These are the notion of long waves of time in which the consolidation-distribution (or centralization-decentralization) pendulum swings, and the shorter waves of time which indicate “seasons” in IT — the spring of growth of new function, the summer of innovation, the autumn of cost restraint and slowdown, harvesting the past, and the winter of “we have no choice but to rip this out and start again”.

The seasons are loosely tied to the economy (but, in reality, to the prospects of the enterprise: you tend to see them more closely linked to the overall economy in the private sector, and almost counter-cyclical in government). The long waves have to do with where we’re seeing innovation occur in the technology space.

Enterprise architecture was born, in most organizations, just as the winter of the post-Y2K blow-out faded into an early spring, and as a long wave of centralization was climbing to maturity.

Much of the work of EA in the last decade, therefore, turned around centralizing. More of the application function went into fewer core application packages. This advanced the dream of a master data model for the firm, and made assets easier to secure, while nicely feeding the emerging business intelligence suite. Technology road maps tended to turn on “who’s leading the market, and who’s likely to”.

Unbeknownst to most architects, around six years ago, the last of the centralization wave petered out. It was replaced by the current wave of distribution of IT capability that we know as “bring your own device” and is quickly evolving into “bring your own application” thanks to the various vendors in the cloud. (2007 was the introduction of the iPhone, which heralded the beginning of the wave of consumer-priced electronics as business tools.)

Meanwhile, as the Global Financial Crisis hit, summer gave wave to autumn in IT. Economically, the five years since have been a peculiar mix of winter and spring: just enough green shoots to make it look like the good times are back, but enough uncertainty to keep the lid on growth in the project portfolio, and tight times for the business-as-usual side of IT organizations.

That’s why enterprise architecture doesn’t seem to have delivered much in the past few years. It’s been out of step with what was needed.

Getting value from the EA investment has to start with getting in synch with the times.

A Western Canadian financial institution, for instance, saw one of its solutions managers in the development function recognize, back in 2007-08, that the waves were moving. His area was responsible for SAP in their shop.

Like most SAP installations, their SAP copy had been modified to deal with user requests, and they were many releases off the leading edge (who wanted to pay for retrofitting perfectly good code that was working?).

This manager drove that process. Over three years he purified their SAP installation (which served multiple user departments) so that the code was again clean. He also cleared a number of items off the “to do” list by replacing mods with in-house components where the differentiation would make a bottom line difference to his firm, or worked with users to overcome the changes needed to simply abandon the mods.

Then he caught them up to the newest release, to benefit from the support it offered for the firm’s future (and the mobile devices that were gaining momentum inside the company).

It was a superb example of how thinking architecturally across the enterprise could reap rewards. The company saved money year after year, exploited the latest technology, got superb support and engineering help from SAP because they could stay current, leveraged it into more differentiation that has swelled their bottom line, removed a long-term roadblock to progress and set the stage to do the same in other parts of the business (driven by different applications). More was also gained from the company’s BI investment. Oh, and the manager got a two level jump, going from manager to director in one move.

Too bad that that firm’s enterprise architecture function was nowhere to be found — in fact, they’d been a significant source of foot-dragging through the entire thing. Their “not invented here” syndrome was apparent for all to see.

In that business, EA has become known, in fact, as “useless” — none of the business areas want to see anyone from architecture in a meeting, because they know there’ll be no value add given, and a lot of delay introduced.

That’s what happens when you’re out of synch.

Getting in synch with the times means moving upward, to laying out boundaries rather than prescribing specific solutions. It means creating space for others to innovate and experiment — the business “bringing its own” — rather than requiring everything funnel through one process and one group. It means devising integration middleware of your own, in some cases, especially where you have a growing number of components from non-traditionally IT vendors (as real-time integration of data sources is bringing us) which will move on their own, different, market cycles and industry waves.

Most of all, it means mastering the ability to determine what is true differentiation of the business (which adds value to the bottom line of the firm) from departmental unwillingness to accept change (where commodity solutions — and that’s what packages are — imply a no-mod, you change approach for lowest cost to own and operate), and championing the correct use of both. It means having a technology road map that’s built around improving Total Cost to Own and Operate (TCOO).

And it means doing these things quickly. No more year-long studies. The times don’t allow for that.

That’s what EA needs to be doing. The question is: will organizations save EA by shifting it off its current path — or will they just let it die?

According to Eric Schmidt, it is very likely that there will be a billion Android activations by the end of 2013. On Google Play, 48 billion apps were installed, compared to the 50 billion that Apple announced it reached.

Google announced more additions to its platform.

Game Services
Google will support real-time multi-playing that will work across Android, Apple’s iOS, and the web. Using a Google+ sign-in, users may have their scores, saves, and identity tracked across the different platforms. Google Cloud Messaging will also be part of Google Play Services. In practice, this means that alerts dismissed on one device will be synched across all other devices.

Maps
To reduce a drain on mobile batteries, the location services API will use much less power. Google said that when active, the service will use less than 1% of the battery. A second update is Geofencing. This lets applications trigger app events with up to 100 location-based triggers.

The API for Activity Recognition makes use of the accelerometer data to determine what the user is doing: driving, biking, walking, or just being stationary.

Google Maps also integrated Google Earth and Street View in part of the refresh.

Android Studio
Recognizing the importance of developers for the Android platform, Google developed an IDE, or integrated development environment, that will make it easier to develop apps. The advantage of the tool is that changes may be previewed in real-time.

Streaming Music
In a move that might give added competition for Spotify or Pandora, Google Play Music All Access was launched. The radio-like service will allow users to remove the songs as required. The service will be in the U.S. for now and will be $9.99 per month.

Pricy Galaxy S4 Announced
Recognizing the importance of Samsung in the Android ecosystem (Samsung took 95% of the profit in Q1), a 16GB LTE-supported Galaxy S4 was announced. The advantage of this device over the one offered by Samsung is that it runs on a pure version of Android Jelly Bean. The device will be available on Google Play on June 26, for $649.

Google+ Social Network Redesigned
Having used Google+ for nearly a year, this writer is pleased that Google fixed everything that was wrong with Google+. Previously, the feed was one column, and lots of space was wasted for suggesting users to follow, encouraging users to complete the profile, and suggesting communities, all of which were ignored by users.

Google redesigned the site so that the feed will be in 3 columns. This would be more visually appealing on a tablet as well as the desktop.

One thing to notice is that the redesign is eerily similar to Pinterest:

The design was based on multi-card format:

Other Google+ related Updates:

• Google Hangouts was also updated
• Photo-editing tools were added to Google+ to support auto enhance and highlighting
• Google Offers, which is in pilot, will help retailers promote discounts

At first glance, the Google+ update is confusing. The menus is confusing, and there is inline scrolling when reading comments posted by users. The disadvantage is that a user could get very lost, compounded by a very busy page. There is the option to revert the feed to one column.

After giving the site another chance, users will get used to the refresh, along with the slide-out menus.  The best way to optimize the experience on Google+ is to first follow as many users as possible by adding shared circle. After adding the circle, disable showing circle feeds on the home page.

Create a second “favorites” circle that is set to show feeds on the home page. Add your favorite users from the added circles to this favorites circle.

Google Wallet
The digital wallet is taking a step forward, with Google supporting payment supports as a Gmail attachment.

Google Glass
Scheduled for a launch at the end of 2013, Google Glass will receive strong support from the search giant. The device will get monthly updates that will fix bugs inherent in a new product.

I’ve also wondered who are the people that do the predicting, how they get to be competent at it, and how good a job they’ve really been doing over the past 50 years.  I’ve even asked myself if it wasn’t Star Trek that started it all……there are numerous articles about the technology of Star Trek and how it has stimulated the careers of many scientists and engineers.

Predicting the future isn’t easy, in my opinion.  Ten years ago, for example, who would have guessed we would be having the current economic problems?  Who would have agreed with such a prediction even if someone had seen it in their crystal ball!

Here’s some break points when the general direction of IT changed (you may or may not agree with the timing!):

• 1960s/70s – IBM mainframes  –> automation of accounting, centralized computing
• 1980s – PC, LANs, Minicomputers  –> automation of the office, some distribution of computing
• 1990s – WWW, Internet, Servers –> widely accessible information, large scale distribution of computing and information
• 2000s – Mobility, Service-orientation, Virtualization –>  universal access, system integration, beginnings of IT as a Service
• 2010s – Cloud Computing, consumerization, big data –> eComputing, public computing services, unified computing/data utility
• 2020s – Possibilities include:  Internet of Things, Personalized IT Services, Globalization of Information, eLibraries, eHealth, etc.

Were there predictions in the 1950s of what became commonplace by the end of the 1980s?  Thomas J. Watson (ex-Chairman of IBM), who was known for his alleged 1943 statement “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” would certainly be surprised by the millions of very smart phones we have today!  He lived in the days of a rotary dial black telephone.

Fast forward to the year 2000, when the worry was that IT would crash and burn as a result of the millennium date change.  Those predictions weren’t very accurate either.  In the year 2000, how many of us were predicting consumerization, cloud computing and big data.   Before 2004, would we have imagined how Facebook would so quickly take over our imagination?

So, what can we say today about IT in 2020 and beyond?

One of the first questions to ask would be:  What is IT anyway, and how will it be different a decade from now?

Two views are derived from the name:  “little i, big T” (IT is dominated by the technologies, information is one of the resources); and, “big I, little t” (IT is all about information with technology merely a tool).  By 2020 we will certainly see big data get even bigger, and we will see many new technologies developed to manage, exploit and organize information.  IT will be ubiquitous – virtually everything will be able to communicate, integrate and participate in global information management systems.

By 2020, will the Information Society be a reality?  In 2002, Peter J. Denning wrote a book called The Invisible Future: The Seamless Integration of Technology Into Everyday Life.  I haven’t read the book but I did like the title.  The introduction says the book is:  “Today’s leading visionaries discuss the future of information technology.  How will e-commerce and e-consumers interact in 2020? What will the relationship between man and machine, man and information, and information and machine mean for future generations?”

Perhaps the appropriate title is Information Technology Society instead of Information Society?

A more detailed future mapping exercise would need to look at the impact of IT on various aspects of society including, for example:

• Personal life – eAssistant, personal information management, eHistory
• Health care – Bring Your Own Doctor, automated health management
• Education – eLearning, widely accessible courses
• Transportation - virtual travelling, automated vehicles, continuous recording of travel
• Banking - cashless society, integrated payments
• Residences – automated houses, robotic assistance
• Offices – virtualization of work environment
• IT Providers – cloud computing, mobile services, multi-cloud integration
• Governments – eGovernment, eLaws, ePolice, etc.

For me, the phrase “The seamless integration of (Information) Technology into Everyday Life” pretty much sums it up.  The keys to the future are: seamless IT, universal integration, and automation applied to everyday life.

The first was when the shop was in a mess. Then, you needed a cleanup CIO. Whether you got someone cut from Charlie Feld’s mould (Feld formed a consultancy that would provide a CIO and management team “for hire” to come in, clean up the shop, and hire their replacements, turning a $2.5 billion profit when EDS acquired the firm) or simply hired a CIO with a résumé that showed she or he had cleaned someone else up, the cleanup CIO generally needed about three years or so to right the good ship IT wherever they went.

Many, like former NY State Electric & Gas CIO Russ Fowler, made their career out of going from one cleanup to the next.

But, once the portfolio was cleaned up, the practices established, and credibility was rising that IT could actually be counted on to execute reliably at a relatively good price, the second CIO path would emerge.

This was the long march: the ten to fifteen year journey to get from “something that’s working” to an architected enterprise.

CIOs on the long march, unlike the fixers, were there for the long haul. These were the ones who held their job through a couple of business cycles, turning down shifts to other roles to see the transition through. (The fixers tended to burn up most of their political capital straightening out the shop, thereby contributing to the myth of “three years and career is over” that CIOs were tagged with at the time.)

The 1990s — especially as Y2K reared its head — were a time filled with fixer CIOs. The last decade (2000-2010) was filled with a growing number of CIOs on long marches.

But now, in 2013, a third type of CIO path is emerging in visibility. Let’s call it the “CIO who can dance”, because it doesn’t have a name yet.

Long marches were mostly formed around a long-term effort to architect the enterprise with enterprise software packages. First, put in SAP or the Oracle suite, then add more and more components, and handle special differentiation with components written to purpose.

Whatever technologies were chosen, they were meant to do the heavy lifting of a master data model, an information architecture, etc.

Dancers, on the other hand, recognize that differentiation and user areas’ ability to exercise choice mean that any IT organization depending on “the answer is our package strategy, what was your question?” is headed to a loss of credibility and a return — quickly — to the kind of chaos that requires yet another fixer.

So, instead, they focus on intermediation as the way to architect the enterprise, while allowing maximal choices to be exercised. They recognize that, today, hardware and networking has never been cheaper, and that the goal is to keep the unit costs down (playing to Total Cost to Own and Operate [TCOO] rather than minimizing the cycles, gigabytes or transfers involved) and use technology to handle transformative connections.

They also recognize that, in today’s world, the ability to keep up is more important than precisely how well things are customized to meet every little demand. Better, in their dancing world, to change the business than to change the package — so that the package can be kept current (the bleeding edge is where integration with clouds, etc. will be found).

Finally, they’re back in the code generation game with a vengeance, wherever differentiation of the business is worth the effort. Value generation is far more important to a dancer than most other factors.

Having watched organizations shed hundreds of IT professionals because a long marcher or fixer was replaced by a dancer — dancers insist everyone who works for them learns to dance, and quickly — it seems the time is ripe to point out that job security begins with knowing what the leader needs of you. For the next few years, the odds are that you’ll be asked to get light on your feet.

Waze Acquisition

source: waze.com

Facebook recognizes the importance of mapping, and wants to acquire Waze. Waze makes software that combines community-based traffic and navigation. The deal, which could be worth billions, is in trouble because the owners do not want the R&D centre in Israel to be closed and relocated.

Facebook Phone Discontinuing

AT&T is reportedly discontinuing the HTC First, after only one month on the market. Bad news started when the carrier reduced the price of the phone to $0.99. So far, only around 15,000 phones have been sold. An AT&T spokesperson said that “as mentioned previously, we do pricing promotions all the time and have made no decisions on future plans.”

Android Facebook Home App Gets Poor Reviews

Image Source: AllthingsD

Home App was downloaded 1 million times, and so far has a review score of just two stars. With around 900 million, the user base is negligible, despite the importance Facebook placed around this initiative. Facebook held a launch event with much fanfare, citing phones should centre around people, not apps.

Desktop Ads Coming

Another rumor is circulating that video ads will be displayed on the Facebook desktop news feed starting this summer. With usage on desktop already on the decline, current users might want to look for alternative social networks before this happens.

Enterprise buyers are staying away from Windows 8. So much so, in fact, that the product will be “relaunched” in an attempt to break down the opposition.

Windows 8 — as anyone passing through public transit stations where a hardware manufacturer, working with Microsoft’s marketing dollars to showcase the product has come to see — has a very different user interface than what people are used to.

Change is always traumatic, but this one looks like one where the resistance will stick.

For, frankly, few can answer the question “what’s in it for me” and come up with much.

The Metro UI in Windows 8 is superb for any sort of touch screen device. When you’re stuck looking at a screen you can’t manipulate other than by pulling on a mouse or gesturing on a trackpad, it’s less effective.

What’s worse, most applications still run as they did on Windows 7 … or even XP.

For the typical enterprise, it looks like a lot of retraining and handholding for very little benefit. So, naturally, they’re not moving forward.

The same thing that was happening with Vista — new hardware would come in the door and be downgraded to XP — is happening with new equipment today. If it can’t be shipped with Windows 7, it gets downgraded to it.

This is making Microsoft slightly less sticky in the enterprise. Worse, it’s removing levers from the licensing equation for the firm.

If companies won’t upgrade to Metro, for instance, Microsoft can’t differentiate other products by making them work better in Windows 8 and make them stick to customers. Microsoft’s cloud is less valuable as a result. So is its Office cash cow. So, too, SharePoint.

It shouldn’t be surprising, though. Enterprises didn’t avoid Vista simply because of its well known active user hostility (security warnings galore) or performance issues.

They avoided it because it didn’t offer them enough reasons to switch from XP — and a lot of the client-server applications being run still ran in Windows 2000 mode and thus “broke” under Vista.

By the time Windows 7 came out, Microsoft had cleared up the performance issues in Vista, and brought some sanity to the security features. Other vendors had updated their clients to run in the Vista/7 framework — or much needed enterprise software upgrades had taken place to allow newer clients to be used (or move to browser-based interfaces).

That’s the underlying reason why enterprises “liked” 7, and “hated” Vista.

Much like XP, Windows 7 does everything enterprise folk want of it.

The other underlying reason for not changing is that there’s less hardware moving into enterprises these days.

Between cloud-based solutions, a shift from client-server to browser-server computing models, and no real new PC-based applications driving change, the need to upgrade has been lessened. Former three year refresh cycles are now five; former five year ones are now eight. Standard system images for enterprises are thus stable, longer.

That leaves less room for “try it, you’ll like it, the reason for it will come clear in a couple of years” marketing to work.

In the consumer market, few with Windows 7 are upgrading. Windows 8 is moving into consumer hands only through new purchases of hardware. What that means is that the normal pressure of “I’ve got better at home than I do at work” that helped force offices along the upgrade curve is lessened, too.

Note that none of this says that Windows 8 is bad. It’s not. Actually, in its day, Vista wasn’t bad, either. Yes, it chewed hardware like a house-a-fire. So you bought enough. The security messages were a nuisance, but could be made manageable.

But not enough people saw a reason to change — and XP lingered on and on as a result.

In an era when hardware doesn’t swap as readily as before, and enterprises won’t upgrade in place, Microsoft has a revenue problem. How it solves it will determine much of the future of the cloud (since that’s where their enterprise future will lie).

Anticipation of Greater Competition
The market is anticipating weak quarters ahead for Apple. In its quarterly report, the company’s CEO did not expect a refresh to the iPhone until the fall. This is troubling for the smartphone division, because competitors, notably Android, is innovating at a vigorous pace. Even when the larger screen size being available for years on the Android is ignored, recent developments assure a tough 6 months ahead for Apple. Google’s Nexus 4 is $299 without a contract, and is a great device in terms of hardware and software. The Android operating system greatly matured, while Apple made no overhaul to its core operating system.

Source: www.digitaltrends.com

Samsung refreshed its successful Galaxy S3 with the S4, while HTC is rolling out the HTC One. Both devices are receiving good reviews, while the HTC is receiving excellent ones.

Apple updated Apple with Siri, partly to make the entering of text easier for users. When Blackberry released the BB10, the company reminded users that it is still possible to design a device without any physical keyboard and to make text input easier. Android already has voice-activated functionality, and Google is extending voice-only commands with its Google Glass project.

No Competition in Tablet Space in Sight…Yet
In the tablet space, Apple’s competition is greatest with its own product. To protect its market share, Apple released an iPad mini, which is hurting margins. Still, Samsung’s release of the 8-inch tablet also fails to compete effectively against the iPad mini, as suggested by this review. The iPad continues to have the greatest market share, but when Google has its I/O conference on May 15 – 17 2013, the company could announce updates to the Nexus 7 and 10 tablets.

Streaming: Apple iTunes Under Threat?
Business Week speculated that streaming music from Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, and other providers will disrupt the dated iTunes store. Sales of music songs have yet to be hurt, but in technology, inflection points are usually reached at a certain saturation point of users.

Weak PC Sales
Sales for Apple computers were flat, but relative to a decline in PC sales, these results were not bad.

iOS 7
A refresh to the smartphone operating system could include more gloss, shine, and skeumorphism. A change from the user interface paradigm would represent a departure from Apple under the leadership of Steve Jobs.

OS X 10.9
On the desktop, it is rumored that the Finder app will be improved. Support for multitasking and app-pausing could also be in the cards, too.

Growth from iTV and iWatch
Markets also speculated that Apple will find growth from the TV and watch market. So far, none of the rumors proved to be true.

Conclusion
The weak profit margins for Apple could get weaker for the next two quarters, as the company takes pause in refreshing its tablet and smartphone. This will be bad news for investors, because the stock market is forward-looking, and anticipates profits to decline further. Apple is in the midst of a maturity phase in its product cycle (discussed here).

Source: www.tomspencer.com.au

This is why the company is borrowing billions to buy back shares and to pay investors in the form of a dividend, as opposed to increasing R&D funding with the borrowed funds.

Right now it’s one of the quiet periods. The core models for getting work done are established. Public cloud, private cloud, server farm. Internet-protocol based networking. Core packages.

What most IT professionals don’t see is that when the hype around announcements is mostly about incremental differences, the really exciting work is actually taking place.

Everyone wants to be on the leading edge of the wave when a new computing paradigm comes to the fore. We all rushed — in the early 1990s — to make sure we got client-server experience under our belt. The late 1990s saw the stampede to ERP package experience. We all rushed — in the mid-2000s — to make sure we got some business intelligence and data analysis work on our résumés. As 2010 dawned virtualization and early cloud experience was the path we set out on.

Right now, though, where would you rush to be on the leading edge of tomorrow?

It wouldn’t be making sure you’re first to get the latest technology, would it? — mostly because what’s coming down the pipe looks a lot like what we have, only refined a bit.

That’s one of the reasons movements like “bring your own device” and its emerging companion, “bring your own application” popped up. It wasn’t just the price and features of consumer technology or “subscribe in units of one” cloud model that opened the door, although they’re the items you see. It was the stabilization of the underlying computing model that gave us all the time to look around and decide to branch out a bit.

We’ve been here before, too. The late 1970s and early 1980s were like this. Back then, IBM had just seen off the other mainframe architectures: everyone was headed to System/370. The midrange was a little more diverse still, but consolidation around the System/34, DEC PDP and early VAX offerings, and a couple of others had occurred. The iconoclasts who dared to “bring their own” in those days bought — and brought into the office — Apple IIs, early IBM PCs, and others, to run tools like VisiCalc.

But in that late 1970s-early 1980s period the independent software vendor was born. Before that, you wrote your own, or you bought from your hardware supplier. Now you could buy utilities, and applications, from someone. Today few of us ever code anything from scratch unless we work for a vendor; back then, your entire portfolio was crafted in house. That’s a big change that that pause in exciting new technology gave breathing room to.

Another early 1980s movement that’s blossomed since was the notion of a master data model, or, if you like, architecting the data of the enterprise so it worked as one. That’s a journey we’re on still — only now is hardware cheap enough that throwing it at conversions on the fly to hook disparate elements together (the data bus approach to integration, using intermediate forms as “glue” to insulate against change and stabilize enough of the portfolio to get to common instantiations of elements) makes sense. Up until now we’ve had to go to ever-larger packages (e.g. SAP) or rewrite our portfolios extensively to get there.

Much of the rest of what you use daily — from ITIL-inspired service management practices to the all-online world we all know these days — has its roots in that apparently sleepy period of the early 1980s.

So what will be born from the apparently sleepy 2010s?

That — it’s called the Information Revolution, or the “I” in “IT” — is where careers are being made now. The management practices, information services, and heartbeats of enterprises being built out this decade will set the pattern for the years to come.

It seems as if the stock market may be giving up on Apple.  I’m not sure we should bury the carcass quite so quickly however!  Would you lend your money to Apple even if they don’t have AAA ratings?  What do you think about their prospects?

Apple wants to spend $100 Billion buying back their own stock by the end of 2015.  That doesn’t sound to me as if they are very short of cash……but I’m not a financial expert.

And the stock is down by 40% since last September.  Is that a reflection on Apple itself or perhaps the overall times we are living in?

But is the stock price the real measure of value that we should be paying attention to?  Perhaps it would be worth looking at the business too……

They say it’s been more than three years since Apple introduced a new “product category.”  Interesting that Apple is measured by the product categories it delivers, not just the products themselves.  That’s a pretty high standard to live up to for long periods of time.  It would be similar to General Motors having to introduce a new category of vehicle (car, truck, van, etc.) almost every other year.  How many companies can create even one new category much less do this more than once.

Is it even possible to keep changing the paradigm for more and more market segments?  And does it mean that Apple will disappear if they don’t?

The quarterly report from Apple suggested there would be exciting new products, services and software starting this fall and going throughout 2014.  Analysts then went on to speculate what these would be and when.  Some of the predictions (including some of my own):

• an iPhone 5S in the fall of 2013
• a larger iPhone (or smaller iPad mini??) in 2014
• a smart iWatch in 2014 (there seems to be a rush to be first to market for this)
• a smart iTV by the end of 2013
• a new service based on mobile payments (an Apple BitCoin ??)
• a subscription radio service
• and obviously new versions of iOS along the way, and probably better maps and improvements to Siri
• and no doubt some improvements to MAC computers and iPods as well

For most companies, doing all that in less than two years would actually be quite an achievement.  Some people think that, for Apple, this would be the minimum acceptable.

It will be really interesting to see how all these gadgets play together, given that Apple argues that having all the pieces will make the total package a better thing.  Siri on my watch controlling my television playing iTunes movies….

While I’m not an Apple “fanboi” it does seem like it will be exciting to see all of this come to fruition.  I may even have to save some money to buy some of the pieces, but please don’t change them every year because I won’t be able to get out of my carrier contracts fast enough.

I certainly haven’t given up on Apple.  But I’m spending too much on the products to buy the stock!

Don’t get me wrong, both the iPhone and the Galaxy are good devices. But they’re also both maxed out.

Several years ago I conducted research into the optimal point in product evolution. In the software world, again and again, vendors have made the same mistake. In an effort to keep expanding the product, so many features are added that the product actually becomes less usable.

There is an optimum point, in other words, and when you reach it it’s time to get out a clean sheet of paper and design from scratch rather than keep adding on top.

Call it — for people who know the traditional “S”-curve of product life — somewhere around 2/3 of the way up the curve. From here on in every incremental change is about trying to preserve share, not grow it, and every change brings the risk of alienating existing customers.

Fine if there are no other choices, and no one’s coming up with a way to innovate their way into your market. GE can tick off as many locomotive engineers as they like because no one’s chomping at the bit to take them on in the railway locomotion market. Boeing and Airbus, on the other hand, found that Bombardier and Embraer could (and did) chew away at some of their business with better airplanes for the job at hand.

I love my iPhone 4. There’s no reason to buy an iPhone 5 — and if an iPhone 5S or 6 is “more of the same”, no reason for that, either. In fact, when I got my iPhone 4, the 4S was out. I didn’t see the point in it, either.

Today, what we see is that the iPhone 4 was the sweet spot in growth. Up to and including the 4, every new iPhone expanded the user’s options. After that — and yes, I’m including Siri in this — every move degraded the experience.

The same with the Samsung Galaxy line. Depending on your pocket size, either the Galaxy 2 or the Galaxy 3 was the sweet spot. That it’s doubtful which is says certainly that we’re there. The 4 — with its flaky new features that don’t work reliably, like recognition that your eyes have left the screen, or that your finger is hovering over a button (but hasn’t touched down), is no improvement.

Compare that to Blackberry’s new line of the Z10 and Q10, where a rethink from the ground up (all new software) has made a world of difference and revitalized the product line — and the company. So much so, in fact, that if I were to look at replacing my trusty iPhone 4, the Z10 would get first dibs on my business.

I value longer battery life (for the same form factor and weight), excellent security, and a host of features that matter more to me than ditzy “new features” to get me to buy again.

The Android fanbois (and you can add just about all the research houses to that crowd, since they’re busy publishing reports and notes that stress “operating system penetration” rather than recognizing either the features that matter to their corporate customers or the divisions in products within an operating system cluster to draw their conclusions) will no doubt shrug off the delays in introduction that the Galaxy 4 is getting Stateside. The Apple fanbois are already gearing up for WWDC in mid-June, where iOS 7 and hints of the iPhone 5S are expected.

As an enterprise IT person, don’t let fanboi-ism infect you. Especially in a “bring your own device” era, being able to compare and contrast the experience of using these different devices for your users is a service that will gain you respect. (You may also get your enterprise moving back towards something closer to a standard when you do, too.)

All the economic warning lights are lit, from slowdowns in job creation to the buildup of inventories to shipping data. First quarter earnings results haven’t been particularly great, with a fair number of misses, including some in the IT sector. (That the markets have been relentlessly optimistic reminds me of 2007-08, when, as you’ll remember, we ended up with a global financial crisis and a market downdraft that turned Americans’ version of the RRSP, the 401(k) into [as the joke went] 201(k)s, as the market lost over 60 per cent in a few months.)

Earnings are driven by sales. So the push will be on this quarter, and for the rest of the year, to win business any way it can be won.

That means that deals, discounts, and special offers will be the order of the day.

Sounds good, right? Well, to really make it good for your organization, you need to do a little prep work first.

First of all, you need to know what your needs are going to be. Here’s where having a technology roadmap that’s based in total cost to own and operate (TCOO) projections would be helpful. Any deal you’re offered that moves you onto the optimal curves that produces are worth taking up, even if it means you might have to deal with a little depreciation you need to finance away, or you’re otherwise moving off your replenishment cycles. Any deal that doesn’t advance that isn’t worth looking at, no matter how deep the discount offered.

Why? Simple — a deal that increases your TCOO is one that you’ll be paying more for year after year, even if you get a discount going in, whereas one that decreases your TCOO saves you money year after year, even if it’s not the best price on offer when you buy.

When you implement, you should also be thinking about the next move. You may, for instance, think that your next destination is a cloud offering — but you’ve got a great deal on the table for replenishing your server, storage and networking racks. No reason not to take it (assuming maintaining the data centre for them isn’t going to be any more cost than you currently bear) — but use the time to implement a private cloud using your new acquisitions. That way, you’ll be ready to transition as your roadmap calls for when it’s time to replace these new units.

For services, it’s important that you get used to reading vendor financials closely. There is nothing worse than having your co-location provider, your outsourcer, or your cloud provider go into receivership while your assets are stuck there. Yes, the data may still be yours — but extracting it can be a nightmare. (Depending on how the company involved shuts down, there may be no access — physical or electronic — allowed for weeks, while the bankruptcy trustees take stock in order to allow a reorganization to proceed.)

Getting a great deal, in other words, can be a sign of risk. Tread carefully if your assets are under someone else’s control. (Treat it as the business continuity issue that it is, and plan for it.)

Finally, there’s the systems integration trade.

Here the suppliers have a different problem: they need to get their benches up out of the office and into your premises, where they become billable. As business slows (and remember IBM missed its earnings target for first quarter, in a business now dominated by these kinds of services) the pressure is on to get a deal, anyway possible, and load up the bodies as fast as can be done.

So you’ll get a lot of aggressive behaviour. You’ll have vendors crashing meetings to try and influence directions in their favour (and to gather intelligence). You’ll have solutions “pushed” at you (because the teams that could fulfil those are idle right now). You’ll be offered aggressive schedules and low prices, but with provisions for overage charges (first get the deal, there’s always a way to stretch it later to restore the profitability).

Whereas with equipment, licences and cloud or managed services a little homework gets you ready to grab bargains, the systems integration/development side of the equation requires a lot more preparation. Here’s where holding back to make sure you’re doing the right project pays off far more than any low price bid does.

Finally, given the deals that will be done, if you’re not looking at your existing contracts to see what terms and conditions you were promised that haven’t been fulfilled, or how they compare to “best in the market” now, you’re leaving money on the table.

The bargain basement is coming to IT shops this year — be prepared, and you’ll be able to take advantage with optimal results.

On April 23, after the tweets were posted, accounts that trade stocks using algorithms to scan news feeds pulled the Dow Jones Industrial average. The index dropped 145 points in a very short instant. Minutes later, the index recovered.

The group claiming responsibility of hack was the Syrian Electronic Army.

Hacking attacks like the one mentioned is a reminder for corporations that the detection and prevention of hacking is a high priority. Companies like Sourcefire could be on the short-list of companies providing intrusion prevention systems. This company is mentioned, because it is the #1 provider in such solutions.

Is your network safe? What intrusion prevention systems do you have in place? On your home PC, what antivirus software do you use? Microsoft’s MSE (Microsoft Security Essentials) is a good choice for antiviruses. Malwarebytes is a good tool for removing malware.

The first is Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion). In every market the new Z10 has been launched in thus far, it’s had a good launch. Product isn’t sitting on shelves; it’s moving steadily into end user hands. Not only that, but returns have been very low (Verizon, for instance, reports that in all cases the reason for the return was that the buyer ordered online, thinking they were getting the not-yet-shipping Q10 with the keyboard).

Nevertheless, a number of stock “research analysts” have issued warnings and reports indicating that the Z10 isn’t selling, that returns are high, and that the product is a bust and the company a dud.

If you, as an IT professional, made your next buying decision based on that sort of nonsense (which, frankly, is designed to manipulate Blackberry’s share price — one wonders just exactly how many shares the house account at these institutions is short the stock — irrespective of facts) rather than actual product specifications, well, you’d deserve what you get.

For here’s the facts: the battery life on the Z10 far outclasses almost all the Android phones out there. The apps are there, and work. The UI is easily learned. All the Blackberry security features enterprises have counted on function appropriately. What’s not to like?

Yet far too often stock jockey information gets substituted for proper technical evaluation data.

Now roll over to Apple, which has gone from being the stock market’s darling, to it’s dog of the year.

If you bought the company outright at its current market cap, quarterly revenues would pay for the entire purchase in a little under six years. Oh, and without using the money in the treasury, either.

In other words, by any financial measure, this is a very healthy supplier (would that all your other ones were so well off). Yet, because everyone looks at operating system share, “Android is kicking iOS’s butt” and “the whole desktop/laptop space is being cannibalized by tablets” has been turned into “Apple is dying” (again).

Wrong on two counts, actually: first, you have to look at the Android (and Windows Mobile) spaces by manufacturer at the very least, not just lump them together (right now Apple and Blackberry are shipping only one product to the phone market, unlike the others where there are multiple licensees) to know what’s going on, and second, that tablet market is still primarily an iPad market (again, look at what’s shipping).

The stock jockeys ran the share price up to unsustainable heights on rumours of wristwatch devices, reinvented televisions and the like. When they didn’t see them, or any of the other rumoured offerings, they sold and sold.

But that doesn’t make the company a failure. Just the retail investors they put in the shares as a “can’t lose” at $700 as they exited the positions they’d ridden up from $400.

As an IT professional, you want to know several things about the products and services you acquire.

You want to know the supplier is financially healthy: it’s your best (and probably only) shot at figuring out if they’ll be there through the life of the agreement you sign with them.

You want to know the product’s technical features fit your organization’s needs.

You want to know (perhaps) a little bit about their future plans, especially if this is a ten year plus decision.

You want to know (where appropriate) how prevalent the skills you need for this product/service are in your local market, especially if you’re counting on contractors to fill out your teams.

But the share price? The overall market share of an operating system (as opposed to the health of a particular supplier of a solution)? What the boys on the Street have to say about the company?

Irrelevant. Even though, most of the time, that’s about all “everyone knows”.

Source: bitcoin charts

The surge in the value of bitcoins is very relevant to technology. Before housing, Y2K was the big bubble that burst in 2000, leaving behind it ruined but weak companies. Only the strong companies survived, and are thriving today.

The dramatic rise and fall in bitcoin has yet to play itself out fully, since the conditions that fed its rise still exist. The conditions include:

• Debasing of a country’s currency to the gold standard
• Mistrust of monetary authorities
• The real fear that deposits are not at all guaranteed – see Cyprus
• Quantitative easing creates the de facto notion that money may be created forever

What ever will happen to the value of bitcoins will be played out by the market. The direction is likely negative, but the importance of bitcoin for electronic transactions will remain. Two appealing characteristics of the currency is limited supply and the way coins are created uniquely.

Bitcoin: Modern Holland Tulip Craze

Update (18/Apr 2013): Bitfloor shuts down

Source: bitfloor

Users, by and large, are in favour. IT professionals, by and large, are not. (Of course, when IT professionals recognize they too are users of technology, their views sometimes change…)

So far, the “Bring Your Own Device” movement has been relatively benign. But that’s about to end in a big way.

The counterpart to the “bring your own” movement is, of course, “bring your own applications”.

In some ways, that’s already begun. Your Android-carrying types are probably already working in Google Drive without your knowing. Your iOS-carrying types are probably already working in iWork (Numbers, Pages and Keynote), again without anyone knowing.

Mind you, as long as what they produce slides easily back and forth around the enterprise, there’s not a lot to worry about with that, is there? (Other than perhaps the usual worries about data escaping controlled environments.)

But a new wave of applications is likely to come to the enterprise.

The skills to build a website were democratized long ago. Sure, it still takes talent, knowledge and a familiarity with tools to build a state of the art one. But if you want to put something simple up, just about anyone can do it these days — and with hardware being very inexpensive, overheads imposed by tools to build websites aren’t a performance issue for most situations any longer, either.

It’s not much more of a journey to being able to churn out your own apps. If you can implement it in a website, you can probably do it as an iOS or Android app, too.

Or, if you can’t, it’s an affordable option. Remember, this is the enterprise world: a user department finding $25,000 or so to pay to have a design turned into an app isn’t at all out of the question. (With HTML5 and other modern approaches, that money might well produce an app for each of the platforms needed, including a web version for when you’re stuck at your desktop machine.)

Think about how democratized those skills have truly become. An iOS developer’s licence costs $99. There are videos online showing you how to get started. YouTube is filled with “how to” videos, code walkthrough videos, and the like. It’s similar for the other platforms.

(I’ve had no less than fifteen separate conversations since the first of the year with people who are in their fifties who are looking at doing a mobile app startup, simply because talent is easy to find and the tools are cheap. If that’s going on at the far end of the work world, how prevalent is it amongst those in school, or just graduated?)

Back when you had to sneak your own app into controlled libraries, or turn a machine under your desk into a clandestine server, in order to have them, the notion of bringing your own apps to bear to improve your work life, your productivity, and give you leverage on the job would have seemed foolish.

These days? It’s more a matter of seeing that the opportunity exists in a way it didn’t before. And when the home for that app is on a device you’re carrying with you, it might be years before anyone else even catches on that you’ve got an asset working for you.

If you could get a $40,000 bonus, for instance, by investing $500 a year in an Amazon EC2 server in the cloud, and spending a few hundred dollars learning to program, would you? Especially when accessing it is done from a phone or tablet that might not even do so on the company’s network?

(I once invested $5,700 of my own money buying a state-of-the-art laptop when we had a purchasing freeze on during a platform migration. The 18 months I carried it before my company-issued machine was replaced gave me 18 months with an additional 90 minutes sleep time in a 90 per cent travel life, different city every day work environment, where phone meetings would start at 11:00 pm or 4:30 am routinely. Sure, I broke the official rules … but I also earned the company over $10 million during the period. Tell me who’s going to win that battle?)

What makes any of us in the central shop think it isn’t already happening?

Once again, we’re faced with the limits of the traditional model of security. The notion that we can build walls around information and hold it in has been punctured many times before. We’ve patched, controlled, issued policies, even fired people over trying to maintain the myth.

What we need to do is to get smart and figure out how to do it right. Building integrity checking and security into the guts of our data and systems would make a lot more sense than trying once again to bolt the door after the escape has occurred.

For make no mistake, “bring your own applications” is out there, waiting to visit you.

No one much bothered to make a big fuss about any of them, though. The affected employees here in Canada tarted up their résumés and eventually found something else. Some ended up leaving IT altogether; others found a contractor’s life; the rest managed to find a new job.

It was so little a part of the public’s mindset, despite years of layoffs surrounding it, that George Takach, a noted lawyer who built his reputation designing contracts for outsourcing deals, could run in the recent Liberal Party of Canada leadership race and never have his part in destroying Canadian high-tech jobs thrown in his face.

Then came this week, and the public revelation that RBC was actually bringing people in on visas to undercut the pay scheme and replace existing employees — whose last IT duties for the banking and investment group would be to train their cheaper replacements.

There’s been a public outcry and a grudging apology of sorts from RBC, and a promise that, now, miraculously, it’ll be possible for the bank to try and find the affected technology workers some other role within the wilds of RBC rather than just turn them over directly to the Employment Insurance program.

What really needs to happen — and none of the business page writers have yet to do so — is to explore what companies use their IT staff to do.

One British Columbia-based firm with a large IT organization — over 500 people — undertook a major rebuilding of its core application portfolio a few years ago (the project continues even today). Even though at the time the firm was not engaged in any major external service contracts, it was axiomatic that a systems integration firm would be bought in, sidelining and shelving the career prospects of the existing staff.

Unlike a major Ottawa-area organization with similar revamping and systems integration needs, no measures were taken to require the growth of the existing staff through the participation (the Ottawa firm required their integrator to form “teams of two”, matching internal staff with external experts, for the duration of the multi-year project, so that by the end the resulting product would be “theirs”). Instead, they were jammed into “maintenance” mode.

Unsurprisingly (and aren’t the social networks wonderful for this) I’ve been seeing early retirement after early retirement announcement out of the BC organization — and none out of the Ottawa one. (The BC firm has also spent more than three times as much on their integrator as has the Ottawa one in the same four year period.)

Oh, and here’s the other nasty part of the story. In BC, all that money has gone to butcher stock-standard industry application packages (because, of course, the business couldn’t be asked to change to fit the commodity solution). At least in Ottawa they have a custom-built product that nicely differentiates them (and that they’ve been approached to sell to an equivalent organization operating in another country, the sale of which would recoup most of the development costs).

Editorialists and columnists in the business press love to talk about our lack of competitiveness, our lack of productivity, and generally to blame government for our woes. Yet, when managerial decisions that waste human capital are made, no one blows the whistle and says anything about it.

The Ottawa firm stands a chance of adding to our national productivity, and it certainly has the ability to take what’s been built for it and move it forward using the people it has. The BC firm will be left with neither. And all RBC will have, at the end of the day, is a fraction of a cent extra on the earnings per share line, but nothing that moves the bank forward any faster than it would have otherwise.

The use of external service providers, be they integrators, outsourcers or just simple consultants and contractors, isn’t wrong in itself. But it is in how you use them, and what you do with the people who work for you in and around the agreements you make.

Right now, Canadian enterprises seem determined to ensure that when they need top talent in Canada it won’t be here for them. That that’s the outcome their individual decisions are adding up to is the real story the business press is missing.

Preference is still strongest with Facebook at 46%. Google+ is second place, at 34%. Amazingly, Yahoo is third and ahead of Twitter. If Yahoo succeeds in returning to its core strength of a centralized, portal content sharing site, Yahoo could still be a force to be reckoned with.

What is your colour? What social networks do you prefer and enter regularly?

Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called “crypto-currency”.  It’s not the easiest system to understand because most of the articles describe it in pretty technical terms.  I’ve seen it called the Napster of currency.

Here’s what the Bitcoin website says about its benefits for individuals (copied from the website):

• Bitcoin is the simplest way to exchange money at very low cost.
• Mobile payments made easy:  Bitcoin on mobiles allows you to pay with a simple two step scan-and-pay. No need to swipe your card, type a PIN or sign anything. And all you need to receive Bitcoin payments is to display the QR code in your Bitcoin wallet app and let your friend scan your mobile, or touch the two phones together (using NFC radio technology).
• Fast international payments:  Bitcoins can be transferred from Africa to Canada in 10 minutes. There is no bank to slow down the process, level outrageous fees or freeze the transfer. You can pay your neighbors the same way as you can pay a member of your family in another country.
• Works everywhere, anytime:  Just like with email, you don’t need to force your family to use the same software or the same service providers. Just let them stick to their own favorites. No problem there, they are all compatible as they use the same open technology. The Bitcoin network never sleeps, even on holidays!
• Secure transactions:  Bitcoin transactions are secured by military grade cryptography. Nobody can make a payment on your behalf or charge you money without having a copy of your wallet. So as long as you take required steps to protect your wallet, Bitcoin provides a nice level of protection against many types of fraud.
• Almost free to use:  Bitcoin allows to send and receive payments for free. Except for special cases like very tiny micro-payments, there is no enforced fee. You can however choose to pay a small voluntary fee to increase your transaction priority and to remunerate people who operate the Bitcoin network.
• Pseudo-anonymous online payments:  Anonymous payments are a part of our everyday lives as most of real life purchases are done without the requirement to provide a proper identification. Bitcoin now introduces the same freedom to the online world. It allows you to buy services or make donations without the hassle of being passed under x-ray. However, you should note that full anonymity requires special efforts.

It almost sounds too good to be true!

Here’s a link to a company in Canada that buys and sells Bitcoins:  www.canadianbitcoins.com

There’s another website that would suggest that Bitcoin could revolutionize online gambling.

So, my questions:

Have you heard of Bitcoins?  Have you used Bitcoins?   If so, was it a positive experience?  Would you recommend buying Bitcoins to others?  Do you think Bitcoin will have a significant impact on banking and the world economy?

Generate new value.

Translated from the language of the executive suite, what this means is that they’re looking for innovative IT solutions to spearhead the organization’s future. New products, new services, new ways to bring money in the door and keep it there.

Even in organizations where making money isn’t top of the hit parade — think of a Deputy Minister answering for their Ministry — the demand for value is still there. It just translates into ways the organization can fulfil its operational and regulatory mandates much more effectively. Or how new policy areas could be fulfilled “smart from the get go”.

So let’s talk about what generating new value requires.

New value comes from differentiating the enterprise.

That means you’ll end up doing something differently than others do. For some, that means you do the same things, but without all the steps, making you seem more responsive. (Most systems are implemented requiring that “all the fields be filled in” before the next screen moving the transaction on can appear — or the screens are simple, but the process is relentlessly linear.) In most other cases, it means you’ll be building a new system that handles a new revenue opportunity.

Differentiation, therefore, isn’t something you can buy off the shelf. It has to be constructed.

Almost by definition, if you’re doing something new, exciting, or different, there isn’t a package out there for it. Oh, you can build on an existing solution as a base: a property and casualty insurer added a major piece of new value as a home-grown SAP component. But they had to write that new component themselves.

Back in the 1990s, when most of us began the migration into client-server computing and then the panicky jump forward spurred on by Y2K, we fell into a model best described by the cliché “the answer is a package, what was your question again?”

There’s no doubt that packaged software — “solutions off the shelf”, if you like — is a vital part of today’s IT world. Whether run in house or bought as a service isn’t what matters. What matters is that you’re buying a solution architecture, and a set of proven use cases, ready for the organization to take advantage of.

For something you do that’s a commodity, that’s a very good thing. It’s better, faster, and cheaper in the long run for you to, for instance, handle your finance function this way. Accounting rules are accounting rules, paying bills and collecting receivables are well known things to do. Why waste time trying to reinvent that wheel?

For commodities, therefore, not only should the answer be a stock-standard off the shelf solution, but it should be vanilla — unmodified. Better the enterprise change the way it does things once, than that you constantly keep retrofitting the same change over and over again as the releases go by in the future.

For places where the enterprise is differentiating itself, however, rolling up your shirt sleeves and rolling your own product is the better, faster, and cheaper answer. Butchering some package or group of packages to do something they weren’t designed to do creates far more burdens and a higher ongoing cost structure than a piece of elegant code would do.

In today’s world, where hardware is dirt cheap compared to years before, and tools to rapidly iterate toward the solution while providing you with a high level development environment (so you don’t have to waste your time writing base level routines), there’s really no excuse not to write when needed. Yet few development organizations exist now that actually generate new code.

No wonder CEOs keep demanding value, and perceive their CIOs and the IT organization as failing to deliver on it!

One last thought on differentiation. A growing area of differentiation has been highlighted by the rise of information to predominance that’s also been going on this past ten years.

Information consolidation, culling, and organizing as side activities taking place between standard processes and use cases implemented in packages — the creation of what’s called a master data bus running through the operations of the firm — is a growing phenomenon. These intermediate results aren’t just for business intelligence use: they can be the feedstock processed by new value applications, without disrupting the main operational flows that exist. Data bus solutions also generally start by building insulating routines (as noted before, hardware is now cheap) so that elements can be changed without affecting other elements in the stream. As more organizations integrate real time (or near real time) process controls into systems, doing this has become more important.

Data buses are part of the path toward an overall enterprise architecture where instances capable of processing work to do expand and contract as needed in response to demand. That’s the path to a continuous operation, where change windows are a thing of the past (updated instances merely start firing up once they’re in the library) and service spans multiple physical locations so that the enterprise is truly “always on” through any crisis.

An innovation that becomes “industry standard” will eventually become part of the off the shelf market — at which point, a conversion to that from home-grown code would be in order. By then, the value that makes a difference has been extracted (so why pay the cost of maintaining home-grown code at that point?).

Take a look at your project queue. Is there differentiation in it? (Or could there be?) There’s your starting point for delivering value.

…a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.

Shortly afterwards, PayPal described its cloud infrastructure as incorporating numerous technologies. Both OpenStack and VMware are used. Red Hat is also used:

VMware provides important technologies for PayPal’s platform. However, we do leverage a few cloud technologies including OpenStack, VMware and Red Hat so that we can architect our infrastructure to enable choice and deliver agility for our business.

(Source: Forbes)

PayPal did not deny the importance of OpenStack for its cloud architecture. On April 5, PayPal will be explaining how OpenStack fits in their cloud at Cloud Connect. Information Managers should listen carefully to the availability of open source solutions.

Speaking of VMware, the company is shuffling its executive team. The CMO, Rick Jackson, stepped down. In January, CTO Steve Herrod left to join a venture capital firm. In April, the CFO (Mark Peek) left to join Workday. With major changes at the executive level, it is not surprising to read spectacular stories about VMware software being replaced by a major customer.

It appears likely that the rumor of VMware being replaced was an exaggeration. A more likely scenario was that big companies like PayPal will be open to a heterogeneous environment to support the growth in cloud computing. This offers companies greater ability in building a diverse array of virtualized or cloud solutions. It just depends on what the business needs. A solution from Red Hat could be more suitable than one provided by VMware. The software solutions may be an answer to one problem but not another. The solutions might need to be able to talk to each other. Hyping OpenStack over VMware would be missing the point.

IT Network Architects need to be aware of what solutions exist, and which ones are most suitable. When PayPal talks about OpenStack, its approach in solving business transformation challenges will be insightful.

Update: Howard Solomon reports IBM throws weight behind OpenStack for cloud.

Sounds impossible. If you use Amazon, Facebook, or a host of other services, you use systems precisely like this. Always on. Constantly being changed and added to. Errors reversible. No data-related failures.

Business continuity? Just go elsewhere and access the systems — they’re still running. All of them, not just some subset.

This is resilient IT — easy to change, easy to fix, always on, no matter what happens.

Let’s see what this doesn’t depend on.

It doesn’t ride on monolithic applications, home-grown or packaged, that have to have “upgrade cycles”. It doesn’t ride on single points of failure, be these a database, a server, etc.

It’s a long way away from what most of us are currently running, and what the projects we’re working on are delivering.

Well, we have what we have. How do we get from it to a resilient IT approach?

The first step is to acknowledge the need. This is a business decision: the decision to make the enterprise more resilient — and more open to change. (That’s one of the keys to being able to seize opportunities, or respond to others’ moves, rapidly and efficiently.)

The second is to subordinate future decisions to the goal of resilience.

That means that the decision to deploy a package no longer turns on “oh, we like this one better”. It turns on whether the package takes you closer to a resilient implementation.

It might lead you to a cloud-based provider (who can update features on the fly, has a resilient back end, and so on) even though there you can’t modify the software and the business will have to adapt itself to the solution. If you’d rather run in house, fair enough, but running as a private cloud (multiple instantiations load-sharing, across a hardware base with no single points of failure and allowing for on-the-fly swaps of components) would take precedence over other factors.

Slowly, across all your solutions, you’d be introducing a data bus that interconnects systems, captures intermediate results (thus journalizing all operations and feeding managerial intelligence about operations without disrupting operating processes) and deals with the issues of changes occurring under different organizations’ control by using intermediate data forms as connectors. You’d recognize that processing power today is cheap, and so is bandwidth, relative to the cost of handling changes.

You’d introduce the notion that regular and steady change implementation is the norm, not the project and “transition day” approach. (Facebook usually takes as much as six months to finish rolling out user interface changes across the billion or so members, with different people having a different user experience in parallel. You can, too, benefitting from learning as you go and increasing the actual return on investment obtained [AROIO] as a process, not a one-time “get lucky or not” moment.)

Between the resilient emerging architecture — which will ultimately require that you select cloud providers or in house solutions based on the attributes of on-the-fly change and running replicas in parallel on many cheap components rather than by worrying about what others think of your choices (because this isn’t the way Windows Server, z/OS, etc. are designed) — and today, there are other steps you can take now.

If you’re committed to Exchange/Outlook, for instance, why are you running mail in house? There are service providers — including Microsoft itself — with a more robust setup to do that service than anything an individual enterprise could afford in their own data centre. (The only way to match it in house is to move away from Exchange as the solution for communications.)

It’s far better to pay for a stock standard service and acquire a step toward resilience than to manage your own servers for it.

If you’re outsourced in some sort of managed service contract, odds are its very terms and conditions preclude changing in these ways. Renegotiation may be in order: major outsourcers have the scope of resources to provide highly resilient architectures, but you need to work with your supplier to make that happen. Trading years for change is a good starting point (since you’re in their hands already).

As a Chief Information Officer, you’re leading a journey. Resilience and speed of change is a part of what you’re there to deliver.

Don’t let your install base stand in your way.

Servers, storage and other hardware that might have been state-of-the-art in the early 2000s continues to run in many Canadian organizations, patched together with what seem to employees like band-aids and wishful thinking. When things don’t work, they ask why IT can’t simply be replaced rather than jerry-rigged to chug along for a few more years. CIOs and their teams, meanwhile, grimly forge ahead knowing that without a substantial budget increase, they will not only have to do more with less but do the same with the same for an indefinite period. Refresh cycles are becoming longer than Peter Jackson movies, with consequences that are occasionally as fantastical as they are horrific. This can’t be the kind of fun, fulfilling work that got so many IT professionals involved in computer science or, in the CIO’s case, management.

It’s different in the consumer products industry, where things tend to get thrown out rather than fixed up. That may be changing, however. This past weekend’s Financial Times profiled the rise of design that tries to transcend the planned obsolescence of the past. The article by Edwin Heathcote includes an interview with the curator of a show at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum called Fix, Fix, Fix, that puts repaired objects next to artworks with little to no context. This quote jumped out at me:

My job … is to get people to look closely at objects and that’s what we’re doing with Fix, Fix, Fix, by getting people to detect the presence of repair.

In data centres, and amid IT systems generally, the presence of repair tends is detected only when users are dissatisfied or frustrated. It’s when programs take longer to load, when access to certain resources are blocked to mitigate an IT security risk, or entire menus and options available to users are transformed as the result of complex (read: faulty) system integration. Employees may be well aware the IT in their company is old and only functional thanks to a lot of behind-the-scenes care, but they have no wish to actually see behind the scenes.

What if, however, the presence of repair in IT was something that could be perceived as a positive? Forget about the obvious: that without a lot of break-fix ingenuity from CIOs and their teams, many companies would have wasted a lot of money on new products they couldn’t afford. What about an issue raised by Evgeny Morozov in the New York Times a few days ago, when he points out that machines that “just work” mean those who use them don’t learn and develop ideas about how thinks could and should work? “On many important issues, civilization only destroys itself by extending the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them,” he writes. “On many issues, we want more thinking, not less.”

Morozov is talking about being aware of how much energy products consume, for example, but in the enterprise I think there could be more than that. If employees were better able to see how the lifespan of technology is extended through the repair efforts of IT departments they might be better able to articulate what their real needs are, suggest solutions that won’t simply create new problems and work more collaboratively to help IT systems adapt to the business as the business changes.

CIOs today talk a lot about transformation but they would probably be more successful if the systems they managed were better at evolution. Repairing what’s there may be just another way of talking about “keeping the lights on,” but as the consumerization of IT increases the everyday understanding of technology, there is an opportunity to be more intentional and embracing of such work. There is an opportunity to take more pride in and communicate about those repair. It’s what could cause a lot more lightbulbs to go off.

In each case, the CFO and/or COO are concerned that IT be optimized. The CIO is generally certain that they’re already running a tight ship.

It’s because these executives aren’t just reacting to events that they’re holding the meetings in the first place. Maybe the IT function is already in the top echelon, optimized and with good management practices. Cuts would actually hurt the organization. (On the other hand, if there’s an opportunity worth seizing, getting on it early would be an advantage worth taking.)

So let me ask you the same sort of questions I might ask, in a private meeting with a CIO.

Which of your contractors is up for renewal next month? Do you still need that individual — would anyone do — or can you do without? More IT shops than I care to think about these days have a mixed labour force: some internals, some contractors. Very few of them actually manage these relationships well.

I have seen (and continue to see) innumerable contract renewals for no better reason than that the previous one “expires tomorrow, here’s the renewal to sign”.

Using contractors and consultants to being in specific skills that don’t make sense to pay for full time is good business. Using contractors as a variable labour force — increase it when money allows, decrease it when times are tighter — also makes sense. Being held hostage to a contractor for twenty years (this is not a joke; it happened in a power utility) because you’ve done none of transfer the skills, offer them a staff position, or ensure you’ve not created a single point of failure is a sign of a management improvement waiting to happen.

Are you getting everything your contracts say you are entitled to? These days there’s few shops that haven’t outsourced something, be it a cloud-based application, a colocation agreement, or a “why don’t you maintain that” contract. Many promises are made at the time the deal is signed that are seldom carried out once things get going. Few amongst us go back and make sure we get them.

There are companies out there who have negotiated steep cost of service reductions, broken contracts without a break or penalty fee, or gotten a host of free service because they actually read their agreements and demanded compliance. (It’s also amazing how many promise to document and don’t, promise to provide monthly reports and don’t, etc.)

Any agreement you sign starts to move out of the “best available price” zone the moment the ink is dry, because the market keeps moving. If your supplier promised it, you’re entitled to it. If they’re not delivering it, you have a golden opportunity to rejoin the price curve where it is today.

How’s your own return on investment? Can you demonstrate what the actual return on investment obtained (AROIO) is, for the projects you’ve delivered? Can you show that you’re moving ever closer to the lowest total cost to own and operate (TCOO)? A great deal from your vendors is one thing, but you own the ongoing results. If you can’t show the numbers…

Far too many in IT work think keeping the lights on (if you’re on the process, or infrastructure/maintenance side of things) or delivering the project is all there is to doing a good job. CEOs repeatedly over the past five years have demanded that IT create value for the enterprise. You need to be able to show you’re doing that — and that comes from increasing AROIO and decreasing TCOO.

Whether you do that in-house, with an service provider, or in the cloud; whether you do that using your staff, a systems integrator, or simply buy a solution that comes pre-configured; the responsibility is yours. Those choices are all time/cost/quality tradeoffs, but they don’t make the primary reason you’re here go away.

How good is your idea queue? This last question usually leaves people scratching their heads.

Far too many shops I visit have a long list of projects on the books. Few of them are actively being worked on (although many of the permanent staff — and a good number of the contractors — attend meetings, write reports, etc. to make it look like the others are being given some attention).

There are two problems here: one is the way we staff solution teams, but the other is that we turn ideas into projects too soon.

Most of us, you see, have no way to capture, track and develop ideas. The only thing we know how to handle is projects. So an early-stage idea becomes a project, which, in turn, ends up with some resources attached to it, and someone who now sees “seeing it through” as important.

If we could avoid turning ideas into projects too soon, we could both whittle the backlog down (which would bring the problems of how we staff to our managerial attention) and avoid the trap of “you promised we’d do this, now when?!?” that tends to emerge once an idea becomes “official”.

I have yet to meet a CIO who had all four of these questions in hand. What that says is something that ought to be obvious to all of us: there’s always room for improvement.

Better to make smart improvements under your own steam, than just be slashed and burnt in wide-ranging cuts under someone else’s initiative.

Today, at age seven, Twitter has more than 200 million users worldwide. 400 million tweets are sent daily. Needless to say, Twitter is here to stay.

Image Source: Mashable

Competition

Twitter’s mainstay is in its brevity. Ideas expressed as short as possible is most suitable for mobile devices. The longevity of ideas posted is exceedingly brief, but when there is an idea, there can be a trend. When something is trending, that originally expressed idea is heard.

Competitors, namely Google, through Google+, and Facebook, through eventual hash-tag adoption, are vying to one-up Twitter. From personal experience, Twitter’s clickthrough-to-post of content is the highest. External links posted on Facebook or Google have almost zero click-throughs.

IPO

Twitter may IPO – trade as a public company – later this year or in 2014. Let’s hope that the company does not lose sight of its strengths (as measured by share price performance), in the same way Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook did.

Video. 

Well, there is cloud-based competition, but that’s not the whole picture. For IT managers, it’s the whole picture that you should be aware of.

You see, Caterpillar (CAT) also reported last evening, and their earnings were off in all global markets. Their sales were down by double digits.

Caterpillar, for economy watchers, is one of the key indicators telling you the economy has turned. What their sales indicate is a global slowdown — this year.

What should you be doing?

First, expect to get a mid-year demand for budget cuts. Now is the time to get a couple of quick wins together, things that will reduce costs, and get them on the table before the demand for cuts limits your freedom of manoeuvre. Don’t overlook opportunities to use flexible infrastructure solutions in place of dedicated resources — we’re well past the point where we need to “test the viability” of most of what’s available.

Demonstrating you are reducing costs and executing plans to do so goes a lot farther than pleas to hold the line when the budget axe falls.

Second, take the time to really look at the projects you’re working on this year. Are any in doubt? This year, resources should be prioritized against things that will actually come in on schedule, as opposed to those who shout the loudest, or for items that won’t complete in time to make a difference.

Promises of Return on Investment pale compared to real returns actually delivered.

Third, it’s time to pull out your contracts and make sure you’re getting value for everything that’s been promised. I spend much of my time these days helping clients discover the money they’re spending that they don’t need to — or the money they’re spending that they’re getting nothing for. This is a time when vendors who are delivering value should be left alone (or rewarded with more business) but those promising but not delivering should be held to account.

Being seen to police your suppliers to deliver results is important to your own attempts to hold onto your spending capability.

Fourth, take a good hard look at your external resources — your contractors, consultants, etc. Some of these add extensive value and leverage to your organization. Now is the time to lock them in, before some “across the board dump the outsiders” directive comes down the pike. Others are delivering far less than they could. Either get results — or prepare to weed.

One or two high-priced but real performers is a far better deal than eight or nine cubicles filled with cheaper average players or newly minted graduates. Pay whatever it takes for people who are truly “on the A-team”.

Fifth, and last, keep a weather eye on your vendors that you need to negotiate with this year. Watch their reported results, know when their fiscal year end is coming. Educate your own organization’s purchasing and legal groups so that “end of year bargains” can be captured within the year end of the vendor.

When times are tough, deep discounts are available, if you can move on them when they are desperate to make quarter end or year end numbers.

Credibility with the business starts with running IT credibly. These five steps will go a long way toward being seen as “on top of things” when the crunch hits later this year.

Nexus 5 is rumored to be:

• 5-inch display
• 1080p resolution
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor
• Nikon Camera module

In more detail, the rumored specifications include:

• 5.2″ OLED Display with 1920×1080 resolution
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 @ 2.3 GHz
• 3GB LPDDR3 Ram
• 16/32/64GB of internal storage
• 16MP rear camera by OmniVision (4k video recording @30FPS, 1080p video recording @60FPS, Real Time HDR & HDR video recording, optical image stabilization, BSI 2.0)
• 2.1MP front camera (1080p video recording @30FPS)
• 3300 mAh Lithium Polymer battery
• Front positioned stereo speakers
• Qualcomm RF360 (LTE 150 Mbps & HSPA+)
• Integrated DVB-T / ATSC-antenna
• Gesture like controls

Are you excited about the Nexus 5? Will you be getting one? Nexus 4 was already a successfully-designed phone. The phone made its way to Canada and offers one of the best price-performance for a smartphone. If you have a Nexus 4, is getting a 5 a sign of suffering from Upgrade-itis?

Fake Image of Nexus 5

If the rumors are true, Google will likely announce the Nexus 5 at the I/O conference, held on May 15-17 2013. A new Nexus 7 could also be announced at that time. Another date floating for a Nexus 5 release is October 2013. The latter date would be more likely, since the Nexus 4 is not even a year old.

Symptoms

“Upgradeitis” is a made-up disease that is spreading amongst the population. The onset comes from reading, consuming, and being excited for new technology. The symptom includes upgrading unnecessarily, to have the “latest and the greatest.” This, however, is a misnomer. Technology will always be greater tomorrow.

Treatment: Caving in and upgrading or staying with what you have.

Other Thoughts

The Nexus 5 specifications, if it is true, are impressive. Google will likely subsidize the phone, freeing consumers by giving them a fairly-priced device. Features will be rich, and will make the iPhone 5 and Samsung GS3 look dated (even though the specifications are on par with them).

Gorillas are products/companies that sweep a marketplace before them. They become the core of new ecosystems. The tornado is the process by which the gorilla sweeps all before it. The tornado, in turn, can’t be unleashed until the chasm separating early adopters from the main parts of the market is crossed.

Everyone — from consumers to professional IT staff — like to be associated with winners. From that little bit of extra résumé sparkle, to standing a little taller because people see you with “the best”, we all play the game.

Unfortunately, what we who do the buying forget is that Moore was talking to investors in the stock market about how to pick which dot-com was going to succeed vs which ones had an equally good story but would ultimately flare out, and incidentally to the management of those start up firms about how to play for maximum results on their founders’ equity stakes.

To this day, in the IT world, we worry incessantly about being seen in the company of gorillas.

I see small businesses insisting on installing SAP, not because it’s the right answer for their business needs (that’s a question they haven’t even asked), but because it’s “the gorilla” in ERP.

I see people panicking over what will replace their current corporate Blackberry phones — because “everyone knows” (and everyone’s wrong, as usual) that Samsung (Android) or Apple (iPhone) is sweeping away all comers. Or they’re immobilized, because the gorilla hasn’t emerged yet (or at least not to their satisfaction) — I’m thinking of companies whose executives still lug heavy binders full of reports to meetings rather than equip them with a tablet. Or they waste hours debating whether Google+ will survive, or Tumblr/Pinterest knock off Facebook.

Here’s the reality. One size does not fit all. Gorilla-speak is saying “one size fits all”.

Now Moore wasn’t as simple-minded as most of the people who may not even have read him but did pick up the language about markets. He seems to have understood that you could have multiple winners in the same apparent space, because these were actually different markets. (The bête-noir of the IT trade, Nicholas G. Carr, he of Does IT Matter?, The Big Switch and The Shallows, recognized that the bigger a gorilla can get, the more the markets converge, and thus the less anyone gets any value out of it, other than perhaps the shareholders of the company that owns the gorilla.)

We started out in IT with no packaged applications. Today we generally have choices. Those choices aren’t clones of each other: they’re scaled and designed for different sizes, types and complexities of enterprise. Just because everyone else has jammed the same ERP down their throats doesn’t mean you should. (For example, if you’re a charity that revolves around the Raiser’s Edge package, odds are you should consider the Financial Edge counterpart for your back office needs — or maybe Dynamics [it's at the right scale for your size and complexity] — but not the big guns.)

Likewise, what’s best for you as a consumer of technology might not be the best choice for your enterprise. (Android devices are amongst the worst choices for an enterprise, for example. Ask any university — which has to support any and every type of gadget someone buys on its network — whose devices bought by faculty cause them the most ongoing grief.)

Our gorilla mania is aided and abetted, of course, by some of the industry’s largest consulting and outsourcing players, who often make the recommendations they do because they have idle resources with those skills available more than that it’s the best choice for your enterprise’s needs. Not often enough, someone in IT is willing to risk their career to take these outsiders on and make sure the truth emerges through actually analysing the situation. It needs to happen a lot more.

You see, the other thing that came out of the 1990s, aside from gorilla-speak, was a label IT got stuck with: “gold-plating things”. Y2K led a lot of people down the path of “oh, well, I don’t have time to figure everything out, so just replace it all and then we’ll be sure”. There’s a lot of folk in the business who remember those days, when spending was high and not much changed when it was all said and done. Since then we in IT have been kept on a pretty tight leash.

Getting off that leash doesn’t turn on buying gorillas. It turns on buying smart.

Leave gorillas to the stock junkies. For your enterprise, focus on getting the right product based on your scale, your complexity, and your needs. Stay, in other words, in your market, not in some mythical “market at large”.

Why?

Facebook could take a step off the gas pedal developing “poke,” reallocating resources to build its own reader. This move could bring back lost users, increase monthly user activity, and improve real content sharing on the social networking site.

Microsoft could build a reader application that integrates with Outlook.com and Bing. This strategic move would pay off more than the Windows 8 initiative, at least from a resource to traffic generation measure.

Do not expect Microsoft to jump quickly on this opportunity.

Twitter could take on building an RSS Reader. Tweet content and the user base would grow.

3rd party developers are not a threat to Google, but are already gaining massive traffic as a result of the Google Reader closure. The fear for some is that the apps will gain a following, get bought out, and then close down in a year or two.

Alternatives

Google’s move to cancel reader could be prompted by the desire to promote Google+. This will not likely work. The goodwill earned from supporting Reader may have the opposite impact. Weaning away from Reader (and consequently Google+) can be done with the following sites:

• http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/
• http://theoldreader.com/
• http://www.feedreader.com
• http://feeddemon.com/

LifeHacker has a list of alternatives and additional instructions on exporting your Reader contents.

List to be updated as alternatives are tested. Findings will also be tweeted here as they become available.

Update 1: Reddit has over 8,400 votes on the matter. A user notes all alternatives are down or slow, due to the mass influx of users signing up.

I couldn’t agree more. Moreover, let me put it as bluntly as I can: since the job title of CIO emerged in the 1980s, the vast majority of people holding it have really been “Vice President, IT” types. Now, at last, we’re able to look forward to people actually fulfilling the promise of “Chief Information Officer”.

That VP, IT comment wasn’t meant to be a dig. It was inherent in the times.

From the 1980s to the 2000s, much of the work of IT in enterprises was process-centred. Moving from wide-spread automation, through “productivity”, to managing enterprise integration across functions in the firm, IT has been engaged in the deployment of comprehensive application portfolios organized around handling more and more of the enterprise’s use cases, making sure that flow is achieved.

Information, during this period, was mostly a second-class citizen. It “fell out” of the choices made in the portfolio: the master data model became the one implemented by vendors. If you, for instance, went down the SAP road, your master data model became the SAP model; your enterprise’s information needs fit into that framework.

Yes, along that road, we put productivity tools on PCs, we implemented data warehouses, business intelligence tools and more lately some elements of the social space, typically using tools like SharePoint. But the focus remained resolutely focused on the application portfolio.

But the times changed, a few years back. For the leading edge, the transition began around 2005. The mass market is hitting it squarely now.

A few things underlie this. There’s been a growing recognition that information needs go far beyond stuff that fits neatly into data base models. This led to document management and content management systems, and information management, records management and digital archiving skill sets entering the enterprise. (This is one of the reasons the change comes at different times to different firms: both the nature of the business and the type of investment approach taken, from early adopter to laggard, come into play.)

What we’ve been learning is that hanging IM, RM and DA off on the side is less productive that building IM, RM and DA into the systems themselves. That means that these functions aren’t separate organizations — they’re a routine part of IT work.

Architecture teams, project offices, development/solutions groups, relationship management needs, you name it, they’re undergoing this transition, some less well than others.

At the same time, the nature of work is changing. Even in organizations deeply committed to “management by taking attendance”, where work-from-home is simply not going to happen, a lot of the toolset of our personal lives, from instant messaging and video calls to ad hoc file sharing, “news” feeds, commentary, and the like are part of getting work done in offices. (It’s not by accident that Skype has replaced Messenger in Microsoft’s toolbox.)

Out in the business areas, the challenge now is not to know what’s gone on — the classical role of finance and most application systems — or even what’s going on (as the near-real-time edge is approached) — but to anticipate what may happen. That was always the promise of analysing all that data in the data warehouse, in the business intelligence application, and it’s the promise of big data. These are not technology problems, and they’re not application problems: they’re information problems, and they’ll require a new set of approaches to their solution.

CIOs only become the “go-to” information mavens of the executive suite when they get IT out on the bleeding edge of the “what may happen” of value creation.

That’s not about digital assets (although it depends on them), it’s not about digital policies (although it needs them), and it’s about far more than some CDO role that seems to sweep the IT world aside through the renaming. (The husks of “CIO as Marketing Guy”, “CIO as Learning Officer”, and “CIO as Knowledge Officer”, not to mention “CIO as Reengineering Czar” predecessors to today’s CDO push look pretty dried up and abandoned today, and no doubt tomorrow’s CDOs will feel abandoned, too.)

We’ve come to the point where being “VP, IT” isn’t appropriate for the vast majority of enterprises any longer. That’s the real significance of the CDO call being made — but what it signals is the strategic importance of the Chief Information Officer for enterprise success.

If you’re a CIO, you need to ask yourself — now — how you’re getting your organization shifted to information-centricity and value generation. If you want to be a CIO one day, you now know just how complex the role is becoming — and what paths you might want to wander though on your way to the job.

Recognizing my own preference over Facebook, Google+ continues to refine its social networking site. After the communities update, which tidily groups communities and gives notifications for each in one place, there is much to be done, still.

While trying to join Microsoft community groups related to SQL Server, the number of users in them were limited. This is unsurprising, but was a test to see how much support exists when it comes to cross-platform “socializing.” For now, the top communities will be related to such topics as Ubuntu (Linux), Android, Star Wars, Tech Security and Social Networks.

Google itself said that it was in the early phases of a multi-year development for Google+. For now, the mantra that Google is less-preferred will remain with us. In a few years time, this view could be different.

Further Reading: Several Years Needed to complete True Vision of for Google+

I was really hoping Gartner’s suggestion for a new role to replace or augment the CIO called a CDO would just fade away, a previous efforts to do this kind of thing have done. To my dismay, however, one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard recently decided to stir the pot with the threat of a CDO revolution, and unfortunately it’s doing a disservice to CIOs everywhere. I had hoped to ignore the whole thing, but I’ve been seeing it enough in my LinkedIn feed recently I feel compelled to respond.

Under the title, IT departments have become completely useless on Business Insider, Peter Hinssen suggested that too many organizations have grown completely fed up with their current CIO and his or her team, and the CDO — who would come from a more business-oriented background and a deeper knowledge of consumer-oriented technologies like social media and apps – is a reality worth facing. I heard Hinssen speak a few years ago at a CA Technologies CIO event, and he was amazing. He was promoting his current book, Business-IT Fusion, where he bashed the concept of alignment and held up Proctor & Gamble’s CIO for firing most of his IT staff and distributing the rest to work directly alongside business units. His is a provocateur’s stance, and while there is much to admire in this thinking and his sometimes playful voice, the emphasis here seems misplaced.

They are rarely perceived by their business counterparts as ‘credible’. The reason is that many of the digital opportunities require a deep insight into the business challenges and the CIO’s environment often doubts if they have the goods to back this up. That’s partly because CIOs are still struggling with past ‘criminal’ records’ starring complex and very painful ‘IT projects from hell’. Safe to say that their reputations are often dented and reliability and respect are not the first things that come to mind when thinking about them.

As any successful entrepreneur or organization will admit, failures, even IT failures, are not the equivalent of a criminal record. They are, in fact, precursors to success. This is the same reasoning the CDOs and their ilk will inevitably use when their social business experiments end in lawsuits, or their superficial BYOD policies lead to customer data loss. As Hinssen himself notes near the end, all this new digital stuff will need to be integrated into the data centre and underlying IT infrastructure in the enterprise, but that won’t happen if your CDO knows the business needs but not how actual system integration works.

Hinssen says CIOs need to choose whether they want to be Batman or Robin. At the risk of offending as many CIOs as he did, I would suggest they think instead of Alfred. Yes, he held the job title of butler, which is more subservient a concept than most CIOs would want to entertain. But if anyone has seen the Batman movies or read the comic book they’ll know Alfred was much more than that. He project managed Bruce Wayne’s and Batman’s dual identity transitions, oversaw key technology resources and provided absolutely top notch delivery in a flexible, dynamic manner. Vendors and CIOs could learn a lot about how to set up an idea service level agreement by looking at Alfred’s role in Batman’s success.

It’s not about a choice of CIOs vs. CDOs, or being a butler versus being strategic. You can take orders and still provide strategic input in how they are carried out. This is what many CIOs have been doing for years. Most consumers and even industry observers now use enough consumer technology they think they know where the future is headed. Not enough of them have the slightest clue of the underlying technology that makes 90 per cent of work happen in companies today.

…and the initial impressions are that it looks much like Google+.

Current Google+

Most similar to the new Facebook News Feed is the toolbar. Google+ has about 8 items on the list. More options are available by clicking on the … icon.

On Google+, Local remains somewhat weak, and needs more user input and integration with friends to be of greater value. Having created a Google+ circle of imported Facebook friends, users from this circle are not differentiated from other circles.

Facebook New News Feed

Facebook New News Feed

Image Source: Engadget

As reported on the verge:

“What we’re trying to do is give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper,” Mark Zuckerberg said, before showcasing the social network’s revamped main product: an organized, sortable feed of every type of content from your friends and favorite content producers.

Facebook recognizes that to dominate the social network space once and for all, it cannot have users defecting to other sites. The site must remain the “go-to” and to be the first place to be at, to get the newest information.

The Takeaway

Much like Facebook Graph Search, News Feed relies on content. The updates do nothing to stem the decline in content. Users are simply getting bored.

The stickiness is still there for Facebook. The site will continue to grow its user base and will have the stickiness for family and closer friends to keep in touch. The refreshed News Feed also subdivides content into sound, audio-video, and photos. It is an extra step for users.

Competition will just keep growing. Sites like Tumblr, Pinterest, and twitter, by staying nimble and focused, will pose a challenge for Facebook. Search Giant Google+ is barely 2 years old and will eventually figure out a way to boost Hangouts as the killer app that makes G+ an even more compelling site to keep users on.

Every time I talk to a group of CIOs, as I did in Vancouver earlier this week, something comes up about social media, and even if they use Twitter a little, or even if they dabble in Facebook in their spare time, LinkedIn is the one service that makes almost immediate sense and on which almost all of them have established a rudimentary profile. Like many other business professionals, many CIOs have multiple positions listed on those profiles so far, with more to come as they inevitably move on to similar gigs, perhaps navigate between consulting or vendor jobs and back again, or take on board of director roles at their favourite charities. Over time, LinkedIn will contain a significant portion of their career history. As such it is what I will call a lifetime platform, owned solely by an independent entity.

Contrast that with the systems of record (let’s not even bother looking at systems of engagement right now, since most enterprise initiatives in that area will never hold a candle to the kind of loyalty LinkedIn enjoys) set up in the average organization. Employees may have profiles on the company intranet. They most certainly have a profile, with a minimum of job title and access privileges, which is managed by the IT department. There may be other systems they use, like Google Docs, Salesforce.com and so on, which has basic identifier information and activity history, but all these are either dumped or left to gather digital dust once employees move on. There is no life in these platforms, and they become more costly over time in part because they have such a limited span in which to provide value.

There are others besides LinkedIn, however, which are trying to build lifetime platforms. Recently I attended the commercial launch of Microsoft’s Office 365, where an IT executive with Queen’s University talked about the ongoing power of a post-secondary e-mail account. Now that these accounts are being offered in a more cloud-based or hosted environments, he foresaw graduates who take that e-mail account with them to continue connecting with their fellow alumni. That might sound a bit naïve, but I know plenty of people who continue to use their university e-mail addresses long after they’ve put on a cap and gown. School is a formative experience, which makes it a good place to offer a lifetime platform.

There was a time when the industry talked a lot about knowledge management and the desire to somehow retain those wonderful ideas, practices, and trade secrets of experienced and valued employees who left or retired. There were even some attempts to set up systems to capture this information. What they didn’t really offer was anything close to a lifetime platform which gave users a reason for immediately contributing and continuing to maintain their profile as they moved to other organizations. In some cases, of course, they couldn’t do this if someone moved to a competitor, but there is still an opportunity to track expertise, much like LinkedIn does today.

Facebook and Twitter might also become lifetime platforms, though the value of personal information will primarily be of greater interest to marketers. LinkedIn does a better job of capturing talent and achievements. CIOs and their teams may not develop such lifetime platforms themselves, but increasingly there will be a need to somehow integrate or search within them, either as part of human capital management (HCM) initiatives or just the ongoing work of getting answers to important business questions. Step one might be simply identifying the other lifetime platforms that are out there. Does your organization have the elements of one, or is there one in your industry? And more significantly, can you learn something from it to better meet the needs of a user for today, for tomorrow, or even forever?

I’ve never been a huge fan of reading online, even on a tablet, and I suffer from the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome with electronic documents.  I am not sure I would very well at university if all my textbooks were online.  I must even admit I still buy newspapers to read when my eyes get tired from looking at a computer screen (most of the time I’m the only one with a newspaper in the coffee shop).

Nevertheless, increasingly, the things I used to read on paper are now distributed only electronically or can only be accessed online.  The number of physical magazines in my home mailbox has decreased dramatically (the post office doesn’t like that, of course).  This includes both technical and personal interest magazines and newspapers.

On the other hand, it is now much easier to subscribe to all manner of things and many of them are free (so why wouldn’t you subscribe?).  These days I get tweets, Facebook postings (not just friends but news like Huffington Post), Google+ items, LinkedIn updates and articles, RSS feeds, emails (both pointers and advertising), PDFs and Web pages.  I would bet I receive over 500 “items” to read a day, with varying levels of interest and quality.  Often it’s hard to figure out how to un-subscribe!

For most of them I scan the heading and decide if I want to read the details.  With tweets, for example, many are just a pointer to a bigger article – if I am interested I then email the pointer to myself.  I wish I had a way to collect all the pointers from all the sources into a single sorted queue for later reading (or even printing).  I haven’t found an organizer app for that yet (although I bet they do exist) and so a lot of them get lost in my email flood, never to be seen again.

So, why did I say all this?  It was because I was asking myself whether anyone would ever read the whitepaper I am about to write (it will be about smart tools for a network CMDB).  If everyone is like me, it requires a really catchy title but ultimately gets filed for reading later (if I am lucky).

These days I download a lot of whitepapers that look interesting and relevant but I seldom get to read them right away.  Almost inevitably I get a phone call a day later from the vendor marketing person asking if I want to buy their product……and I will have forgotten I even downloaded the whitepaper!

Sum total – I am collecting more and more information, scanning a larger and larger number of headings, but really I am reading less than ever before.   Is this your experience too?

There was the Basi-Virk, or BC Rail, case in the Government of British Columbia. Key email records required for discovery by the courts couldn’t be found. (If it hadn’t been for a quick thinking IT person at the Ministry of Management Services remembering that they had backup tapes that might contain copies of the missing records, and that the recycling of tapes would mean that these would be overwritten soon [so get them out of the cycle now!], core evidence would have been lost.)

More recently, in Ontario, the legislative inquiry into the relocation of the gas-fired power plants has gone through multiple waves of document discovery, apparently because the search algorithms used didn’t take minor variations into account.

No organization likes to be on the receiving end of a legal process, but the reality is that most industries are regulated these days (banks, insurance companies, utilities and telecoms certainly are) even when they’re not in the public sector, and thus will be even if the enterprise is good at avoiding major lawsuits.

Courts, in turn, are getting increasingly frustrated with organizations who simply do mass data dumps (often at the last minute) because they can’t narrow down document requests properly in any reasonable length of time. So are utility commissioners, and other regulatory body members.

Given that our records these days are almost all electronic, and managed in IT systems of one sort or another, that means designing in the ability to find the right ones — and not a whole mass of extraneous ones — should be a part of what we build in from the get go.

In other words, these are use cases just as much as all the business process conditions we put into solutions are.

If, for instance, your solution architects and design teams don’t include people with information and records management and archiving know-how, you’ll likely make a hash of the use cases (or forget to include all the ones you should). Even in the most advanced organizations the IM, RM and Archivist teams are often apart from the rest of the IT-related parts of the organization. It’s past time to embed them in day-to-day affairs.

(Don’t forget to embed these skill sets into your procedure and policy development as well. Not every policy or procedure needs it, but then, not every one needs all the other skills of modern IT either. These information skills should be made available so that they can say “nothing for us here” rather than be overlooked out of old habits.)

Periodically the existing base of systems should be forced to undergo a test retrieval cycle, just as you undergo periodic disaster recovery tests, or other “proofs everything is working” processes. (You are doing these, right? — done well, they’re also part of building your data to buttress a business case to reduce key elements that make up Total Cost to Own and Operate (TCOO), or to help improve Actual Return on Investment Obtained (AROIO) on older implemented solutions.)

You may need to come forward with cases for some new tools — better enterprise search, for instance — that can be used to locate items more readily. These could even be entry points for a useful test bed for playing with some of the elements of big data (e.g. HADOOP for finding matching items by regularized expression) to build your capabilities for the future.

Finally, if you’re an enterprise like many other, where you’ve struggled to extract real value from your efforts with social tools — perhaps you’ve spent years trying to get SharePoint used as more than a glorified shared drive, for instance — working on the records question can help you come at getting value from social tools like wikis, forums, blogs, etc. internally in a different way. (Don’t also overlook the sound messages in Euan Semple’s Organizations don’t Tweet, People Do — this area is riddled with cultural change issues as well as information management concerns.)

The bottom line is clear: don’t wait until you have lawyers breathing down your back to find out whether you can find things in the petabytes or exabytes of data you have stored away (because you have to count not just what’s spinning in your shop, but what’s stored in offsite locations as well) in an effective and complete manner. Start building in the capability now.

• 5-inch display
• 1080p resolution on OLED display
• 2GB memory
• 13MP camera

The most distinguishing feature could be the ability to track a user’s eye to determine where to scroll (source: NYT).

The S4 competes well against Google’s Nexus 4, HTC One, and Blackberry 10. The Nexus 4 remains very difficult to beat on price. Quad-core powered, the device is 4.5-inches and has a 1280×768 display. Many users are extremely happy with it, despite S4 supposedly supporting a 1080p AMOLED screen. Leaked (albeit likely inaccurate) photos show a much thinner bezel.

Is a 5-inch phone getting to be too big? Samsung could very well need to get into the clothing industry, manufacturing pants to fit this mini-Galaxy Note phone.

Another challenge for S4 is that the company has a reputation of being slow in providing updates to the operating system. The added Samsung software slows down update cycles, which frustrates users who want to get updates quickly.

The S4 announcement on pi day will be still be exciting for Android users. Blackberry 10’s release may already have come and gone, Nexus 5 could be on the way, but HTC’s One announcement will be the release Samsung will need to outshine.