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I used to talk a lot about ‘Shadow IT’, the increasing tendency for non IT staff to use simple web-based technology to solve their own and their local business unit’s requirements without the involvement, or even knowledge, of the IT department. Back in 2006 when I first mentioned this, and wrote about it in my first book on the new world MashUp Corporation, it was considered a shocking thought. Today it seems inevitable, and the questions about the whole topic of user-driven technology have changed from how to stop it, towards how to make best use of it.

The most common question with respect to users introducing their own iPhones has become ‘what services that are corporately beneficial can we offer’, and not how do we block them from gaining mail access?! It would seem that the decentralisation of Information Technology, or the introduction of business technology, (defined as web or cloud based technologies deployed for front office support), depending on which way you think of it, is here to stay. The question is therefore how to ‘enable’ this decentralised environment in sensible ways. It’s with this in mind that I picked up on two recent announcements.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on July 26, 2010

I am finding it increasingly difficult to know what the readership of this blog does as a role. Given the common thread is how technology supports business, in the past the readership would have been CIOs in large enterprises looking at matching the business requirements. The term technology would have been synonymous with computerisation of process delivered by Information Technology. Today the term technology means … well anything that is now on the market. This ties into an increasing recognition that individuals want their own devices, particularly when it comes to smart phones and tablets.

I have been struck by a series of product announcements that allow enterprises access to, and control of, specific content on the employee’s personal device. As an example Blackberry - the major player with 40% of the US market according to a recent survey - has introduced new capabilities to handle these issues. This looks to be the reality of this decentralisation that enterprises are experiencing brought on by new and different technology. But as I have alluded to in previous posts take this too far and an enterprise loses corporate leverage, the very asset it has built up so successfully with enterprise IT.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on July 19, 2010

There is little doubt that the credit crunch has brought about a fault line in the business continuum by creating extreme circumstances that have sped up interest in innovation through technology to put business growth back on the table. In some ways the previously little-known volcano in Iceland and the resulting impact on air travel has also been a catalyst for change in business behaviour with respect to how we interact. Add pressure on budgets to the mix and the scene was clearly set for a boost in video conferencing, or its high grade option, telepresence.

However, that’s only part of the story about how video is being used, however before I leave this part of the topic behind there are a couple of points to make. The first is that I really would have loved to steal the headline from a posting on the growth of video for conferencing with the byline; ‘Eruption in Video Conferencing continues as new Volcano ash alert’. How is that for a topical attention grabbing headline!?

Posted by Andy Mulholland on July 11, 2010

HTML 5.0 is on the verge of being ratified with draft comments posted at the end of June promising to deliver all the features necessary for the web of today around Rich Internet Apps, and to many that means video. So the industry is on the verge of delivering what we all want, right? Well may be not, because the biggest consumer question is why Apple, the multimedia champion, doesn’t support Adobe Flash which is the format the majority of the current content for consumption uses. Is Apple being awkward? Are all those mutterings about Apple building ‘walled gardens’ to exploit its customers true? And will it all end in the same way as it did with the Apple PC in the early nineties, when after taking the lead in the PC market this closed approach led to it losing the lead?

It’s certainly tempting to try to frame the argument in this way, but it ignores the other major player in this space, Microsoft, also going in the Apple direction offering support for HTML 5.0, but not at the expense of it being a substitute for SilverLight. The question as to what enterprises should do about this is important, as with each passing week more and more of their content gets created as videos, and that has typically been done using Adobe. It’s a pretty big decision to make to make a change, especially if consumer eyeballs are for the most part using Adobe. But then on the other hand Apple has built a huge consumer base eager for content on its iPad, and iPhone….. Maybe this piece from Microsoft on how they plan to use HTML 5.0 as a hardware accelerator gets nearer locating the real benefits.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on July 5, 2010

So SAP buys Sybase as its first major acquisition in quite a while and industry pundits speculate on the ‘what and why’ surrounding its customer base, its mobility platform, and its background in the database market. The obvious explanation was pitched first around the need to get a mobility platform, something that increasingly becomes the battleground for delivering the ‘services’ model of clouds and SaaS. Jack Gold on his Conceivably Tech blog gives a really good overview on this. Well worth reading in its entirety! Within the review he also notes something that escaped a lot of the commentators; Sybase365 the business unit embedded within Sybase that supports SMS/MMS services through most major carriers; Jack says, and as I cant put it any better, I quote;

Sybase has a major component of its business in Sybase 365: a company with connectivity to nearly all the worldwide carriers for its SMS/MMS messaging traffic. However, Sybase 365 also has some core components necessary for extending end user services to consumers (e.g., mobile payments, m-commerce, alerting). This is very attractive to key industries (e.g., retailing, banking) that want to extend their SAP back office systems to be direct to consumer focused (e.g., on-line banking, mobile commerce). This is a huge opportunity in both the developed and the developing world, and SAP should be able to leverage this accordingly and generate some significant revenues

Posted by Andy Mulholland on June 30, 2010

Testing is a funny topic to discuss, on one hand its essential, and professional testers are passionate about methods, good practices, etc and on the other it’s a topic that many would prefer to ignore. I find that I get very interested in the topic when I meet a real expert who can raise points that I simply hadn’t thought about before. This has just happened twice; first I got a preview copy of the World Quality Report, more of that later, and the second was to hear a real expert on testing give her views.

The tester in question is Google’s Chief Test Engineer, Goranka Bjedov, who made the case at the recent STAREAST 2010 Testing Convention that we are ‘heading towards developing software with testing for quality and this practice may not be a bad thing’. It certainly gets my attention.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on June 21, 2010

Again not a new topic – but I realise increasingly that many basic requirements don‘t change too much, it’s the capabilities we have at our disposal that do change, and this leads to new answers. As the focus on real time data analysis becomes the norm for helping front office workers make optimised decisions based on sliced and diced information, the amount of information to assimilate from the screen when making that oh so valuable human judgement will grow. At the same time as processing sharply focussed event data streams there will be a need to understand more about the context or background situation.

Think of it this way; it’s good to know that temperatures are climbing by 4°C when you are selling ice cream, but if the context is coming out of the biggest cold spell of the winter it won’t have the same impact as if the same 4°C rise comes on top of the biggest heat wave of the year! Now in real life it won’t be such a simple challenge, a host of other factors will need to be considered, how about the impact on a supply chain of a hot spell ending suddenly with a cold spell and then temperatures climbing sharply again. Likelihood will be that the supply chain will contain ice cream that will need to be sold before further orders can come through so that’s another factor to consider. Add a market the size of North America or Europe and it magnifies all the issues from weather forecasting, to the length of supply chain, to a local view of what constitutes ice cream weather, and probably a few other things as well.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on June 14, 2010

It was a US President who first said ‘it’s the economy stupid’ when asked what the top topic from a long list of issues would be most important to voters. If you substitute the role of a voter with that of a user, then the answer to the same question – what is most important to them - might well be, ‘it’s the data stupid!’ Yet bizarrely data is the one topic that we still have the least clarity about, particularly with respect to what and how we will be dealing with it in the more complex environments beyond IT applications and structured databases.

We have clarity, or at least emerging clarity, about the issues of computational power, networking connectivity, and even integration, by the cloud, internet and web respectively, but exactly what do we have on data? Lots of promises around how semantics will change the game, and as part of this there is no doubt that semantic events are getting more interesting in establishing how to manage data created for, and consumed by, human eyeballs, not applications and computers. But is this enough to address the changes we are experiencing around the explosion in use of the web, and the road into ‘everything and everyone connected in the cloud’ based on everything as a ‘service’?

Posted by Andy Mulholland on June 7, 2010

Well it had to be that when VMware and Salesforce.com got together to make an announcement of a new partnership called vmForce it was going to stir up my, and I guess your, interest. But what exactly did they announce? Is it a highly effective solution, but a proprietary lock-in, or a move to place Java development on equal footing with .Net development on Microsoft Azure?

Well, opinions of the real experts on the topic point out that what was announced could have been achieved before, as in using the SpringSource Cloud Foundry running on Amazon EC2. (Remember VMware bought SpringSource relatively recently). But to me that is missing the point, what this announcement brings is a main street capability backed by two trusted names that will encourage many more developers to try this approach.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on May 30, 2010

This started with my preparing a plenary keynote for the World Congress of IT, or WCIT, that I am delivering tomorrow. The theme calls for a new partnership between government and business in terms of the provisioning and use of technology in the creation of the emerging society we see today. It’s long been a theme of mine at government, or EU, events that what we need to focus on is not eGovernment, but eCitizens. It’s not about delivering the IT processes of government today over the Web with citizen access, but rethinking how a citizen will want to run their relationship with their elected government. In short this is ‘government for the people’, though not as the saying continues, ‘by the people’, that seems a step too far currently!

Another way of putting this is ‘user driven services’ which makes it recognisable as the old cry for alignment between business and IT. However the contrast between eCitizens and eGovernment is a particularly easy one to see as a use case for the complexity and scale of the change we are approaching. An eCitizen is going to expect a unique and individual outcome to their requirement that combines any number of government departments and services (meaning business capabilities) together as a delivery. I.e. a severe illness in the family requiring care cumulating in death with all the complex issues of registration, tax, inheritance, etc. By contrast a government will be driven by auditable processes each separate in administration and consequences, which, if mixed might produce wholly unforeseen tax or social payment outcomes to say nothing of muddled responsibilities.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on May 23, 2010

I was recently interviewed by The Fifth Conference, a 'platform for vision and enterpreneurship' about the concept of Slow IT: finding the right pace and dedication in both building and using technology. The full interview is here. Have a look (take the proper time to read it, I would almost say). Your builds are most welcome.

Posted by Ron Tolido on May 20, 2010

It often seems that there is an automatic acceptance that ‘green is good’ and therefore I was initially a little shocked to be sent a piece from my colleague Stephen Timbers entitled ‘Green isn’t always good’. But suspend any reactions until you read this post because it is a factual approach to finding the right balance, and as an engineer I thoroughly applaud his approach and argument. See what you make of his views!

Posted by Andy Mulholland on May 19, 2010

It’s been an interesting week on the front line with CIOs, first at PegaWorld in Philadelphia and later in Boston at a CIO Magazine roundtable. The CIO roundtable provided a really good view of the mega issues being faced, and the enthusiasm on display at PegaWorld for embracing new techniques in developing solutions to tackle these issues in a new way really surprised me.

The first clear change was the number and quality of CIOs who were prepared to get out of the office and go to a roundtable event. A couple of years ago, even before the credit crunch, attendance had dropped noticeably. CIOs simply didn’t think there was enough of value to spare precious time in going. IT was pretty mature, the challenges were all in internal execution and that wasn’t helped by roundtables promoting the problems they had already identified. Now the challenges and issues are fresh ones, important ones, and experience in how to deal with them is in short supply.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on May 16, 2010

Back around the middle of 2001 after the fear, excitement and expenditure surrounding the Year 2000, or ‘Y2K, ‘problem’ died away and the then promise of the Internet as a force of transformation was being talked about, a colleague started talking about ‘the Null Zone’. He drew a neat little PowerPoint which showed a classic ‘crossing the chasm’ bell curve going from a slow flat start, ramping up sharply as the market grew, before flattening out again in maturity. He designated this model as classic IT. Next to it and rising above it he drew a second representation of the same curve which he called the Internet era. His point was that he expected a flattening of the market around traditional IT, meaning back office and ERP, before the start of the boom in the market around using the Internet to create online business.

People weren’t blogging in any obvious way back then which is a shame as it would have made a nice piece to refer back to. What he, and most of us frankly, got wrong was that the Internet wasn’t ready, and I do mean the Internet, as in the bandwidth and universal access that was holding business use back. It wasn’t just the dubious business and commercial models of the time; it was quite simply that Internet wasn’t ready to do what business wanted. You may remember that whatever you did it was an agonising wait, and the better the site in terms of rich features, the worse the wait.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on May 10, 2010

I just wanted to share the foreword I wrote for The Art of Enterprise Information Architecture, a book written by Eberhard Hechler and 5 of his colleagues at IBM. Obviously, I recommend the book to all of you.

In the past two years, I have been more and more involved in what my company, Capgemini, fondly has started to describe as the "Business Technology Agora": a place where IT and business people meet, make decisions, and prepare for action. Like in the old Greek cities, this agora proves to be a catalyst for dialogue, a gathering place for different stakeholders to reach out to the others and improve understanding.

By using the principles of the Business Technology Agora, we carefully identify the most important business drivers of an organization, map these on technology solutions in different categories and discuss impact, timing and implementation issues. Categorizing solutions in different areas helps to simplify the technology landscape, but it also provides us with a wealth of insight into what areas of IT truly matter to the business of our clients.

If there is one dominant category that we have identified in these two years of business technology sessions across the world, it is no doubt 'Thriving on Data': the abundant, ubiquitous availability of real-time information proves to be the single most important requirement to satisfying the needs of the business.

Organizations envision thriving on data in many different ways. One way might be to simply get more of a grip on corporate performance by creating a more integrated view of client-related information and having management dashboards that truly show the actual state of the business. Another way, gradually being used more often, is to carefully analyze data from inside and outside the enterprise to predict and understand what might happen next. Above all, the exchange of meaningful data is the glue that binds all the actors (man, machine, anything else) in the highly interconnected, network of everything that nowadays defines our business environment: data literally gets externalized and becomes the main tool for organizations to reach out to the outside world.

Given this extreme importance of data today, it is surprising that many organizations do not seem to be able to govern their data properly, let alone use data in a strategic way to achieve their objectives. Data is often scattered across the enterprise. There are no measures to guarantee consistency and ownership is unclear. The situation becomes even more difficult when different business entities are involved or when data needs to be shared between organizations. This is a truly complex problem and businesses need a much more architectural approach for leveraging their data.

Posted by Ron Tolido on May 7, 2010

It’s a perennial topic for sure, but it usually focuses on how well aligned IT operations are to the business, or changes in skills, delivery methods, outsourcing, and so on. In short, all evolutions of running the IT model as we know it today and not dealing with the real question: how should the role of technology be managed within the enterprise?

In today’s enterprise, technology touches everything and that means a wide mixture of technologies from humble sensors, up through an ever widening number of user devices, to conventional computers. The one thing they all have in common is that they are almost certainly all connected in one form or another to the internet, directly, or indirectly. Increasingly in this environment all these ‘technology elements’ will be interacting through ‘services’ in both senses of the word - i.e. the business value delivered as a service and the format of technology provisioning.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on May 2, 2010

It took some organising to meet with each of these vendors for a briefing on their views in the course of a single week in the Bay area, but it really does work in terms of being able to make comparisons. Not competitive comparisons of the products, but comparisons between their vision of how the next couple of years will develop and how that affects the way they are designing their products and solution capabilities.

The common vision is of a world dominated by services, paid for on demand, removing the need for capital investment, or monolithic large scale projects, and focussed on supporting a decentralisation of the edge of the business. The focus is on user centricity or enablement of the front office in its go-to-market activities, supported by effective ‘on the fly’ data analysis to optimise decisions, collaboration to increase employee effectiveness in leveraging expertise, with an overall change in the way of working resulting in a rise in the productivity of individuals.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on April 26, 2010

There seems to be a number of people doing some pretty serious thinking at the moment. On the one side there are CIOs and business managers grappling with some very real challenges and on the other some very good work on identifying the key factors that underlie these challenges. I think the playing field for CIOs was pretty well defined by the phrase; ‘Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Web 2.0; (is this a) Business Transformation or a Train Wreck?’ I suspect you spotted that there was no mention of clouds in this, well that may be because it is actually the title of a free Oracle white paper and Oracle are a little reticent on clouds.

On the other hand there does seem to be a dawning recognition that clouds are merely a collection of technologies, and the change factor is where, and why, you need to deploy these technologies in a particular manner to solve new business requirements. (I have covered various aspects of this in previous blogs such as 'why are clouds so hard to understand') . So actually the Oracle focus on three major aspects and their use in solutions, rather than just throwing in the term ‘clouds’ does make sense. But what is the change in focus, where are the CIO issues, or what’s wrong with IT as we currently know it?

Posted by Andy Mulholland on April 19, 2010

Architecture has claimed its place in the IT landscape over recent years as the need to understand how increasingly integrated environments, if not entire enterprises, fit together. Unfortunately, rather like standards, we now have a number of options as to which architecture method to follow. Even worse we increasingly find we need a lighter weight solution approach that will span more than one architectural model. This sounds like a cue for making life more difficult and even more complex, but maybe, just maybe, there could be a way of doing this. So please suspend instant judgment and take some time to understand the proposed way you could achieve this in the thoroughly practical approach outlined by my colleagues Theo Elzinga, Joost van der Vlies and Léon Smiers. They call it a Common Reference Architecture, or CORA for short, and this blog post outlines what is in their book ‘The CORA Model’ available from www.coramodel.com.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on April 16, 2010

We all know the question, but who knows the answer? I got asked it again this week which is what made me try to capture this point. The most common response would seem to be ‘I will know it when I see it’, which suggests business success is based on ‘getting lucky’. As you might expect business schools don’t agree with this and as A G Lafley, author of several works on the topic comments: “Innovation is risky, but it’s not random. Innovators have a disciplined invention process”.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on April 12, 2010