Collabri Group LLC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A use case for understanding new capabilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Intuitive presentation and usability

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

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

3. From big IT to small services

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

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

4. User-driver environments

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

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

5. Big data means more than a lot of data

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

Example: NoSQL databases; search engines, image recognition

6. Tight-coupled computers to loose-coupled people

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

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

7. Development and deployment methods

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

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

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

8. Next generation data centers deliver true cloud

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

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

9. Mobility in every sense of the term

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

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

10. The redefinition of security

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

Example: Jericho Security, closed App Shop models 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every now and then I get really excited about a newly released or upgraded product. I must confess it doesn’t happen that often, but what does it for me is when I see something that I know is the missing piece in a particular jigsaw. And that jigsaw is connected to the title of this blog. My jigsaws, and their pictures, are almost always user or business solution oriented, you might say down the stack, which is Capgemini’s role in the industry, whereas products and product vendors think more around the technology capabilities, or up the stack.

This morning I read an announcement from a specialist company called RealVNC http://www.realvnc.com whose core product they describe as: provides remote control software which lets you see and interact with desktop applications across any network. The product is version 2 of their iPad Viewer to work with Apple iOS 5 and I reproduce the following from their Website with a slight edit marked …………. covering greater details of the product. Oh and by the way when you are reading this remember that in their Q4 2011 results announced in mid-October, Apple reported sales of another 11.2 million iPads, and 17.7 million iPhones, so some of these are in your enterprise for sure! It’s what they are being used for and how they are being used that should matter to any IT department.

RealVNC, the original developer of VNC technology, has announced a new version of its popular VNC Viewer application that provides remote control of Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or UNIX computers from an Apple iOS device. Available now from the App Store, VNC Viewer version 2 supports the recently released iOS 5 and ……… take full remote control of office and home computers.

With this latest version of VNC Viewer, any external monitor that is plugged into the iOS device will automatically display the remotely connected computer’s desktop. And with iPhones or iPads running iOS 5 with Airplay Mirroring turned on, the computer’s desktop will be automatically transferred to Apple TV. In both cases, the mobile device’s screen acts as the keyboard and mouse. VNC Viewer for iOS enables users to provide remote IT support, access home computers whilst travelling and view Flash-based websites. To connect from VNC Viewer, VNC “Server”-compatible technology must be installed and running on the computer to be accessed. The recommended VNC Enterprise Edition provides robust, high-performance connections and unmatched flexibility along with strong security.

If you link this back to the topic of separating internally-oriented, client-server, data-centric IT inside the firewall with external links being made around the governance structure, then that is appropriate for this – ‘inside-out’ as we call it at Capgemini. This is in contrast to the increasing number of users with their own devices, such as iPads and iPhones, who want much wider access to Web-based services from Apple App Store, or other Web and cloud sources, and are frustrated by the IT department ‘locked down’ corporate PCs – which we call ‘outside-in’. To get a more complete brief on this see earlier CTO blogs. BUT the fact remains that I, and most of those iPad and smartphone users, want to work in both environments for different reasons and at different times.

Most of my day I am distinctly mobile, i.e. out of the office visiting clients, or industry technology vendors, even sometimes at industry events, but always relying on wireless connectivity of one sort or another, and usually interacting with others on social networks, reading technology news etc. In fact, other than email I don’t use any Capgemini services from inside the firewall, and in the case of email I get it as ‘push mail’. The very need to go through the necessary connection via a VPN and authentication to establish a link into enterprise IT within the firewall is too time-consuming and awkward, and that’s even before I consider carrying a notebook PC on the grounds of size and boot-up time. So it’s an iPad and Windows 7.5 smartphone for me and my distinctly externally-focused activities in the ‘outside-in’ environment.

However, at the beginning and end of the day when sitting in my hotel or at home then I will turn to my PC and move myself within the enterprise firewall and work in an ‘inside-out’ environment to deal with the ‘heavy lifting’ tasks which almost, without exception, need data in files. The first and biggest group of tasks will be those replies to emails that need a file from my PC to be attached to the reply and I have ‘parked’ during the day. Then there are a few items that I might need the next day and I will email the attachment to myself to make it accessible on my iPad, and finally there is some work that actually does involve using genuine enterprise applications. (By the way, I appreciate that if I had a more office-based role in say, Finance, this would not be the way I would work.)

At this point I expect you have made the connection to the RealVNC Viewer on iPad, and yup there is a great answer in that I could remotely tell my PC sat safely inside the enterprise firewall to open a file, mail an attachment, or whatever, without moving the data outside the safety of the firewall. Magic!! Well certainly worth a closer look anyway as I am not trying to endorse the product unseen!!! The point is that here is the kind of solution that answers the needs of both sides; the IT department is rightly concerned with the security and safety of corporate applications and data, and mobility workers are rightfully requiring a different working environment.

So it’s time to acknowledge the realities of the new ‘post-PC era’ as in fact a different working style and environment from the standard enterprise desktop environment – the ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ definitions – and start to use another popular term, ‘innovation’. There is a definite need to look at these changes as undeniable reality with the need to find new types of potential solutions, after all, another 11.2 million iPads plus some 1.2 million Android tablets will be in use next quarter so delaying tactics don’t look like much of a solution!

One big news item that could not really go un-noticed due the headline writers’ interest in linking it to the comments on Steve Jobs and his legacy was the ‘victory’ of Apple over Adobe in the battle of HTML5 versus Adobe Flash. If you didn’t see this then the main point is that Adobe is dropping the mobile version of Flash, whilst the PC version, which after all is the big market for Flash, continues. The Informitv reported this and included the most important point in a quote from Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for the Flash platform at Adobe:

…supporting Flash Player across different mobile hardware devices, operating systems and browsers has proved challenging. “This is something that we realized is simply not scalable or sustainable,” he said.

Put another way, the development path of mobility operating systems and devices is simply following a different path to that of the PC, hence the increasing use of the term ‘post-PC era’ in various articles. This doesn’t mean that the PC is dead, which of course it isn’t, and if we look at the need for heavy duty desk-based transactional work it clearly won’t fade away any more than traditional mainframes have disappeared from heavy duty online transaction processing areas. Though by an interesting coincidence and timing IBM has just announced that Windows applications can be supported on their zServers, or mainframes to the rest of us. CRN news did a good breakdown of the announcement in detail including an interesting example around running SAP.

The ‘post-PC era’ really refers to the form factor and use made of tablets/smartphones, and, as the operating systems for both converge, the difference between the two is rapidly becoming the form factor alone. But it’s not just the form factor, the user experience, gesture driven, better battery life, new features etc., it’s for what and how we use mobility devices that is the important point.

The term ‘mobility’ is associated with devices that are able to function beyond the governance and delivery of traditional enterprise applications, outside the enterprise firewall, and are able to make use of all types of Web-based capabilities including cloud services. For these devices and the people using them the external focus is predominantly on doing business with others, and using external information from the Web via Internet connectivity. As it is the Internet-Web architectural model it is loose-coupled (hence the ‘mobility’ between all resources), stateless and non-deterministic, and with browsers as a key delivery element it is also thin client and requires hosting of its services and data. The Cloud satisfies this requirement and indeed enables the whole model of ‘mobility’ based as applied to outside-in.

As a practical example consider Apple, its App Shop and its iCloud. The Apple App Shop holds the ‘services’ or ‘apps’ that a user can choose to use and provides the authentication for their use. A download provides the enabling client, but in apps such as iFly all the data, or information is supplied as a real-time connection under REST. In the case of a banking app this can be a very secure method of separating the user in the external ‘unsafe’ environment from the secure traditional IT applications, data and systems housed in the ‘safe’ environment inside the firewall. If a user needs personal data, i.e. photos, etc., then Apple offers Apple iCloud storage which can be accessed by any of the user’s devices; PC, iPad, iPhone, or iPod that possess the authentication key thus ensuring that all personal user activities are perfectly synchronized at all times.

True mobility and true cloud are both parts of the same architectural model and business revolution in terms of delivering new capabilities outside of the enterprise. And they are absolutely different from a traditional enterprise client-server application delivered remotely, with its requirement for an extensive and complicated synchronization to maintain externally ‘state-full’ data on the device with all the security risks that go with it. So all in all not a huge surprise that Adobe Flash doesn’t transfer to the new mobility or post-PC world readily. The big point is a lot of other code won’t either, and as mobility is one hot topic at the moment it’s important to make the difference clear, and in a sense I have written it from the technology perspective.

However, it’s got a lot to do with business and business users, so much so that The Economist, very much a business publication, has recently run an online debate as to whether or not we are in a ‘post-PC era’ with the motion:

Some folk in the technology industry, including the late Steve Jobs, have argued that we are now in a “post-PC” era. According to this view, the PC is no longer the center of the computing world. Instead, it is taking a back seat to a wide range of new mobile-computing devices which will dominate the future. These include tablet computers and smartphones. Combined shipments of the two devices are forecast to exceed those of PCs for the first time this year. So is the PC passé? Or is talk of a post-PC world overblown?

The side ‘against’ the motion is led by a leading Microsoft person. But if you read his opening presentation even though he is arguing against the motion he accepts that it will be both PCs and mobility devices that will make up the business estate of technology. So if you’re contemplating making mobility work for your enterprise and maybe even controlling those rebel users who have gone off with their own devices do make sure that you understand the difference between connecting enterprise applications to mobile devices, versus true mobility which is entirely different!

Are the new technologies of cloud, mobility, and big data in particular, as many in IT would say, an evolution of what we do today? Or is there a game-changing revolution in play as many in the business world seem to think?

As with all such statements it’s a too simplistic generalization, but it does sum up the current mood which is a mixture of confusion as to whether the new technologies of cloud, mobility, and big data in particular are, as many in IT would say, an evolution of what we do today, or there is a game-changing revolution in play as many in the business world seem to think. If you are from the IT side then you may be surprised, shocked even, to see how the business press is engaging with business managers on how technology is a game-changer. No less a true business magazine than The Economist has been running an online debate entitled; ‘Personal Computing; this house believes we are now in a post-PC world’.

The leaders of the ‘for’ and ‘against’ are two technology vendors, Citrix and Microsoft respectively, and there is the first real clue about this topic. Citrix is of course a thin client vendor, and Microsoft is still heavily dependent on thick clients, meaning PCs, though to be fair Microsoft does not try to deny the motion, it merely suggests that the world will contain both. Because enterprise IT as we currently understand it and use it is built on thick client, client-server applications then it’s a fair argument that we continue to need PCs, but conversely the business people, whilst acknowledging the need for enterprise IT, are looking to escape its model to take advantage of new ‘online’ business solutions. Therefore, solutions using Internet, Web, services on demand from clouds in a mobility context of devices with wireless connectivity are all based on thin clients.

It’s the term ‘solutions’ that gives the real clue to answer the question of is this a true game-change or not. Business managers use the term ‘innovation’ to define a generation of new business models that allow them to access and sell to their markets in new ways. To understand this best either read Mark W Johnson’s book Seizing the White Space and see his definition of 19 different online business models, or at least take a look at the ‘Seizing the White Space’ website. The solutions that they want to deploy are only possible because we have new capabilities by using the new technologies together with different development and deployment methods that radically change time and costs. And that brings us back to the paying ‘on demand’ against consumption both firmly allocating cost to business activities to show their true profitability, and shifting from long-term capital investment cycles to short-term operational expenditures.

All of which can be summed up in the post I made about splitting these two separate activities up and defining them as ‘inside-out’ for the role of existing IT, and ‘outside-in’ for the role that business managers want technology to play. A full explanation of this is on the CTO Blog, which includes a link to the Capgemini point of view as to how this changes solutions in the government sector, which can be used as a comparison to other sectors in the key points pretty easily.

So how do the bigger technologies look different to the two sides?

Big data from the inside-out IT side looks like the ability to use cheaper and more flexibly available Mips from virtualization with enhanced storage to be able to do better fine grained analysis on larger amounts of existing internal structured data. Viewed from business managers using an outside-in perspective it’s the possibility to use previously inaccessible data from online activities in ‘real-time’ to support decision making around external opportunities probably driven by the new generation of social CRM. It’s the same with clouds; inside-out IT sees clouds as technology to reduce cost and improve the efficiency of operating the current application-centric data center. The business manager sees clouds creating new environments in which you can interact or liaise and work with your customers or suppliers in ways that were simply not possible with closed and proprietary IT applications.

Mobility is making existing enterprise IT applications available on wireless devices under the IT management inside-out view, whereas to the business manager it’s the capability to be liberated from the PC and internal IT, and use all the new online capabilities whenever and wherever they choose. All of which can be summed up in the terms ‘consumer IT’ and ‘Bring your own’, or ‘BYO’ devices meaning that the business manager gets out of the governance straightjacket on IT and into the rich online business world versus the IT management fears of such devices being a dangerous weakness in the security governance model of internal IT applications.

No wonder the two sides are confused and in disagreement as to whether we are seeing an evolution of IT capabilities or a game-changing revolution in business capabilities to use technology. And this is not only an internal issue either as the technology vendors are split along these lines too. Apple, Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com are all clearly driving and supporting the business managers with outside-in capabilities, and some traditional vendors are clearly looking after their traditional positioning with the IT department and the resulting installed base and license income. But this is changing as Oracle at Oracle OpenWorld introduced their Public Cloud and WebCenter suite of capabilities aimed at the outside-in market with its own sales force. SAP seems set to follow the same path with a preliminary announcement a few weeks later, and others such as EMC also straddle both sides with traditional IT storage systems as well as cloud storage for the new markets.

In summary, the answer is that both the IT and business managers’ views are correct, but only from their individual and different perspectives. The real issue is that there is a need to see each other’s perspectives and grasp how to deliver both evolutionary improvements to traditional IT justified by cost and efficiency, as well as supporting and enabling a revolutionary business use of technology in game-changing ways that increase revenues, market share, customer satisfaction, etc – truly the digital revolution of business!

Private, public and hybrid are three well-known terms for sure in connection with clouds, or cloud computing. There’s an interesting but important difference, however. In speaking to many people I do wonder if the definitions are as clear and as well-known as the names. Not surprisingly, for many people the definitions that they see are those of the product companies and therefore created around how that vendor views its strategic positioning in the market and product development plan. Very seldom are the terms described in terms of how each might be used, and that in turn leads to the way standards are being developed by the Open Data Center Alliance.

If you are a regular reader of my blogs then you will know about the importance of differentiating between internally-focused enterprise IT as we know it today, defined by Capgemini as ‘inside-out’, meaning its prime focus is inside, and the connectivity to the outside is defined by the policies, practices and methods of enterprise IT as a secure environment inside the firewall. Conversely, much of mobility, the front office, Social CRM, and indeed the business focus are now on using technology to support externally-focused connectivity and interactions with a small amount of connectivity across the firewall to the existing enterprise IT, hence the term ‘outside-in’. A previous blog defined this in more detail.

Instead of using the terms private, public and hybrid cloud to describe the location/operation of a cloud it might be much better to consider the way a cloud is being used. Why? Because a manufacturing enterprise might be running a cloud in its own data center to host services from its suppliers as part of its supply chain logistics. Access to this cloud would be controlled by the manufacturer operating the cloud and physically it would be in their data center running on their servers. Is that a private cloud, based on location? Or is it a public cloud as other enterprises are using it? And for those other enterprises will it not seem like a public cloud because they use it? And lastly, for all the enterprises involved how will it coexist with their in-house services?

Interesting questions, eh? The obvious starting point is to identify and remove from this discussion the use of ‘cloud technology’ to improve the internal operational effectiveness of our current data centers running our current enterprise applications. Personally, I would call this ‘cloud computing’ as the focus is on improving the utilization of the computing resources to do what we do today around traditional enterprise applications, not on delivering new forms of ‘services’. It’s a good move and produces excellent cost-saving results but it’s not as Salesforce.com say ‘true cloud’, though it’s definitely what comes to mind when the term ‘private cloud’ is mentioned.

We tend to call this private as a continuation of the practices of internal IT being defined in terms of policies, methods and even quite a lot of the technology products being proprietary because they must fit the enterprises’ unique requirements. And that means our own data centers are implemented according to these requirements, as it’s our ‘private’ data center. The key to the externally-focused ‘services’ model is standards because the ‘true cloud’ is built on the Internet-Web architecture model – see a previous blog that explains this and that works for everyone because it is standardized. (I.e. the Internet provided standardized connectivity, the first generation of the Web produced standardized content, then Web 2.0 standardized interactivity for people, and now clouds introduce standardization for process elements.)

The above example of a manufacturer’s cloud is about the creation of a ‘place’ meaning a specific cloud in which the suppliers can place their business process elements using technology standards to ensure comparability. The business services can be combined to create a process flow to be orchestrated from these elements in response to a particular supply chain event or requirement. So, while the terms of public, private etc may not be so easy to use to define this, the requirement and business value certainly is clear.

But how will the manufacturer’s data center host these? It will need to be a common standardized hosting environment in much the same way as a Web server hosts content from any source if it complies to the right standards. And that leads to where and how are these standards being defined as well as reminding that it works both ways, i.e. services should be correctly written to be hosted and the data center should be correctly implemented to host the services. This is a key point that is frequently missed – if you are going to develop ‘services’ then write them to standards as even if you think they will only be used internally today, that may not be true in future. Most important of all is the realization that you will need to create a true cloud-hosting environment in your data center for external use, and that’s where your internal services will also need to be hosted too so they better conform to the standards too.

Often referred to as a NextGenerationDataCenter, the definition of this new type of data center capability is the work of the Open Data Center Alliance with a membership of 300-plus companies. Most importantly, these are, with only a handful of exceptions, real companies using the clouds to change their industry sector in this way, though in the handful of technology companies present you will find Capgemini!

The alliance just brought their work up to date in September with the release of six proof of concept models underwritten by Intel, Dell, EMC, VMware, RedHat, Citrix and other vendors who are strongly associated with the breakthrough use of clouds. These are all laid out in a ‘showcase’ manner covering: Cloud On-Boarding; Carbon Footprint services; Secure Cloud Services On-Boarding; I/O Control for processes; Secure Monitoring and Service Catalogues; and True Cloud Interoperability. I really recommend taking a more detailed look at this work in planning your own adoption of clouds and services as being a more ‘realistic’ approach than some of the definitions used in connection with public, private and hybrid! Oh, and by the way check who from your industry sector is a member of theAlliance, they might be a useful collaborator, or they may turn into a strongly enabled competitor!!!

Not what you would call an obvious link perhaps but experience shows that understanding requirements and managing expectations is at the heart of most problems. So moving sharply forward – as it seems we are going to have to do – into Social CRM projects, which are comparatively poorly understood, seems to increase the likelihood of failure. Everyone worries about making sure their project is successful but before we go there, how about the comment in the first sentence about having to go to Social CRM, and fast? What’s that about?

The simple answer is sales! In the current market most enterprises are worrying about what they can do to sustain revenue and maintain margins. The Capgemini Global Trade Flow Index reveals a decline of 8% in the first half of 2011 and that’s a lot of missing sales activity. I haven’t seen a direct report on how prices are being impacted by both business buyers and consumers, but I have to believe that the abilities to search for alternatives and best buys using the Web are having an impact. Some of this behavior is getting pretty sophisticated with new apps that provide savvy consumers with new discount options such as Zorate, which claims to have been the first online discount voucher ‘on demand’ provider with its zApp for smartphones and iPads.

Put another way, the buyers have learnt how to use online and social media faster than many enterprises have learnt how to use the tools to prevent their current market and customer base eroding. Successful players and products are increasingly winning through good use of the medium, but the problem is exactly what is a ‘good’ use of the medium? And that’s what takes us full circle back to requirement definitions, and successful project delivery, only now just to make it even more difficult with new technology as well.

As a take on this, an interesting snippet is that this year one of the market analysts expects Apple to sell 60 million iPads. Add to that the number already out there, and there must be close to 100 million in use. In my experience the iPad has changed browsing habits – iPads are usually floating around the home in the evening, becoming an online magazine that allows people to follow up areas that interest them, and discuss them with the rest of the family or friends. This is a big change from browsing as a solitary activity in a bedroom or study. It’s made it easier to be involved in social networks, post opinions on products, or companies, etc. In short, interactivity levels are rising due to mobility devices and technology, and not because of PCs with their familiar technology.

Back to the challenge of what does ‘good’ look like and the introduction of a very helpful report from the IBM Research labs which have studied this in detail with a significantly large number of people. The results, complete with recommendations as well as findings, are all available in a two-part download from a master site. One of the charts compares the consumer reasons for interacting with companies via social sites, with the business view of why they think consumers are interacting with them (see Download Part 1). It illustrates some pretty big mismatches with the top two consumer reasons being the tenth and eleventh (last places) of the business reasons.

It seems likely that a successful Social CRM project would be measured by improvements in sales, and yet that fact alone seems to suggest that it might not succeed! Other key messages are that ‘build it and they will come’ simply doesn’t work. Instead, it’s ‘interact and dynamically change’ that works. Well, that’s not the usual way that IT departments organize their work. And what about the skills to deliver in a different manner whether you define it as ‘agile’ or something else? In short, we are looking at a rethink of what and how technology is used, delivered and supported, so with this in mind read the new report from Oxford University that shows how one in six IT projects out of a total of 1,500 studied were ‘black swans’. The report defines a ‘black swan’ as “where rare, unexpected events of huge proportions occurred where the risks should have been more obvious at the start.”

What could be the huge proportions in a small Social CRM project? Well, here’s a true personal closing story about buying a new printer and checking for views and comments on the best buy sites on the grounds that even if I knew the make I wanted there were too many models to make the choice obvious. Online interaction made me change my mind about not just the model, but the make too, in favor of another brand with a smaller market share. When I went to the local store in the big national chain I was told that they had started to stock this brand with a selection of models because demand had made it necessary.

That’s quite a huge impact alone, but what was the issue with my original choice? Their online sets of services to enhance their printer beyond its basic functions, by allowing sharing of photos, sending prints over the Web to friends’ machines etc was causing their new high-end machines to lock up, and as of yet no fix was available. Now that’s a really big ‘black swan’ in terms of an IT project failing to deliver a Social CRM project!

I have been meaning to get around to reading an IBM Research report entitled ‘From social media to Social CRM’. In an illustration of social networking this was highlighted by a colleague working on social CRM to those of us who are registered as interested in this topic via our Capgemini internal social network, in itself a useful example of the power of social tools to help people share experiences, knowledge and content without bombarding each other with emails.

The research backed up what many practitioners will feel they have experienced already with facts about how customers are using social networks to learn about product experiences, but this is still pretty well unconnected with the actual marketing of products. The report draws the obvious conclusion about the need for a more structured approach rather than the hit and miss of relationships of customers and enterprises which all too often are centered on the complaints department and make public all the wrong kind of messages!

Well, an enterprise has internal IT so that’s the structured end for sure, but if you reflect on the value proposition of the external use of social technologies and business use of social media then the benefits are all about seizing unstructured opportunities. So the big question is how do you go about doing this, and back to the headline, how do you get the linkage between an enterprise’s structured internal IT and the unstructured but opportunity-rich series of events and people that social media, networks, collaboration, etc supports? At this stage I should warn you that this blog is not focused on CRM but is focused on the challenge of enterprise integration in supporting this issue.

I got the closest answer I have seen yet in terms of an enterprise-level major technology vendor inPraguedirectly after Oracle OpenWorld when I was invited to be the guest speaker at an internal Oracle event training their European staff on the collection of capabilities that make up Oracle WebCenter. This is nominally described as being part of Oracle Fusion Middleware which provides the integration backbone to support and connect both traditional IT and the four major parts of Oracle WebCenter: Web Experience Management, Composite Applications & Mash-Ups, Enterprise Content Management and Social Networking & Collaboration.

I say nominally because the headings don’t really convey how much there is ‘in the red stack’ and most of all exactly what Oracle means by being a full stack vendor in terms of some different and genuine business benefits in this new area. This blog is about what we need and what we gain from this, but it is well worth taking a closer look at some of the Oracle content to gain a real feel for their thinking and capability, so based on the event and talking to their key staff, here’s a recommended paper that is low on sales, and high on insight:

Transforming business processes in Social by Design.

I suspect that many CIOs react to Oracle’s terminology ‘a full stack’ by thinking of this in terms of technologies and products with the implied technology lock-in and are rightly suspicious. This might be true in the core IT back office, but when you get to the new world around the front office the way Oracle uses the term is around process and event integration moving through the stack of capabilities. If you get into the detail it’s pretty interesting, and lays out an approach to the headline challenge that’s worth reflecting on whatever your product and vendor strategy.

Oracle is perhaps able to do this as I think it is alone in having the three core blocks of business functionality as well as the underlying technology to be able to make it function, for everyone else it’s a technology integration task in parallel to the process orchestration and integration. That’s not saying it can’t be done, it can and at Capgemini we are doing this, but it does give Oracle the opportunity to provide a thought-provoking view on what good looks like. So what are the three business blocks?

Clearly, the new ‘go-to-market’ activities around Web-based social models, content and interaction is the first, and the third is the ERP and data engine. The second fits between these two and is often overlooked even though it’s just as important; best of breed vertical sector specialist applications. Oracle has been buying, and integrating specialist vendors in this market for some time, and if you are successful in ‘managing’ your interactions with the market, customers and experienced employees, it’s specialized vertical sector applications you are most likely to need to use to actually capture the opportunities into process, and then on into the transactions of core ERP to produce the structured data.

Interestingly, the big debate with the Oracle folks was about how specialized vertical software crossed with horizontal software through common user interfaces; the user experience had better be good or the capabilities are not going to be usable. So that’s why it’s interesting to take the time to understand the Oracle point of view on ‘the red stack’ even if you are not an Oracle customer, because it’s really about a view of business process integration across the stack from the one player with all three business blocks as well as the enabling technology.

Big data seems to be the new hype and continues to be mentioned in lots of press releases and presentations. As long as we define it by traditional internal structured data it’s really a game of more manipulation and more power to analyze what we have better, and so more products and services are continually made available for us to do this. However, the real challenge, indeed the real value, is that most businesses want to figure out how to find and use external unstructured data to make real breakthroughs in seeing the ‘real’ world through using the data of others. The questions are therefore: What are the external sources from which we can get at least reasonably trusted data? How can we store the huge amounts of data? How can we manage access to it all?

September wasn’t a bad month for making progress on these issues as the Open Government Partnership held its first meeting in New York supported by the United Nations with the following statement as to its principles: In a world marked by so much turmoil, we need open government to build trust and to revitalize the social compact between states and citizens. Openness can bring governments and citizens together, cultivate shared understandings, and help solve our practical problems. It starts with sharing information.

The participating governments, and increasingly local government units as well, are signing up to the ‘open data’ movement, meaning that they are making at least a reasonable amount of their trusted data available to be used by business or in the development of new solutions. Open data, the act of making your data sets available for others to use without copyright or other hindrance, has allowed some interesting new services to be introduced. Google Transit Feed is a particularly well known example tying a metropolitan area transit authority’s data to Google maps and feeding a new generation of apps for mobility devices such as NextBus.

At the root of this is a very serious point about ‘using’, in the full sense of the word, open data, meaning both being able to find and use new real-time feeds, as well as make some of your own data available in this manner to encourage others to make your company more ‘visible’ in the market. Open data requires an application programming interface (API) to access the data and though this can be defined and published to suit the open data set when it is made available, it’s a really good policy to make sure that when developing ‘services’ to make sure that the data set is separated around its own API and that the service then consumes the data via the API. Think of it as a valuable move towards all app developments, and for more information on this in the government programs take a look at the work of Code for America.

The other interesting event was the release by the Storage Networking Industry Association, SNIA, of the Cloud Data Management Interface, or CDMI, the standard for providing virtualized storage in the form of Data as a Service, or DaaS. In their own words from the standards pages of their website:

CDMI defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the Cloud. As part of this interface the client will be able to discover the capabilities of the cloud storage offering and use this interface to manage containers and the data that is placed in them. In addition, metadata can be set on containers and their contained data elements through this interface. This interface is also used by administrative and management applications to manage containers, accounts, security access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is accessible by other protocols. The capabilities of the underlying storage and data services are exposed so that clients can understand the offering.

The whole point of CDMI is to provide a ‘simple’, yet secure and reliable, interface that will encourage the use of virtualized storage and enable the access to data held in this manner, which of course is the link back to open data! CDMI works for most types of data but is optimized for REST, Restful State Transfer, as one might expect in building the new generation of apps based on the Web Architecture with HTML5. CDMI doesn’t just simplify accessibility and use, it also manages a cohesive set of security measures – indeed these are comprehensive enough that on their own they would justify adopting CDMI.

So, two big moves that make apps for mobility clients, defined as new generation capabilities that can be combined from data sources onto a Web model and run from clouds, easier to deploy. BUT, as is generally the case with this new environment, new development methods and standards are all important!