 2009 will be a breakthrough year for – well – a cloud of music.
10. Let’s socialise! We’re all recognizing the power of social networks. And next year, it will even happen in business. See also 4 and 18.
11. Standards bodies wake up to clouds. Is it Groundhog Day or what? Anyway, with the cloud penetrating the enterprise, standards bodies will become much more active, for example around service management and security. See also 3, 4, 6 and 8.
12. Bricolage IT. Central IT departments may lack the budget and the energy to pick up a new generation of IT tools that aim for the near proximity of business. So business units are bound to do it themselves, in true ‘bricolage’ style. See also 15.
13. Information filtering and behavioral targeting are the new gold. There is too much information and we are almost overrun by it. Filtering and behavioral targeting are the new tools to deal with it. See also 1, 5 and 14.
14. Slow IT. Stop the ADHD! We will contemplate our IT household and choose for a more careful, better balanced use of technology. See also 1, 5 and 13.
15. The end of the user. Finally, we will stop considering persons as ‘users’ of information technology and instead we all become ‘participants’ of systems, actually becoming one with information technology. See also 12.
16. Death of the money making core product. Forget about making a profit on your core product. Instead, businesses will make creative use of web 2.0 to sell ancillary products and services that generate a much better margin. See also 4.
17. A more sensible approach to de-risking data loss. 2009 will see many more examples of holistic security and information management as a major step towards mitigating the risk of data loss. Buzzword to follow: Enterprise Digital Rights Management (ERM). See also 3, 4 and 8.
18. “Open” is the new “Closed”. Open up your assets to the outside world and find new, innovative ways of collaboration and co-creation in the new year. See also 4, 8 and 10.
Apparently some clouds in 2009, we can safely conclude, accompanied by the enterprise use of Web 2.0. A new emphasis on standards, trust and security. And – amid all the buzz – a plea to leave technology every now and then for what it is. A lot to look forward to, I hope you agree. Anything we are missing or completely wrong about? Let us know. Hope to meet you frequently next year again on our blogs or – better still – in real life. All the best!
43 IT Things to do in 2009
No better timing than right now to contemplate your plans for 2009. And why not use good old 43Things to do it in true web 2.0 style? Until now, I have been using the site to write down and share my own personal, silly targets. Meditate more. Pick up Chinese boxing training again. Create the first Yellow Raincoat painting. Write a book about Slow IT. You know, just the basic, ordinary stuff we can all relate to.
But why not do it a bit different this year? What if the CIO would share his or her ’43 IT Things to do in 2009’ with the company. Wouldn’t that be a simple and transparent tool to communicate and share the IT strategy? And wouldn’t it be an interesting exercise to condense that complete strategy into a couple (7, 12, 43, whatever) of simple, straightforward targets that others can understand and comment on?
Or why not use the list to create a wish list of personal IT activities that we should definitely consider in 2009? I really hope that you readers – since many of you will now have a few days off – can help me to compile a list of 43 items that we will then publish on the site for everybody to see and work with.
To get the discussion started, here is my first list of IT activities that people may want to plan for in 2009:
1. Build your own mashup application
2. Become a Togaf 9 certified architect
3. Give and get one OLPC laptop
4. Use a cloud application
5. Blog about your project
6. Install Ubuntu Linux on a PC
7. Start a community on Ning
8. Get a personal KPI gadget on your desktop
9. Try an Android smart phone
10. Use social networking tools within the IT department
The Mouse That Roared
Today sees the 40th anniversary of a rather special mouse (and my personal thanks to Chris Yapp for his encyclopaedic memory).
On 9 December 1968 hi-tech visionary Douglas Engelbart first used one to demonstrate novel ways of working with computers.
As well as the military, these days of course one can often look to the computer gaming industry to understand what the new innovations for the mass market might be. 40 years on and the human computer interface has certainly advanced. The Nintendo Wii remains a revolution in human computer interface technology and innovations in the You Experience continue at pace.
Sometimes referred to as a brain-computer interface, Emotiv Systems describes their technology as a revolutionary new headset for human computer interaction. However you describe it, the Emotiv EPOC is one of the first commercially available computer interfaces that responds to the electric signals generated by thought.
Or if you prefer the human touch perhaps Microsoft Surface is for you – facilitating human interaction with surfaces with digital content through natural hand gestures, touch and physical objects.
And whatever the physical interface, seeing is believing. So before trying to write the thousand words many times over to describe the experience, a simulation or two supported by technologies such as iRise and a visualisation approach can not only enhance the business outcome but will tend to save 10-25% of full lifecycle development and run costs too.
It’s reported that Dr Engelbart wanted computers to act as helpers that augmented human intelligence and enabled people to operate far more efficiently and productively than they would without such tools.
If information is the lifeblood of business and government then perhaps the human interface with it is its consciousness.
While the innovations are breaking down traditional barriers between people and technology, we are still far away from their everyday application, and from Engelbart’s vision of computers acting as helpers that augmented human intelligence. Too often we see people serving technology as opposed to technology serving people. One of these tends to lead to intelligent sophisticated business behaviour, and one of these doesn’t.
40 years on, while the mouse has always been the symbol of the user, perhaps over time as it gracefully matures beyond middle age, we may come to think of it more as a general symbol of technology serving people, and so as a symbol of corporate intelligence.
If you’re tackling a complex problem, looking at how the humans and the computers interact first, and how the business processes work second, might just reveal a pleasant surprise or two. And with the innovations around today it doesn’t take a Q-bomb to do it. Happy 40th!
Tech Predictions 2009: the end of the user
User. To quote Wikipedia ‘Users in a computing context refers to one who _uses_ a computer system’. Already we are lost. Already, we have a split between the user and the computer. Here, in the word user, we see the essence of the business/IT divide in all its perpetual wonder.
Despite frequent calls for a replacement term – I particular like Jimmy Guterman’s ‘don’t call me a user’ request for a user-generated superior term to user – the word stubbornly persists.
On the other side of the user coin is the term ‘IT system’. If only there was a deep wishing well one could throw all these coins into and magic up a new more valuable currency for the digital economy.
Well, having taken on the mantle of a fairy godmother once already in this the season of the pantomime, I would like to offer as an alternative - ‘participant’:
As a participant in an information system to achieve a goal, it's the combination of the information in my head and the information in the computer that counts.
What’s interesting is by changing this one concept one almost automatically has to consider different management practices.
Organisations which see themselves as ‘users of IT’ tend to use management practices based around techniques such as:
- Optimisation of the parts
- Theory X management
- The Organisational Model
- Business Processes
- Stability & Predictability
- Change Management
- As-Is and To-Be Grand Designs
However, the organisations that see themselves as information systems – i.e. which do a 'find and replace' on the word user for participant across their corporate consciousness – might just find themselves starting to naturally adopt management practices such as these:
- Optimisation of the whole
- Theory Y management
- The Social-Enterprise Model
- Value Systems
- Agility & Innovation
- Adoption Engineering
- Agile planning and execution
In the turbulent times ahead, perhaps above everything else agility is going to be key. And agility needs participants, not users.
So, here is a tech prediction for 2009 – or to be more precise a social-technical prediction – 2009: the end of the user and the year of the participant!
ps - you might wish to try out using participant instead of user for a day, and see where it gets you...
Voicemail
“… Hi, this is John’s voicemail. I am currently unavailable. You see, we have our annual strategy session with all of the IT management and the leaders of the business units. And it seemed perfect timing to make a change this year. Think about it: IT strategy is more crucial than ever. The wolves are howling in the deserted, grey streets of the economy and we are in desperate need of creative ideas. And not only about how to save money on the IT department. We are also looking for fresh, new ways to use technology to tackle the downturn and find a path forward.
Oh, by the way, this year we are not in that luxurious neo renaissance chateau. Instead we are in this nice little motel. Very convenient, just near the motorway and all.
Anyway, IT strategy. If it is so crucial to the success of our company, why are we so careless about it? Last year, it was difficult enough to get all of the major stakeholders together for one lousy day at the chateau. Well, nearly all of them, that is. Even when I was on my way, I received a hurried cancellation. Something about an emergency client tender, although I have never heard anything about that one ever since. The rest of the attendees sort of trickled into the room during the course of the morning and actually it was already 11 AM when we were really up to speed. Just before lunch, actually (they served an excellent Californian Chardonnay, come to think of it).
Tech Predictions 2009: Slow IT
When I first read Carl Honoré’s bestseller ‘In Praise of Slow’ I was devastated by his now famous example of speed-parenting. A few years ago, he was so obsessed with speed and efficiency that he actually liked the idea of One-Minute bedtime stories. Honoré read about it in a newspaper, impatiently standing in line at an airport gate. While figuring out how to get the complete series as fast as possible through Amazon, he suddenly realised that things had gone way too far. Being a father of a two-year-old son, he already found himself involved in nightly confrontations, his son fancying long, carefully told stories and Carl trying to find the shortest stories and the most efficient way to tell them (you know, why not have Snow White and the 3 Dwarfs...?). All because emails were waiting, calls had to be made, decisions had to be taken and every minute seemed to count.
The experience changed his life and since then, Carl Honoré has been one of the proponents of the Slow Movement: people that believe that the important things in life need to be done at the right pace, with careful dedication and a genuine love for foundation and quality. Where slow is already having a profound influence on cooking and dining (Slow Food actually started the whole movement), industrial design, travel and parenting, I predict that 2009 will be the year of Slow IT.
Here’s why.
Tech Predictions 2009: Bricolage IT
You probably won’t be stunned by my prediction that 2009 looks like a bumpy year indeed. No matter how we put it, many IT departments will need to cut down on their costs. Applications and infrastructure will be consolidated, innovative projects may be on hold and the rest of the budget – if any – is likely to be spend on risk management, reporting and regulatory compliance.
Interesting enough, this may lead to an even stronger push to the phenomenon of Bricolage IT, particularly at the business side of organisations. Let me explain ‘Bricolage’ first: this is a typical French word that describes the art of using whatever is available – in a pragmatic way – to achieve a goal. ‘Do it yourself’ describes the same, but misses a bit the semantics of making the most of what you have, even if it is not that much.
I predict that the business side of organisations in 2009 will need new IT solutions to deal with the requirements of the market, particularly alluding to the downturn. However, the same downturn makes the central IT department even less responsive than it used to be: with a decreased budget and even less headroom to innovate, it will act more and more like the central Nay department.
Left to its own devices, the business side will look for alternatives – outside the scope of central IT and within the limits of their own, local budget -. And it may be in for a surprise, because a new wave of on-demand, software-as-a-service solutions is readily available, covering a considerable number of new grounds. They will enable Bricolage style applications that directly address the needs of market-facing units (some would call it Business Technology solutions). All without costing a fortune.
Now, who's the President?!
You thought you got it all worked out. Used the Web 2.0 like no one else to mobilise a huge crowd of supporters. Announced to appoint a national CTO, in charge of using technology pro-actively to create new jobs and restore competiveness. Created an online dialogue with your citizens, even before your term began. Yes, you were going to be a geek in the best sense of the word, leveraging information technology to reach new innovative heights.
Then the IT guys at the White House told you that you can no longer keep your Blackberry. To start with. Unsafe, unreliable, uncontrollable. And besides, it is not a company standard.
What’s next? Probably handing in your MacBook.
Ah, some of these IT security experts (or should we call them the Innovation Prevention Unit?), they can put a damper on any new initiative. Their remedy against the dangers of the connected Internet: just pull the plug and don’t email ever again. Life is so simple, if you really want it.
Obama will soon face the same challenge that many frustrated business users already know all too well: to see your inspiring, new ideas being smashed to smithereens by the central IT department. Because these ideas don’t fit the organisational security policies and procurement rules or because the existing systems are too petrified to accommodate the change.
But unlike many of us, Obama is in the unique position to change this game. There is just one question he needs to ask. Let’s hope he does (and yes, he can).
Obama's CTO
Despite all the serenity I predicted for 2009, I followed the US election night in that typical mashup style of now: on the couch with my Apple laptop, one window open with Google Docs (I was writing a column for a magazine), EyeTV television in another, a few additional news sites open and – of course – a live Twitter feed.
What can I say? it’s still 2008.
Whatever political preference, nobody can deny Barack Obama’s obvious charisma. One day before the elections I noticed him giving a speech, somewhere on a remote TV screen in a shopping street. There was no sound and there were no subtitles. It may be a platitude by now, but the sheer intensity of his appearance gave me goose bumps. It is the same intensity that stimulated many to vote for the first time in their life. It is the same intensity that makes you believe that change actually can occur. Just a bit more of that Obama-style leadership in our profession, and I am sure we would see many more successful transformation projects and programmes.
And obviously, there are other ways in which Obama inspires us business / technology people. He may not have invented the Internet himself (that was Al Gore) but he convincingly demonstrated how to use the Web 2.0 tool kit – social networks, viral video’s, blogs, RSS, to name just a few – to reach and mobilise an unprecedentedly big community. Indeed, elections will never be the same again (but please, don’t call it Elections 2.0). And now, in the transition period towards the new Administration, the Internet is used to engage with citizens and collect their ideas. Actually, people who aspire a position in the new Administration are urged to do this through the site, as “applying on-line is the fastest and most accurate way to get your information to us”.
Four ways that Technology has changed our buying patterns
In the past couple of years I have read much more widely than ever before as I have tried to understand Business Technology, the bringing together of technology and business into a single capability as opposed to IT which is a separate operation that must be aligned to business. There is no shortage of stuff to read around the topic, and most of it seems to be from a business point of view, and poses lots of interesting and difficult questions about business models. One of the most thought provoking places to learn more is here. Of course having just had the news that the last two major USA investment banks have decided not to be investment banks anymore and change their business model to retail banking it kind of makes the point about the importance of ‘business models’.
As a simple technologist I can’t say that I can answer too many, if any of the points raised, but as an engineer I tend to want to research for facts so here is my conclusion from examining as many case studies as I can find to try to identify the common business threads that technology has played the leading role in changing. I would not say everything fits but i have found that I can recognise four reasonably common threads, and the first three may be interesting, but it’s the fourth one that is driving the market;
Depression
I am probably wrong, but somehow I have this feeling of crisis hanging in the air. Do not ask me how I know, it is just this very well-developed sensitivity for what is happening in the market. On top of that, it is autumn in the part of the world I live in. Brown and yellow leaves are swirling all around while a clammy wind blows through the deserted streets. Looks like everybody has spontaneously become depressed. Especially at IT departments, the gloomy mood seems to be all over the place. Finally you managed to create that innovation plan, next thing you know it is mothballed. Projects are stopped in total panic. Drawers are opened and spreadsheets appear that still look unpleasantly familiar. Only the head of Procurement strides through the building with a newly found élan.
Light therapy for everyone and pass the Prozac jar please.
Or could the situation be different this time?
It sounds utterly cynical, but we should not be surprised if the current misery leads to a pile of new IT work. The Government is clearly back at the wheel in many places and the public opinion just won’t tolerate even the slightest suggestion of misconduct in business. Rules and regulation will be tighter than ever. It means more risk management, more reporting and in general a call for total transparency. All of these areas obviously depend on enabling information systems.
Also, more organizations are bound to split or merge (if necessary repeated in random order) and this will require extensive support through enterprise architecture, standardization and carefully crafted integration solutions. Indeed, a lousy economy may spur the demand for certain categories of IT professionals.
A different premise for operation?
I was thinking about IT, and how the business community can find IT services relevant to their work but not find the IT department relevant, something which was shown in our most recent CIO survey. It occurred to me that perhaps we (the IT community) are working from some wrong, or at least obsolete premises. The tendency in IT is to put things into nice, neat boxes. Our background with programming logic makes us do that, it's to be expected that we'd like things nice and logical. But it also seems to me that we tend to build towards models that are too static - if we just get this enterprise data model done, all our IT problems will be solved. And I think that's where the challenge comes in - conventional IT seems to build to static models, and plan for clean neat solutions, when the world no longer, or never did work that way in the first place. If so, perhaps that's why we see so many "shadow IT" groups in business units - because they are able to adapt quicker to changes, or to work better with ambiguity by working "closer to the user". Perhaps we should be looking at a change of premise, a different outlook for IT overall, one that helps balance the laudable goals of enterprise architecture with the realities of a quickly changing IT landscape where "good enough" represents the essence of another premise. I'm asking myself why the IT department doesn't matter, playing over and over the answers I've seen in big shops and concluding we try to do too much and that putting more "IT" in the hands of the business might be the answer we need. What do you think?
The Fallacy of separating Web development from IPv6
IBv6 has been the coming thing for quite a few years now, but like many things you start taking notice when some big bodies decide on adoption. The US Government is allegedly the largest technology infrastructure operator so its move to mandate all departments to have the ability to send and receive using IPv6 stacks within 3 years which expires on 30th June 2008 is clearly a BIG sign. But it doesn’t seem to have worked out too well in practice. The European Union feels the same way even publishing an action plan to help states follow its own version of this mandate.
However the big reason that was supposed to be the reason for adoption namely that that the limited number of IPv4 addresses would bring a limit to Internet expansion has not yet proven to be the issue that needs to be addressed. In fact I don’t think I have ever seen any comments from any user/administration direction that says this is proving to be an operational issue right now. So it seems we can all sit back and wait this one out till it does become an issue, right? Wrong!
Exciting IT? Come to the Dark Side.
I am about to leave for holidays. And so are probably a few more of you. Thought it would be nice to leave you with a couple of ideas and concepts. Just to keep you focused among all the distraction of doing nothing and enjoying the great outdoors.
I can’t really tell you where I am going (although I will reveal that the local currency is quite low compared to the Euro), but the weather forecasts promises us lots of sun and high temperatures. No doubt we will have to seek protection in the shadow every now and then. Not to worry, it will give us the opportunity to contemplate the exciting things that will happen in IT after summer. And they are bound to happen in the shadow, on the dark side: in more and more organisations, market-facing departments leverage the power of service-oriented architecture, Web 2.0 and mash-up tools to build their own, instant solutions.
It is a direct result of the pent-up demand that is created by us all, spoiled as we are as consumers on the Internet and as owners of advanced tools and devices. We have come to expect the same experience at the office and if the IT department is not able to deliver it, we will do it ourselves.
Bricolage, is what the French would call this: use what is available to build your own solution. You may want to think about it, if you happen to stroll through the local markets in the Provence this summer.
Features Overrated
Nah, let’s not produce yet another obvious comment on the queues of people, anxiously waiting to buy - and maybe, just maybe even activate - their new iPhone 3G. After all, this is world news that nobody can escape from, easily beating missile tests in Iran and the election dispute in Zimbabwe.
What did strike me though in some early comments was the claim that the functionality of the iPhone is not so special at all, as many established smart phones contain similar features. Particularly the Japanese would not be interested in the new device, spoiled already for years by products that support even a lot more, including photography, live TV and an electronic wallet.
So why is it then, that some of the biggest queues were in Tokyo?
Guess it all comes down to Features being so Overrated, a persistent phenomenon in the IT market, not caused by users and consumers but by producers, analysts, industry watchers and consultants. I fell victim to it as well, in an earlier career as the chief developer of a commercial software tool: every new version of our product was shoved with additional features, just to stay in the Rat Race with our competitors. It was entirely about the check boxes, sent to us on surveys that had been put together by all and sundry, but not by the people that actually would be using our software.
I recently spoke on a CRM seminar where all major suppliers showcased their products. The upcoming SaaS challenger Salesforce.com was contemplated thoroughly and some competitors and analysts made the already familiar suggestion that the product is interesting, but yet too limited in functionality for mainstream, enterprise use. This amused one of our clients – recent winner of a prestigious annual CRM award - and he commented that if only all sales representatives in an organization would really use 30% of the simplest CRM package functionality on a daily basis, this would be a monumental leap forward. This argument also pertains to using word processors and spreadsheets: in the first instance, we may judge Google Application’s features too limited for enterprise purposes. Then, the majority of us may actually find too much in the package to absorb.
Features are overrated. And we may be so immersed in our check boxes and surveys that we don’t even notice that queue of business users. They are piling up to work with tools and applications that are basic, simple and – above all – fun to use.
Who knows, even sales reps might start to maintain their client records. Just because it is a cool thing to do. Or are we tempting fate now?
As the world turns...
Lately I've been trying to come up with a pithy description for the changes technology is currently driving our companies toward, and came up with the following. Check out the text, see what you think, and leave a comment with your thoughts.
When the business cycle was long and environment was somewhat predicable (or at least more predictable than today), we focused on optimizing the steady state. The value-chain—viewing businesses as transaction factories—was our metaphor of choice, and our priority was to ensure that we had a complete set of information management tools (enterprise applications) to optimize throughput. Automation enabled our businesses to scale to the high transaction volumes that would deliver large profits. These value-chains are efficient but, somewhat like the Titanic, make it very difficult to point our business in a new direction. This was not a problem however, as the business cycle was long, our environment somewhat predictable and the icebergs still over the horizon.
Today we find ourselves in a much more uncertain environment. The business cycle is short and shrinking, and the steady state rarely exists for very long. We need a new metaphor to understand the business—one which lets us optimize our business agility, rather than transaction volume. This requires us to take a more granular view, focusing on the decisions within our business (and within our partners and customers), and the interactions required to support them. We also need to remove inertia from our business by shrinking its physical and IT footprints to our core activities and decisions, passing responsibility for supporting functionality to a broad partner ecosystem. This encourages us to continually optimize our business processes, tailoring them to the current business environment and context, as our employees, partners and customers work to make the best possible decision in each circumstance.
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?