It’s important to know what you’re looking for, though, or you can destroy your credibility in a flash.

Take transit systems. “Are we doing a good job?” is a reasonable senior management preoccupation.

Vehicle trip times, and inspectors checking on whether they’re on time at midpoints, gives data today. It can help with bunching up problems (followed by long gaps), up to a point.

So more transit systems are turning to integrating Twitter feeds and other social media into their analysis. If people are tweeting about lousy service, it’s an indicator.

Here’s the gotcha, though: they don’t tweet about good service.

They also stop tweeting about poor service when they’ve given up the hope that it’ll make a difference. So silence could mean satisfaction — or sullenness.

The data feed won’t tell you which.

Likewise, with the internal data, everything could be making the numbers, but if the routes don’t serve the public well, or if the way the numbers are measured lets too much customer aggravation through, you can miss the picture.

The process of using the combination effectively is iterative — moreover, it should lead to revisions to what you set as standards to measure by.

Otherwise the big data effort simply leads to a false sense of security.

On the product and service side, too, there are pitfalls.

Research at Simon Fraser University done by Dr. Jian Pei and his students into mining big data has shown how, for instance, a travel service (airline or agency) could provide a much more tailored response to prioritize flight choices.

People care about cost (to a point), total trip time (to a point), frequent flyer bonuses (to a point) — the “best” flight has different characteristics depending on circumstances such as when you’re going and when you’ll arrive. It’s not as simple as “sort by price” or “sort by number of connections”.

“Learning” patrons’ patterns would allow the service to provide the best tailored option — and thus make this place the preferred place to purchase the flights.

Here, too, though, there’d be a need to move beyond the mining of patterns and get feedback mechanisms installed to “tune” the service.

“Good” is situational. A Western Canadian travelling East sees the trip quite differently from an Eastern Canadian travelling West (a function of time zones and connection points if they’re required — it’s not uncommon to have to fly over your destination and double back to save time in the West). Again, a learning and adjustment process would be required to maximize the value and make the service more than a novelty.

Big data’s promise, in other words, is also a source of its potential pitfalls, leading to a rejection of the whole idea later.

Much as happened, come to think of it, with data warehouses and business intelligence/performance management toolsets.

You’re going to have to consult with the business to make this work.

Related posts:

1. What is big data?
2. Does Your Organization Need Big Data?
3. Big Data is This $97 Billion Elephant in the Room

After attending a Gartner local briefing earlier this week, the limitations of how corporate data is structured is clear. This is not to say that Big Data will ever replace BI, ERP, or data warehouses. It is to say that Big Data will need to work alongside existing systems.

Gartner weighed in on Big Data, recognizing that unstructured data decentralizes the business analyst function in corporations. The Business Intelligence function is pushed outside of the IT unit to the business unit.

Corporations should anticipate that Big Data projects start as a proof of concept. The cost of Big Data software (Hadoop) is very low. The rising acceptance for open source software contributes to the low cost for Big Data implementation. Large volume, complex, loosely structured data are characteristics that would fit a Big Data project.

The growth in Big Data is illustrated with these recent developments:

1. Six government agencies in the US will be spending over $200 million to help find ways to store, analyze, and organize large data
2. The significantly lower costs of Big Data prototypes as compared to BI/ERP/Data Warehouses is creating jobs in this specialty
3. A Toronto hospital is using big data for the clinical detection of infections in premature infants

Big Data is getting a dose of legitimacy, through the participation of large IT companies. Microsoft acquired Fast Search and Transfer in 2008, making the tool available in its SharePoint. HP acquired Anatomy (although paying a significant premium), a company based in the U.K. Oracle acquired Endeca. Endeca provides tools for managing unstructured data. The company also supports web commerce and BI. EMC has a tool, Lucene Solr, to support text analytics.

Despite acquiring Cognos many years ago, IBM is building its own BI tool for Big Data. The company chose to organize its tool in the format of a tabbed spreadsheet for linked analysis.

Further discussion: where is your company at with Big Data? 

Related posts:

1. Big Data is This $97 Billion Elephant in the Room
2. What is big data?
3. Suppose You Didn’t Need Big(ger) Data

The addition of “big data” to the IT pool can be countered by a thought experiment.

Suppose not only that we don’t need “big data” — suppose we don’t need all the data we have?

Take a look at the headline on Sigurd Ringe’s blog (he’s the founder of Thingamy): “Here’s 30 megs – now go run Germany”.

30 megs? These days, that’s a few emails with spreadsheets and a presentation attached.

How could you run all the business operations of a company in a country of 81.7 million people in only 30 megs?

What Ringe’s getting at is the idea of asking “what do we really need?” to accomplish something. If you need 30 petabytes instead of 30 megabytes, that’s fine. But every bit of data should be useful.

That means it has a payback.

Too often, we collect things because the applications we bought store them. Or we keep it “just in case”. Or we think that when we analyse it something good will be produced.

But we don’t know.

Meanwhile, most of us are constantly cleaning out our mailboxes and finding our shared drives and personal document stores on servers full, while terabyte after terabyte is filled with data waiting for someone to use it.

In most enterprises, people don’t analyse in new ways, looking for new patterns, or new opportunities.

They run the same reports over and over — look for a few bits of information in them — and ignore the rest.

Moving mounds of printout to virtual presentation on screens hasn’t changed that behaviour.

Yet that’s precisely what needs to change, before an enterprise can get value from an investment in big data. Or, indeed, in the data it already has.

I’m aware that some elements are retained solely to deal with matters of compliance or reporting. If you’re not going to use them, do they need prime real estate?

I’m also aware that today’s databases don’t usually support the idea that this record is immediately available, but this other record is somewhere in a cloud … or stored on a tape that we’ll have to retrieve and mount.

So there are practical limits to how close to “we only keep what we’ll actually use” can go.

Still, freeing up even a little bit of the mounds we keep today would allow for reassignment of that to the “personal” and “group” pools. Keep you from wasting hours clearing your mailbox, or deciding what to delete on a server so you store the work you’ve done today.

IT generally makes things available — but if IT were in the business of follow-through, working with its clients in the enterprise to see to it that they had the skill not only to use the technology, but to do something with the information, there’d be a lot of value generated.

In fact, that’s what has to happen for big data to ever pay off for your enterprise.

Related posts:

1. What is big data?
2. Big Data is the start of Systemless Information
3. Does Your Organization Need Big Data?

Yes, a new wave of “this is good; I read about it on my last flight” is about to hit.

That says to me that we should be preparing the way now: you might not rush to implement huge data collections and analysis tools today, but you should think through how you’ll handle them, at least.

Some open source methods will help on the technical side. What about the policy framework?

After all, there are a lot of data warehouses and business intelligence tool implementations that got a bad rap. “We built it, but they didn’t come.” Or, at the very least, it’s not used in the ways that were envisaged.

The challenges of big data are threefold:

How Much is Too Much? is a question that needs to be asked and answered before someone’s favourite project gets pushed on you. Just because more is available, it’s not always a help. We’re all used to situations where multiple metrics for a function are defined, and they end up telling us simultaneously that all is well and that there are serious problems. More for the sake of more is similar.

This means setting some ground rules about analysis — because while infrastructure’s a lot cheaper than it used to be, it’s not free. It may also require that you have a competency centre ready to help people accomplish their goals, rather than stumble around on their own.

How Prepared are we to Trust This? is another question of principle that has to be decided before investing a lot of time and money into big data solutions. Some organizations simply don’t trust any external data: if they didn’t create it themselves, it’s automatically suspect. (Some departments don’t trust other departments in the same way: you should know in advance if that’s a problem.)

Likewise, handling masses of data often requires new presentation methods. If you’re one of those enterprises where spreadsheets rule, a three dimensional visualization of billions of data points where you look for signals and clusters simply won’t be believed if presented — yet, often, that’s how to present results effectively. (If you’d like to test some reactions, see some of the outputs from SenseMaker, the toolset used by Cognitive Edge practitioners to handle masses of textual data.)

What Counts as Success? is the third key question. There’s always a temptation to do another analysis — and to require that every analysis traverse all the available data. Neither is necessary: there’s a point where you should have enough confidence in the results to stop the process. How do you figure that out? Who says “that’s it: deal with it”? What risks, in other words, is the enterprise willing to bear?

These are business governance decisions that impinge heavily on IT governance, and the process of building and running an IT Governance Board is very well suited to answering these questions and setting business policy for the use of big data before you’re in the throes of working with it.

Related posts:

1. In 5 Years, THEY will be Your Challenge

However, a Google search returns over 1 billion results….. I’m not reading all of those!

Is Wikipedia the good place to turn to for help?  Wikipedia says (in part):

Big data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.

And to quote an IBM website:

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.

It seems like there’s definitely a market for all this data out there and it’s easy to believe that the demand is growing, especially given the kinds of data we’re now able to accumulate!  Imagine how much data Google and Facebook process daily.

I can see the day coming when today’s big data is considered normal and really big data will be orders of magnitude larger than today.  How much data would we need to record our whole life’s events?  Is there an end to the amount of data?

There are always a few other, more immediate questions:

• Do we need that much data in order to make acceptable decisions?
• Will we be using data owned by many different parties or do we need to collect it all ourselves?
• Can we trust “communal” data and will it cost money to access?
• Will we suffer from ever increasing problems with “analysis paralysis”?
• How long do we need to keep all the raw data?
• What new security and privacy issues will we need to overcome?
• Can these mountains of data be cost-effectively collected, analyzed, managed and retained?

I don’t have answers to these questions but I am sure there are many people working through them.  The real key is finding ways to keep costs low, and to make a good business case.

Related posts:

1. Big Data is This $97 Billion Elephant in the Room
2. Does Your Organization Need Big Data?
3. Big Data is the start of Systemless Information

Here’s why: evidence-based policy formation.

We’re all aware that the public sector is facing a squeeze. Governments in deficit need to return to balanced budgets, perhaps even return to retiring past debt (in Ontario, for instance, the “Ministry of Debt Servicing”, with its single program — pay interest on the province’s accumulated debt — is the third largest ministry by spending, and closing in fast on number two).

That means there’s little money or appetite for redirecting some for a massive project.

Yet, at the same time, it’s the public sector who’s best placed to have some early big data wins.

Municipally, there’s a constant debate about traffic flows and patterns. Should streets be one way, or two? Should a lane be taken away for bicycles, or not?

Instrument the roads involved with traffic counters, measure for a few months, implement the change, measure again.

Now you know what the effects are.

You may be asking yourself, “but what does this have to do with IT?”

As with BYOD, big data heralds a core transition in IT work. It becomes less about business processes and efficient operations (they still matter, but a lot of that work is done) and more about value generation.

You want to partner with your business colleagues in the enterprise, you need to bring ideas to their table. Ideas that don’t assert an outcome, but show how it can be tested relatively quickly and inexpensively.

IT gets to learn about the tools and techniques needed to do this repeatedly. The business area gets hard data they can slice and dice in many different ways to do their job.

In the public sector, that’s policy recommendations.

Imagine a City Council that could be taken through minute by minute ebbs and flows on a change, see waves of traffic move through streets.

Imagine seeing as well whether the usual fear — if I change this street, the next street over gets the overflow — is real or not.

For, with traffic, sometimes that is what happens — and sometimes the traffic just melts away. People find other ways to get around than driving a car.

IT’s contribution has simply been to be able to put facts on the table. The policy work happened where it should, in the business. But they can defend their recommendation, not with opinions from consultants, but with data.

Start small. Pick a target. Keep it cheap and simple. Build your expertise.

Delivering wins will help keep the dollars that are available flowing into IT, because you’ve shown you produce results with them. Isn’t that what you want?

Big data could be the public sector’s time to shine.

Related posts:

1. Leading a Transformation
2. Public Safety Canada Daily Infrastructure Report
3. Big Data is This $97 Billion Elephant in the Room

I was pleasantly surprised to see that he is making news with a whitepaper he wrote last year.  It is called “Systems of Engagement and The future of Enterprise IT – A Sea change in Enterprise IT” and it was developed for AIIM, the information management industry association.  An introduction to his thinking is also available from HP videos.

I suspect that the concept of “systems of engagement,” which complement and supplement the traditional “systems of record” that have been the focus of IT in the past, may be one of the driving forces for the topics we are discussing in blogging idol this year.  One of the key observations is the importance and complexity of content management in this emerging new “consumerized” frontier for IT.  I think the whitepaper basically agrees with some of our conclusions from last week’s BYOD blogs.

If the hypothesis is that a whole new wave of IT is coming at us, then it is reasonable to ask (and believe) that BYOD, Big Data, Cloud Computing and other developments are really underpinnings that we will need in order to realize the future of IT (we used to call this a “paradigm shift” I believe).

Two questions:

• How many of you believe that Geoffrey Moore is right with his latest thinking?
• How many of you believe there will be gorilla’s (see Moore’s earlier works) – ie., winners and losers – in the realization of  ”systems of engagement” ?

Related posts:

1. CRM: Customer engagement challenges lay beyond Technology

How might you think about whether or not you need to jump onto the big data bandwagon?

What’s your enterprise’s business model?

There are many highly successful organizations that simply don’t need to do a lot of new analytics to succeed. Mostly these are competing on price or efficiency, have a limited number of customers, or are otherwise engaged in the business of constraint.

These really don’t need the kind of market-finding, opportunity-seeking, or mass interaction analyses that a big data approach would bring.

But we have a lot of data!…

Some enterprises naturally collect masses of data, and so it may look like there’s an opportunity waiting to be found in it.

If you told me you had masses of movement data (retail sensors that showed you the movement of people through your chain of stores), coupled with RFID data that showed which items had been moved, to then be coupled with your point-of-sale information, I’d agree. There would be real opportunities in space planning, adjusting the merchandise mix, considering staffing levels and the like to be had.

If you told me you had reams of radar traces for aircraft movement, I’d be less likely to agree. Yes, you have a lot of data, but it’s unlikely to lead you anywhere useful.

Details from switches in a telecom environment — the inputs to call detail reporting — probably fall somewhere in-between. Yes, you’d have some insight as to when a switch or cellular base station may be facing overload, but the infrastructure investment cycle is driven by other factors (work scheduling, depreciation, available capital) that will overrule what the data may show. (This is why you can have “dying zones” on certain routes with the cellular system for months on end.)

Then, too, there are petabytes and exabytes of data created in medical records, especially with test results and images — but what tends to matter there is being able to retrieve a specific record when needed, rather than to analyse the pool seeking opportunities. (The medical research community will subset the data for specific classes of information before beginning their analyses, shrinking the pool dramatically.)

Where Big Data does matter

Fundamentally, big data matters most when the analysis leads to new products, new services, or significant changes in the way the enterprise does things. You want to invest in what big data takes — different tools, a different way of thinking about data, concerns about the operational environment, etc. — because the payback will be a steady stream of value-generating opportunities.

That’s why the decision to do big data is an executive-level one best handled at Governance Board level. The commitment to put the results to work is an enterprise-changing one.

If your enterprise can’t make those calls — you shouldn’t be in big data.

Related posts:

1. Big Data is the start of Systemless Information
2. Big Data is This $97 Billion Elephant in the Room
3. Why Open Data Keeps You Relevant

As defined on Wikipedia, Big data is defined as consisting of “data sets that grow so large and complex that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools.”

When Facebook entered social networks at a time when MySpace and Friendster were the dominant players, how did the company grow hundreds of millions of users each year, as its competitors network choked due to heavy data loads?

Minutes spent on a mobile device exceeded the time spent on the desktop with Facebook’s users recently. The data load on Facebook servers just keeps growing.

Facebook successfully managed big data analytics by using Hadoop/Hive, which is a complicated system that does not achieve real-time goals. As of September 2011, the site handled 200,000 events per second. Users will be most familiar with “Like.” This interaction is central to Facebook’s analytics. Facebook stores these events in memory and acts as a short-term primary data store. Long-term data is stored on disk.

A simplistic model for a complicated system.

While the valuation of Facebook will be the main focus in the days and weeks ahead, the company’s contribution to technology is  the real-time analytics of big data deserves special attention. Its role in monetizing consumer “likes” for advertisers will take a back seat, but the infrastructure is already there to be figured out.

Related posts:

1. Big Data is the start of Systemless Information
2. Is LinkedIn Worth 9 Billion Dollars?
3. Why Open Data Keeps You Relevant

Part of this is a chicken-and-egg problem: they don’t have a specific request to respond to, yet, that needs a big data infrastructure to drive it, and they don’t have the resources within IT to build that infrastructure out to produce some big data experiments they can use to “what if” with the business.

The other part is what the IT folk hear about big data: it requires massively parallel capabilities, blows the doors off their relational database managers, requires them to think differently about data.

So a lot of the championing of big data as a source of business insight is coming from the vendor community, and IT’s feeling a little pushed around — again.

Set all that to one side, just for a moment. What’s really happening here?

What big data means to the IT organization is the divorce between the systems that some data flows through and the overall information resources of the enterprise.

It’s a key signal of a core transition (along with social business and a few other trends) from IT as process-centric to IT as information-centric.

Or, to put it another way, a shift from IT as emphasizing the “T” of technology over the “i” of information, to emphasizing the “I” of information over the “t” of technology.

Both still matter, but their weights change.

In the “I” world, IT thinks of the information assets of the enterprise as a unit. Systems dip in and out of the pool. But we stop talking about the individual parts.

There’s also a lot of other information in that pool that isn’t associated in any way with any of the existing application systems being run. Some comes from RFID sensors, some from an Internet of Things, some from the social world, some from external sources (purchased inputs), some from plant-floor devices … it’s a long list.

Also embedded in this set of assets are intermediate data objects, or partially-processed entities. Maybe you’re able to collect radar data from around the country. You might assemble these traces into records of flights moving through the sky. For some purposes I may need the raw data still, for many others I may need the consolidations. These intermediate data objects are processed solely to facilitate analysis. (Another example is in billing details: I might pre-assemble days of activity, or types of activity, to avoid chewing through all the details every time.)

Yes, enough data can take us out of our existing infrastructure and the database technologies we’ve established skills in. Smart thinking about masses and consolidations — and getting an information studies-trained information architect and information manager working with database people and EA-trained architects — can get you going.

Going enough, with what you have, to do a few demos, potentially add a little value, get started with the business.

CEOs want value from information. Big data is how IT will deliver.

Related posts:

1. Why Open Data Keeps You Relevant
2. Open Data and disclosures, or Beware of the leopard
3. Are You a Data Hoarder?

By then, everyone who works in a knowledge worker type of role — one that requires credentials, degrees, etc. — is responsible for their own tools.

Instead of having technology provided to them, they get an allowance (which, of course, they are free to supplement).

Only people who do routinized work — which could be the examiner in an auto insurer’s claims centre, the front-line customer service person in a bank, or an accounts payable clerk, to take but three — still have their technology provided to them.

And, although some of it may look like a standard piece of technology, it’s really a configured device in an Internet of Things, and not used as a general-purpose computer any longer. Just like a store that uses a PC as a cash register, or a piece of medical testing equipment that does.

That’s because even these folks have their phone in their pocket — and that’s enough for office communications (mail, calendars, documents).

Why would we want everyone to bring their own technology?

Simple: we want them to bring their tools.

The construction trades have had workmen bring their tools — tools they own — to the job for years. In turn, the worker has selected each item in that toolbox to be “just right” for them.

For a knowledge worker, the tools are templates, macros, prior work product, files, and the customization done to make toolbars and machines work “just right for me”.

IT tends to focus a lot on the loss of control over business data.

But it’s a two-way street. We hire people because they not only have paper credentials, but because they have experience.

They’ve solved a problem like ours for a previous employer. We want access to that.

But we’re not entitled to seize their working documents that they’ve carried from position to position, just as they’re not allowed under intellectual property considerations to simply pass off prior work for another firm as work done for us.

Still, tell me you never use last year’s document to set up this year’s. That you always build everything from scratch. That you repeat yourself constantly.

We’ll accept diversity — of devices, of tools, of methods — in order to get results faster, and that have had their internal logic errors somewhat cleaned up through repeated use and testing.

It’s why we need to think now about how to encrypt, dynamically authenticate access, build in self-purging where necessary. Why private clouds to hold the data on company assets usable through shared documents might be a better answer.

Some of the top consultants you hire always work this way. Coming soon: a much larger base of employees.

Better set your architecture team to work imagineering alternatives and roadmaps toward them. There’s a lot of work between here and there.

Related posts:

1. BYOO – Bring Your Own Opinions
2. Is IT demonstrating it is BYOD “with it”?
3. Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 3 – Desktop Computers

Unlike the survey we posted for our readers — which offered the options to ban, allow or negotiate over BYOD — there are more shades of grey than anticipated. (For those of you who are curious, view the poll results here and comment below on whether you’re surprised or it panned out exactly the way you thought it would, Kreskin.)

Next week, we’re moving on to the subject of Big Data. There’s a lot of angles to take:

* Does this have legs, or is it a marketing flash in the pan? Is this just data mining by another name, or is it an entirely different kettle of fish?

* What’s the use-case — really? Considering the huge investments required, who can big data work for, and under what circumstances?

* Ever given any thought to the notion that maybe we’re collecting more data than we can actually use?

* Has big data reinvigorated the open source movement?

Looking forward to what our bloggers have to say next week.

Related posts:

1. What is BYOD – and is it strategic?
2. BYOD: Blackberry Fusion
3. BYOD: The solution is Service Management

It’s generally application-centric, not service-centric.

The infrastructure that was used to support is is likewise composed of monolithic blocks.

We’ve changed mainframes for servers for virtualized servers, and we’ve changed terminals for PCs, but “one size still fits all”.

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement — and its corresponding use of public assets as services — suggests an architectural moment of destiny.

Stop thinking packages. Think only of services.

Stop thinking monolithic delivery systems. Think only of how to get the service running.

With that kind of thinking, how would you renovate your asset portfolio?

What would the roadmap be to being the supplier of information anywhere, anytime, anyway you can get it?

In the early days, a lot of this will probably be done with remote logins, remote desktops and the like.

Then apps may front end the back end for a while. Dynamic dashboards might expose information stores.

There’d be a sense that the enterprise is “coming together”. It’s no longer this system over here and that system over there and communications separate from all of them.

They start to blend — and without having to put all your eggs in one vendor’s basket.

Sure, this is a decade-long change. You’ve got depreciation to work off, mods in packages to undo, conversion efforts galore.

There’s all sorts of practices in the enterprise to change, too. Business areas won’t “own” applications any longer. They won’t control upgrade cycles the way they do now.

So you’ll have governance practices to build that run investments for the good of the whole but transparently and openly.

Along the way, Information Technology starts to put more and more emphasis on the first word — Information. Making it available, organized, easy to use, useful in everyday work.

The back end will be a mashup of “x as a service”, platforms, bridging code, some packages (although you may choose only to use some pieces from them and ignore the rest of their functionality), all kept current and integrated.

Up front, this presents itself in a sea of access apps on devices. For people with routine desk jobs, those devices may still be PCs. For most of the rest, they’ll be fit for purpose — and often duplicated (my phone will do what my pad will do what my ultralight laptop will do). “Use what makes sense now.”

There’s a lot of potential in this for IT. A lot of fear, too.

Still, doesn’t your organization deserve the best from this brave new world?

Related posts:

1. Theme: The Mobile Revolution
2. So You’d Like Some Limits on BYOD…
3. Governing in the BYOD age is different

To put it in different terms, this is really just the Service Management discussion that was introduced with ITIL in a different form.  What we need to do is understand that our users don’t care about Outlook, or Exchange or any of the servers, protocols other back ground issues.  They care about getting their e-mails, accessing the ERP, or and printing from where ever they are, with the device in hand.  I.e. they care about the service, not the method of delivery.

Looking at this chart describing how to build a service catalogue.  Let’s be clear, your users care about what is in RED, the service, nothing else.

The “business” cares about the next 2 levels, and everything below that is the IT department’s view of the world.  We need to step out of that view and look at the problem from the users view.

So lets take another look at BOYD in that light.  Do your user say they want BYOD, or do they simply want e-mail on their own device? IT does deliver E-mail as a service right? So instead of offering BYOD and all the complexity that comes with it, simply give them the services they are asking for using your existing tools!

In our case, we exposed our Exchange server through the Microsoft provide web-mail interface years ago.  Since I’m already exposing my e-mail system with the approval of senior management, what’s to say I can’t expose it to non-traditional PC devices.  To do this all I had to do reconfigure the web-mail server and turn on the included ActiveSync features and allow any device to read e-mail.  I use our normal e-mail archiving processes to limit how long mail can be in a mailbox (<90 days) to restrict the amount of data that can be exposed with the device.  There is still a data leakage risk, but it is identical to my existing BlackBerries and laptops if they go missing, so it is not a new risk.  And since ActiveSync includes tools to kill individual device access if one is reported missing, I don’t even need to introduce any 3rd party tools for device management.  The only hard part was introducing a code of conduct where users need to have a password on their device to meet our security requirements, but honestly who doesn’t these days.  A few FAQ articles on our intranet site and guess what, I meet my compliance targets, I’m as secure as I was with my BlackBerries and I’m now delivering “e-mail as a service”.   It really is that easy.

The key here is to realize you are only responsible for exposing an existing API interface in the products you ALREADY HAVE IN PLACE.

Don’t believe me it is that simple, well here is another example.

If you want to give users the ability to run software on their own device, then simply provide remote RDP access to their workstation in the office and get them to use Jump Desktop or basic Windows RDP through the Microsoft  Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway).  Again, a free service you already own, that ties directly into Active Directory for security you already have in place, and that can run on the same server as your Web-Mail interface.  In under a few hours you move from saying NO to delivering Desktop as a Service to all your users, on any platform.

With the above configuration, I manage the user’s internal desktops per normal, and the only thing I need to do is give them RDP access rights to their own machines.  Talk about a quick win.  My staff now have easy remote access to do their jobs.  Sell it as part of your DR/BC plan for an epidemic or weather related event if you need to convince anyone.  Trust me on this one.  When you say you can deliver desktop as a service for no cost, you will get people turning their heads.

Now want to allow them to use their MAC or IPAD in the office?  Well again, it is simple.  Go to your AP and configure it with an VLAN and a public SSID.  Tie that VLAN to a port on your firewall DMZ and you have now delivered BYOD with zero complexity.  Users can use any device they want, the key is it is not on your internal network.  The tools you use to deliver it externally work just as well internally.

The key here is understanding that you are charged with “service delivery”.  Go back and take a good look at your ITIL service catalogue, layer the existing services, and technologies and you can deliver your BYOD solutions  by morning.  You can thank me tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. BYOD: Blackberry Fusion
2. Hello World 5.0: Blackberry is Still BYOD and Well
3. Digitization and cost management

I studied engineering at university, so I always like to define and analyze things.  I think I’ll stay true to form for my first blogging idol post on BYOD…..

Just how do you define BYOD, anyways? Apparently, there are three parts to consider:

B = Bring          YO = Your Own           D = Device      Working backwards…..

“Device” is pretty general and not very limiting.  It could cover pretty much everything from a basic phone to a camera, although I suppose people usually think of a smartphone first.  Ooops, these devices can be cameras, dictating machines, scanners, geo-locators, pedometers, journals, radios, TVs, and so on.  We don’t usually think of a desktop PC as a BYOD-compliant device, however.

“Your Own” should be pretty obvious – it belongs to you, or at least the hardware does.  But what about the applications and the data?  Especially the data – you don’t want to mix personal data with company data!  If you are travelling in the USA, can they seize the data stored in your “Device” under the Patriot Act?  The device ideally needs to be virtualized to keep things in separate partitions.  What about special devices, such as the little devices that couriers use to get your signature – you would never want to own one of those, would you?  What happens if you don’t want to add business apps to your personal phone – can BYOD be made into a condition of employment?

“Bring” would suggest the ability to move the device easily and use it wherever you are.  I can just imagine trying to use a desktop PC in your car.  Taking that a step further, if you are using a business app on your smartphone in your car, and you have an accident, is that a workplace accident?  Does BYOD make your office be anywhere, anytime?

A few more complications:

• If the company wants to back up the device (to a cloud?) then should it only be the business part of the device or all of it?
• If the company wants to upgrade the operating system, but there are personal apps that break, who is responsible for fixing them?
• How do you divide the network costs between business and personal use?  Or should the person or company pay for everything?
• If you have a home office and you “bring” your desktop MAC to it, isn’t that BYOD too?
• If you are a BYOD user, can you “turn off” the company part when you are on personal time?

I’m sure there are many more things to consider.  What I conclude, however, is that the life of an “IT guy” is not simple.   You need to try to answer a lot of questions in addition to simply deciding which brands of device are acceptable on the corporate network.

Related posts:

1. BYOD: Blackberry Fusion
2. Limits on BYOD
3. So You’d Like to Stop BYOD in its Tracks?

In a BYOD world, IT needs to earn back credibility with the rest of the enterprise.

So, do IT people in your organization show up to meetings with their devices?

I’m not talking here about leading the charge to diversity. I’m talking about coming as an equal.

You have your pad, smartphone or ultralight wireless machine right there on the table.

You know how to use it — and you use it in helpful ways right in the meeting.

It’s loaded with necessary diagrams, facts and figures, useful tools.

You’ve made your repositories easily accessible on the fly.

You’ve got micro-decks ready to go to explain policy, standards, etc. — and your hookup cable is in your pocket.

And … and this is most important … you know how to leave the technology alone.

You’re not checking your email constantly through the meeting. You take notes in the fastest way (which might well be pen-and-paper).

Nothing like having taken paper notes for an hour, then using the camera to image the page into a scanning/character recognition app.

It shows you value your time, and theirs — and understand how to integrate the electronic world with the physical.

IT professionals ought to be the masters of technology and how to be most productive with it. (It’s the unstated assumption every business colleague holds.)

Few IT organizations equip their people for this, set up the IT work environment to support it, or train their staff in how to handle client interactions for maximum effect.

Getting your business colleagues to take direction (in an era when bucking your reins is cheap and easy) comes from credibility and respect, not from policies and enforcement.

These interactions are also opportunities to plant more seeds to bind the business closer to IT.

Are you, for instance, using a wiki for project status and reporting rather than word processing documents? The idea of a team document may spark other ideas when they see you actively using these methods.

Are you, for instance, a user of information during meetings, to deal in facts rather than memories or opinions? Do you quickly Google when you need to, run a query to get data, have dashboards and other business tools at your fingertips.

Most IT organizations have practically nothing to buttress their case in real time, and the point of BYOD for the business is real-time access to facts and knowledge.

If you can show that the IT organization is a 21st century business, your views carry more weight. You get willing followers of the directions you set.

You’ll control without having to exert control.

The BYOD phenomenon could revolutionize IT — if you get “with it”.

Related posts:

1. So You’d Like to Stop BYOD in its Tracks?
2. Governing in the BYOD age is different
3. Apps are IT’s route to BYOD-era “direction setting”

Mobile Fusion expands BYOD in the workplace, but some companies are balking at the licensing cost. If device support grows, RIM may have an opportunity to increase service revenues. Further, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said he was open to licensing Blackberry 10 (BB10).

BB10 is considered a wild card for RIM, when it is released later this year. Its success will not be known until a few quarters after its release. This means it will not be until late-2013, or when Blog Idol 6.0 is “released” in the wild, when it will be known if the system will be successful.

(Image Source: crackberry.com)

Until BB10 is launched, expect the discussion of BYOD to centre around other platforms, such as Android or Apple. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 might even make the list. Blackberry’s current OS 7.1 should be expected to face steep declines this year. It will sell at a price that is heavily discounted.

Related posts:

1. Hello World 5.0: Blackberry is Still BYOD and Well
2. So You’d Like Some Limits on BYOD…
3. So You’d Like to Stop BYOD in its Tracks?

Not the “how do we turn this to our advantage?” side — the “how do we put the clamps on this?” side.

There are organizations — a few — where having to have iron-clad control is essential to the enterprise’s success.

There are also organizations — sadly, many — where the idea of loosening control is just not thinkable, at least yet.

So how might you put the genie back in the bottle?

Well, you’d have to start by issuing mobile technologies to anyone who wanted them. Gone would be the day of “only people of a certain rank” get them, or “only people with an approved case” get them.

When you can go to the mall, stop by the phone kiosk, and walk out with a fully functional smartphone for less than $100 and less than $50 a month, all the bureaucracy of business assets just got turned on its head.

So unionized staff will be carrying technology just like managers do; clerks will have it just like executives do.

At least if you make it a universal tool you can buy in bulk and standardize on one model, right?

Well, no — because every vendor refreshes their product line at least three times faster than contract lengths. One vendor is about as good as it will get.

Then you’re going to have to lock down the devices so that people can’t download from app stores? Think again.

Remember the person who bought an iPhone or Android phone while still carrying his “official” BlackBerry? It was the app store that drove that purchase.

So, if you’re going to lock down the app stores, you’re going to have to offer all the apps people need anyway, either written in house or approved from the store and part of your standard configuration.

That puts you in the Facebook, Twitter, news reader, etc. business just as much as it might put you in the Salesforce.com client business.

But, at least you’re in control of the data on the device, right?

Think again: people will buy their own device to have access to their personal email account, contacts, etc.

So you’ll have to let them configure those on their device to keep the others at bay. But now you’ve got the problem of combined data: theirs, and yours.

You’ll also be installing WiFi everywhere, because you won’t like the cellular service bills if you let everyone default constantly to the network.

By the time you’ve achieved the control, you look a lot like the shop that simply learned how to live with device diversity.

Except that every time you’ve decided what people will carry, or how they can use it, you’ve made enemies.

The other shop? They’re at least neutral — perhaps even made a few allies.

If it were me, I’d yield early, and turn it to my advantage. Technology is now a personal matter.

Related posts:

1. So You’d Like Some Limits on BYOD…
2. Apps are IT’s route to BYOD-era “direction setting”
3. Governing in the BYOD age is different

On BYOD:

Research in Motion’s decline is not a new story. It is in fact an old one that was a point of discussion in the first year of blogging idol. When RIM released the Torch, it was clear that the company viewed itself as capable of coming back. RIM failed to recognize the rapid growth of Apple, mobile applications, and tablets.

Apple blind-sighted  the traditional mobile device market by extending smart phones as being beyond emails, weakening RIM in the process. By the end of 2011, Apple’s iPad was the tablet market.

While it is believed that Apple decimated its competition, Android will prove to be the superior ecosystem. Google’s Android is lowering the price point across many channels. Once Android figures out how to get its updates to devices more quickly (“Ice Cream Sandwich” 4.0 is available but not widely installed), Apple will find it more difficult to dominate.  As Android and Apple battle, where does this leave RIM?

RIM allowed its competition to entrench on its turf for three reasons:

1. Weak browser

2. Few applications

3. Weak tablet offering

BB Jam 2012 addresses RIM’s issues. Delivery for BB 10 remains the biggest risk for RIM, along with an iPhone 5 release concurrent to RIM’s release date.

The upside from the BB Jam  event was:

1. Entrenching development around BBM – Blackberry Messenger – Integration

2. Allocating $100 million to attract developers

3. Building development tools that plagued past challenges of building on Blackberry

4. Ensuring hardware is on-par or ahead of consumer demands

With sufficient cash, stable tablet sales, and steady smart phone sales overseas, RIM’s transition to a more functional BB10 system means RIM can still prove why it was once a leader, and why it can become one again a year or two again in the future.

Related posts:

1. Apps are IT’s route to BYOD-era “direction setting”
2. So You’d Like Some Limits on BYOD…
3. RIM BlackBerry OS 6.0 too Little, too Late?

Direction setting is less volatile. Yet it gets you to the same places.

In an era where the power and elegance of mobile devices has launched an irretrievable move toward “I want it … and I shall have it”, how can IT bring a little order into the chaos?

Simple: get into the app business.

Your first order of business, if you haven’t already done it, is universal WiFi on company property.

Naturally, that network will be protected … but it needn’t (and shouldn’t) be closed.

Protection is a direction people can get behind. Closing it, restricting what can be accessed, is a step too far.

The world will not come to an end because someone can access Facebook or Twitter, or a Socialtext site.

Now, start delivering useful apps.

Think of these as throw-aways. Lightweight, simple, enough to get the job done. Get them out fast, don’t put a lot of money into them.

These are expenses, not capital investments.

With universal WiFi, people will carry their devices everywhere. So your apps serve that need.

“I need a meeting room” … “I need a projector” … “I need the sales numbers”.

A Find-A-Room app, a Where’s-the-Tools app, and a minimal focused dashboard app should be your responses.

Now, given that these are quick-and-dirty apps, it’s understandable that you’re not delivering them for everything.

So you do them for the most common device(s) only. You act like a real mobile application developer, and follow the market.

That market, by the way, is iOS first (iPhone/iPad), then an Android distribution, with RIM and Windows Mobile as afterthoughts.

Why iOS over Android when there’s supposed to be more Android out there? Real vendors know that iOS users are more likely to pay. Apple, in turn, has tools for corporate app distribution.

iOS also comes in only one flavour: within a week of a new version of iOS shipping, over 90% of all devices world-wide have upgraded. There are Android devices shipping today that are running 2.2, 2.3, 3.0 and 4.0. iOS comes in two form factors — phone, and pad. Android hardware comes in a variety of screen sizes, with much supplier user interface code involved.

In other words, iOS lets you get a quality product out the door, get a little respect … oh, and guide your internal market a bit.

“But we’re a BlackBerry shop”, you might say? Better pound RIM into submission, then. They don’t make any of this easy for you.

Besides, your business colleagues dumped their BlackBerry devices for that shiny new iOS or Android one they’re carrying.

You get to set direction by being useful to your internal market.

Which fight do you want to fight? … or would you rather evolve and win?

Related posts:

1. So You’d Like Some Limits on BYOD…
2. Governing in the BYOD age is different
3. Limits on BYOD

The new look and feel for Blogging Idol is really interesting, although it took me a while to realize that it looks best when you use compatibility mode in IE9 .  Once I figured that out I was good to go.  And now I also realize I better edit my own posts – my typing isn’t the best!

I’ll be back again soon, and I hope we’ll have some lively and interesting discussions over the next few weeks!  And maybe it will be BYOO for BYOD and all the other topics to come!  And at the end, the tradition is we won’t have to think about BYOB (bring your own bottle) when they announce the winners!

No related posts.

Well realistically it is no different than what made the personal computer so special as compared to the mainframe.  It’s the personal part.

At the core of any iDevice (iPod/iPad/iPhone/iTV) is not so much the hardware, as it is the ability to customized a device to my specific personal needs and tastes.

The personal computer was always about taking a device and tailoring it to your personal needs, something many of us forgot.  Back in the days of Visicalc and Word Perfect, the PC allowed you to run the query and computations/reports you wanted, or produce the document you wanted with fonts other than Times New Roman / Helvetica.  Believe it or not that was big news and the reason most people fought to get their hands an a PC, any PC.  Both of these items were something the mainframe could never do.  Hell just to install software on a mainframe you needed a degree, so who cared about what the output looked like.

The PC however allowed just about anyone with “some” level of experience to install and customize the machine and data to their needs.  It was never easy but it was possible.  Windows was the first step, but Windows as good as it was/is, is not about personal.  It is more like the Ford philosophy that you can have any colour you want as long as it is black.

As the PC progressed however it became these personalization add-ons; Harvard Graphics then PowerPoint, Visio, Publisher etc that allowed us to express our personality that drove the growing sales.  It was never the access to the ERP (SAP/ORACLE/JD Edwards), but that need to do something different and innovative.  To consume the information we felt was important and present it as we felt it needed to be presented.

But a computer was never really personal.  It might be mine, but if I need to leave it at home/office, it really isn’t that useful.  That is why net-books and now ultra-portables are so attractive, they are light enough to take with me “most of the time”.

From a personalization stand point however these devices don’t compare to an iDevice.  Even today when you talk PC you get into the brands, speeds and feeds.  It is a religious war.  Not so with Apple devices.  For the Apple device it is all about the feel and multitude of customization add-ons that “just fit” and work.  For $25-75 I can get a case the represents me and my device.  I can clearly mark my device of choice as being mine.

From the software side, 3 year olds and 80 year olds alike can install and get going with new software in minutes simply by pressing the “install” button and waving a finger over the screen.

E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, DropBox and other cloud services just work.  No need to configure, no need to do anything but select a username and password once and promptly forget them.

For anyone who has had to ask their IT department for new hardware or software, justify it 10 different ways, wait 6 weeks for delivery and then go through training just to make it work (hopefully), the iDevices are miracles.

And that folks is why they are so special.  They allow anyone to tailor a device to their specific needs one app, one song, one movie at a time in minutes from the comfort of, well where ever.  They are the epitimy of personal devices. After all could there be any thing more personal that stating I!

No related posts.

The business is littered with strange devices, “as a service” contracts, and applications written for them by who-knows-who.

You’re the Chief Information Officer! What are you going to do about this mess?

Let’s talk about what won’t work, and then what will.

If you’re thinking that now would be a good time to assert yourself, making the kinds of moves attributed to world-class CEOs that make the front cover of the business magazines (jaw helpfully pushed out, camera shot just a little upward to make them look taller and more forceful), there’s a word from Seinfeld to keep in mind.

Fuggedaboutit.

The moment you personalize this battle, it’s lost. The rest is just how much time it takes to take you down.

The strong, fearless, “in command” CIO model was matched to the challenges of the previous IT era. It’s how you forced the major packages in, how you got Y2K handled, how you injected security and compliance into the mix.

This era, though, is the exact opposite. Technology is dirt cheap, publicly available, easy to buy and use.

No, it’s not easy to integrate and protect. But we’re dealing here with entry costs. Even in the most tightly-controlled enterprises, the ability to pay for a device, or pay for a service on the public Internet, is well within the signing authority of almost any manager.

Indeed, a great deal of it comes in as “expenses”, and never sees a purchase order at all.

So what should you do?

Now you need to have the various parts of the enterprise at the table with you. That means walking away from being “the big kahuna” or the “top gun” and instead becoming “first among equals”.

One voice amongst many, working to shape a future that your peers buy into.

One where trade-offs are made, where you give this to get that.

That’s the sort of thing an IT Governing Board does: a permanent collegial body that makes policy decisions and prioritizes investments and directions.

Much like a Board of Directors is supposed to do in a corporation: strategy, policy, direction, but not management.

Good governing boards keep the players at your table, understanding the issues, casting the votes to limit themselves, feeling bound by their decisions.

The djinn won’t be back in the bottle — but you’ll have built a bigger bottle you can live with to deal with these times.

And you’ll be the “good cop” — Jane Q. Employee’s own boss will be the one saying “no.”

That’s how you slowly wrestle the BYOD era into shape.

Related posts:

1. So You’d Like Some Limits on BYOD…

Not only can’t they control what students bring to the campus network, they can’t control the faculties, either.

Research grants, after all, are typically used amongst other things to buy technology.

At the same time, there’s a high premium on security, integrity and — in this day of the electronic classroom — things just plain working.

So how do they do it?

First, there’s a resolute understanding of the need to set some minimal rules.

The WiFi isn’t quite open: you do have to login.

Single sign-on, with a userid whose attributes can be centrally driven, is implemented and accepted.

The single sign-on service, in turn, opens up the student’s or professor’s email, online course portal, file share access, and, if needed, administrative systems. It’s a strong reason not to go around it: you make your own life more miserable when you do.

Meanwhile, the bookstore sells technology, models selected and known to work well in the campus environment, coupled with service plans that take advantage of the institution’s buying power.

What this means is that a “name brand” service from Bell or Rogers (to name two) competes financially with the newcomers like Public Mobile and Wind (again, to name but two) as far as the buyer is concerned.

Meanwhile IT has a vendor to work with who conveniently stocks a reduced range of handsets, tablets, netbooks, etc. Still a healthy selection, but not an unlimited one.

The campus network, in turn, operates more like the public Internet than like the typical corporate network.

Controls are light. As someone who has taught at the graduate school level recently, I can assure you that lectures are filled with students on Facebook, on Twitter, texting, watching YouTube, and downloading torrents.

As long as the “corporate assets” are suitably protected, what you do on the network is your issue. Also your liability: that’s published policy.

The environment is not perfect, but it works, and works well, with tens of thousands of devices connecting and disconnecting constantly. Rooms seating over a thousand do not lose either service or speed: when was the last time you went to a conference and WiFi worked that well in a hotel ballroom?

These ideas all fit regular enterprises. Give a little room, get a lot of necessary structure back.

Related posts:

1. Google is using Canada Post to give away $100 in advertising!

BYOD Company policy (see #5 – data encoding) recommends that you limit your choices to:

1. Display Device – your recording/display device should be pPads (paper pads). pPads should should be lined and no larger than 8.5 by 11 and should have a brightness of no less than 92.  Clay tablets are now deprecated.
2. Peripheral Entry Nodes (PEN) shall be limited to either yellow (2B) PENcil or ball-point or felt PEN – preferably black. Violet is strictly prohibited.  Use of all forms of wooden wedge sticks are now deprecated.
3. Annotation Pads (aPad)  shall be limited to the Yellow (Info), Blue (link) or Red (to do) varieties.  Semi sticky adhesive only to avoid damaging the original record.  pClips and and other connectivity devices should be avoided.  Highlighting of text on a record shall  be accomplished only with a yellow aPEN.  Blue and red are strictly forbidden.
4. Data Base – the company provides you with cabinetry in each department to store company records.  All records should be submitted through the dBase administrator (department secretary). Copies of records can also be provided by the dBase administrator.  Do not attempt to store/retrieve a record by yourself.  Removal of records off company premises require at least director level approval.
5. Data encoding – all data must be in English and if other languages are included have to be linked to or have an English translation included.  Please avoid the use of acronyms, and if absolutely necessary, use only those on our company list of approved acronyms (LOAA).

It is important that all employees comply with these controls.  Without such controls our company would descend into chaos, with negative effects on our bottom line. (and senior management bonuses).

LOL

Related posts:

1. So You’d Like Some Limits on BYOD…
2. Virtual Life Example: the Limits of Cloud Computing. More than online books
3. A Beginning Is A Very Delicate Time

So how do you do that and not be seen as the over-controlling ogre?

Let’s face it: the business will win the control fight. It’s hard to lose when executive row is on the “I want my favourite, and I want it now” side of the battle.

Still, there are things you can do, to limit the diversity.

Apps are a big part of getting some control back. Everyone — even the most die-hard supporter of the most obscure and miserable device — knows it’s unreasonable that you should support everything.

So create some attractors: small, quick, cheap apps that provide useful services, but are only available for the platforms you want to support.

Not platform — platforms. There has to be some choice left open.

Simple apps that make office life easier are a good beginning. Room booking on the fly, for instance.

You make these available for, let’s say, three platforms at most. iOS is a must. Android, probably — and you’ll have the chance to decide which ones you’re supporting. What screen factors, releases, etc.

Then you get to choose between RIM and Microsoft Windows Mobile (if you think their Metro tablets are in your future).

“But we’re a BlackBerry shop and committed to Microsoft.” you say?

Sorry, the market’s changing, and you’re going to have to change with it.

Odds are better than three in four that a BYOD item brought in will be Apple product, or Android product. RIM and Microsoft failed their competitive challenge.

While they’re not out of the game yet, they’re also not market leaders any longer. You have to recognize that reality if you’re going to succeed.

Your apps, in turn, are the opening to the idea of even more app interfaces to your systems. Here’s where you can start to embed the security and integrity controls you need.

Meanwhile, you’re producing things that are seen as valuable.

That builds your reputation, and the battle shifts from control to “here’s some money, can you make me a …”

That’s a good place to be.

BYOD is a great opportunity for IT, as long as IT starts to see itself as the in-house vendor making things for a marketplace rather than as the “one size fits all” controller of information services.

People — as Apple well knows — willingly give you control when you give them a reason to.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Life Example: the Limits of Cloud Computing. More than online books

Here’s how the typical person in the business sees it — and why they’re going to resist even minimal controls like “approved devices” and “let us install this.”

They bought their device, probably in a mall, from a kiosk or store operated by a vendor.

They turned it on, and it worked.

They installed an app or two, and they worked.

They browsed a website or two, and that worked.

Why, then, do you think things won’t work here?

After all, the phone was made a different company than the carrier, the apps all came from even more companies, and the websites are from all over the place.

Yet — phone, pad, netbook, whatever — it all just worked.

That’s the core of why they don’t think IT needs control over what they use and how they use it.

After all, the WiFi at Starbucks worked just fine — what’s special about it in our office?

The reality is, of course, that on the public Internet everyone has had to solve the same security and data protection issues that IT worries about.

Amazon has to protect your credit card and shipping address. The Android Marketplace likewise. The Globe and Mail’s app had to handle the newspaper subscription for that iPad.

Why is it that IT doesn’t see the world the same way?

The way of the Internet: each service is its own thing, and secures itself.

Anything that can route there and establish an IP connection is welcomed.

Instead, IT typically sees security, integrity and protection as add-ons, something that has to encompass everything, while it’s wide open once you’re inside.

That’s a design flaw that no one’s questioned for years. It’s a hangover from having a single computer — mainframe or midrange — with a security package installed on it and dumb terminals attached to it.

In today’s world of virtualized servers, cloud resources, multiple device types, “work anywhere” habits, that just won’t cut it.

Business folk would be readier to play ball if they thought IT had caught up to the twenty-first century.

So IT will lose the control battle. The business will make sure of that.

I think, if I ran IT, I’d be architecting security and controls the business can work with.

That might actually sell a “transitional period” of device limitation and control.

Nothing else will.

Related posts:

1. Consumer Devices in the Enterprise
2. Social Business…the next big thing?
3. Shifting the Mindset of IT to Cause Transformation in Business

If you have been even minimally exposed to tech news in the last few months, you’ll know that employees bringing their own devices onto the company network has become a front-and-centre issue.

On the one hand, employees feel they’re more productive working on the device of their choice, and the IT department hasn’t been scrambling to get it to them.

On the other hand, that’s for good reason. A wide-open field of end user devices is a support and, more importantly, infosecurity nightmare. Consider this late news from security firm Symantec Corp.: Mobile vulnerabilites increased 93 per cent in 2011 — thank you, Android — and of mobile devices lost, 96 per cent will experience a data breach. That’s some kind of exposure.

So there are a few angles to explore in Blogging Idol:

1. How does the IT department deal with the BYOD tidal wave? Ban the devices altogether from the network? Open the floodgates, since users will bring them onto the network anyway? Negotiate a list of approved devices? (We’re polling readers on which approach they favour; you can vote and see the results in real-time at this link.)

2. How credible is it to expect the IT department to support hundreds of different devices? Or sould that be a user responsibility? And if it is, does that mean the user’s proficiency at keeping his or her technology up and running become part of the employee evaluation process? (I bet that’d scare a few users back into line.)

3. What’s the best form factor or device for your style of work?

Now, I’m old-school and cranky on this issue, and I’m all for the hold-the-line position on this. You can debate me and thumbs-down me all you want; that’s part of the game.

But remember, on a broader scale, this is about community. The Blogging Idol community’s become quite close-knit and very supportive of each other. If you haven’t joined it already, come blog with the best in technology for fun and prizes. You can register at this link. If you’ve already competed in BI, your existing user name and password should still be valid.

In the spirit of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the puck drops next Monday.

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How is it that tech companies are devoid of following traditional economic valuation for companies?  What sets them apart? Bankers, VC’s and angel investors seem to have a blind spot as to how tech companies are worth way over market value. Seems that when the tech bubble crashed the first time Internet start-ups were all the rage and had no real way of making income, they were given substantial funding although they had no real income stream.  The money gained from loans and investors was used for working capital and day-to-day operations without having a real income stream or even a plan for different revenue streams.

Just because something is a good idea does not mean there is a way to make money from it. Unless you are innovative and can create a revenue model to support growth and sustain your company through organic means or through funding to innovate and grow only, not to run your business day to day, this seems to be what the new wave of tech companies are looking to repeat.

Analysts are quick to devalue companies on not meeting earning expectations when they fall short but how they justify and convert hype to initial company value. Case in point, Facebook, although it has the user base and has actually made a little money for posted earnings, is the company worth the estimated IPO and value that is placed on Facebook? Not only will Facebook have to sustain and increase revenue, but can it grow at the same rate on which the evaluation is based? Other industry sectors do not have this type of flexibility other than tech. Google and Apple are a couple of the tech companies to succeed and worth somewhat what they are valued at due to the sustainability and their ability to increase revenues consistently. Facebook has not proved that it can continue to grow at its current pace while increasing their customer base and rapidly continuing to capitalize and grow revenues.

Recent tech IPO’s such as Groupon’s have proved that companies that have users do not necessarily translate to success. With the model of freemium software popping up from enterprise software to social to CRM to project management, how do they make money? Some of these companies upsell additional services to make money, but is that quick enough to sustain operations?

It seems that if you are tech company you may be subject to false valuation numbers, which may not be bad if you are the company receiving the valuation. It seems that the principle of making profit from your company has been clouded by the second generation of the tech bubble as investors get caught up in hype rather than actual results. In Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank the investors (the sharks) do not invest if a company does not have revenues.  Seems to me the fact they do not put their own money on the line should tell you something about company valuation.

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I’m on the road this week and my laptop is behaving badly, so if I don’t want to miss the first week of blogidol.ca this better be a viable plan b. Talk about BYOD.

The soft keyboard is an issue here, I can’t see the whole edit window. I don’t see my auto-complete options either. I also can’t drag my insert point; there is no auto-capitalization or auto-corection in play either (although that feature can be a real pain at times). I need to figure out how to cut and paste.

Anyone else blogging from a smartphone?

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I may be alone in this point of view but in the short term I’m not worried about these offerings.  I’ve been using both Google Docs and Microsoft offerings for a while now, but they both don’t deliver something that DropBox got right early, application API integration.  As a place to pop a file and have it everywhere, neither Google or MS offer the convience that DropBox does.  It works on my desktop, my laptop, my Blackberry, my iPad, my iPhone, my Android phone….  It works with the APPS on those devices too.  And as we are learning, APPS are key.

Somehow I just don’t see that level of integration with either product above.

And from a team approach the DropBox offering may still missing some security features, but my executives love it, my team use it daily and you know what.  I’m not responsible for DR on any of it!  Talk about a deal.

So for now, get your free space, it is always useful.  But my money is with DropBox.

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I’m not sure about the new interface, it has already given me some problems in IE9, so I switched to Chrome – the image drag and drop did not work in IE9, and the ‘Save Draft’ button obliterated my content.  I think I’ll be sticking with Chrome.

I agree that ‘big data’ & ‘cloud computing’ are hot topics suitable for this year’s competition, they’re also suitable as a spring board for my favourite favorite (don’t tell me this tool is going to hassle us about Canadian spelling) subject – HPC – High Performance Computing.

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Usually when creating reports from an ERP it was often a chore that involved coding and heavy customization to change reports and make new reports for different purposes.  Older systems used to integrate with Crystal reporting and other reporting engines.  This required coding, integration, testing and an entire project plan just for changing a report.  A lot has changed.  New SOA architectures open API’s and noncoding options now exist for integrations.  Now creating reports is a lot easier to do and often nowadays can be done by ordinary end-users.

Since each department uses data from their ERP system for their own needs they often have to aggregate their own data, create their KPI’s, interpret their own data which only makes sense to people within the department.  It is this need to customize departmental business intelligence (BI) that has spawned an interesting concept in BI.  For customers that have Agresso – Unit 4 now have departmentalized BI solutions that act as plug-ins to the main ERP SOA.  Many of the preset departmentalized functions such as Sales, CRM, HR, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and other departments that require specialized information for reporting.   Executives that require real-time information can use their own data to foster decision support.

These add-ons have been preconfigured with templates, best practices and easy to use formats to create individualized departmental reports.  This convenience has greatly eased adoption and accelerated system adoption for an easier to use ERP system.  This functionality enables employees to create individualized reports.  This concept of “BI on the fly” to create your own reports when needed has caught on.  Many other BI types of software have started to capitalize on this concept by providing a reporting platform for companies to do their own BI as needed. We see this as being platform customization for reporting as new BI software allows for this and integrations have all become significantly easier to not one ERP but many types of enterprise software through graphic and open API’s.  Creating your own real-time BI has enabled employees to contribute and make their business case with now instant supporting data rather than waiting several weeks for IT to get it to you to put into your presentation.  Instant information that is easily dissectible by individuals can enable managers to act upon information and make the corresponding changes to either business processes or what adjustments need to be made to maximize efficiencies within the department.

If each department within an organization can self-diagnose its own flaws and inefficiencies the overall company will succeed as each unit will adjust to getting better at what they do, as they understand within the department what information they need and what information they understand to do their job better.

BI on the fly can actually drive efficiencies and increase overall effectiveness of the organization, which will lead to better bottom line results. The right data to make the right decision is vital as organizations can also reduce missteps in planning, reducing costs, forecasting and the range of other business functions that are present across the rest of the organization.  We predict that most other BI and enterprise performance management (EPM) will take this approach to further customize their solutions to offer this kind of convenience.  In the case of Agresso a new SaaS pricing model is emerging by offering BI as SaaS by function or department. The new BI/EPM will be data, system and process agnostic and may provide workflows to automate these processes and simplify reporting creation with triggers, alerts and automation by having the data available.  In large part most ERP systems now use their SOA to accomplish this but BI as middleware is emerging as a new enterprise software trend.

Eval‐Source is a consulting firm that provides enterprise software selection and strategic technology consulting services for organizations. Our consulting practices encompass cloud and on-premise software evaluation services, ERP, Supply Chain strategy, social media and technology consulting. Eval‐Source is an industry leader in the analysis of software technology and our thought leadership has placed us in the elite of consulting/analyst firms. What sets us apart is our unbiased best in class consulting services that provide our clients with value, direction and success in selection, planning and infrastructure planning of their technology systems. Eval-Source can assist organizations in any phase of their selection process.

www.eval-source.com,    twitter: @eval_source

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Designer Eric Schmidt (no, not that Eric Schmidt) tells me that until he adds an auto-sizing element, the safe width for images is 450 pixels.

Hey, that’s what beta’s for.

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