I hope you all enjoyed following the Symposium on this blog, although I did not see any comment posted. From my point of view the whole week was very interesting and provided a lot of ideas for the months to come.
In principle, I should be able to download all the presentation stuff (and not only for the sessions I attended) and make it available when I'm back at the office.
See you soon!
Software engineering and project management is just a waste of money, because the software quality remains bad. And Nick thinks that the quality will only worsen, even if putting more money on project management and other engineering processes (think CMMI here).
Software quality is equal to availability + precision. Over time, the high availability and precision types of applications will not be the majority nor the most important.
Software development is not engineering, it is a knowledge acquisition process (until you deliver what the user wants). Human beings do not fit the lifecycle model. Specifications are a snapshot at a time but the delivery will happen later…
An IT sytem is a collection of technology and people. In real life, a development team does not know its goals and does not communicate. They risk no penalties for doing things wrong. With better tools, people build bigger software, not better software.
Systems can be big or robust but not both. Success is pure luck! There is no evidence that this will change in the future.
But does software quality matter? Software is useful whatever its defects and users are tolerant to errors. Digital natives are used to bad quality (perpetual betas). Users concentrate on the speed of fixing problems (agility is more important).
The future: more processing power (multicore), multi-threading and parallelism (leading to a development and testing nightmare: Heisenberg principle).
Then there is Web 2.0, mashups, SOA and clouds: nobody controls the architecture and even knows where things are. These are parallelized as well. This makes things even worse.
Consumerization is the enemy of software quality because the number of independent participants, devices, user interfaces, networks, technologies increases.
However, sometimes you don't need precise answers: think context, adaptative systems (neural networks), social networks…: these are fuzzy systems.
Everyone wants agility but it "corodes" strategy, there is a looming skills crisis, some new development tools are dangerous weapons in more and more amateur hands… Take a look at these risks and distribute the list in your organization.
Surviving means to get rid of the fantasy of software engineering but to learn to live with bug-ridden software.
Recommendations (summarizable as a shift from a focus on functional bits to a focus on operational issues):
Acceptability-Oriented Programming is emerging from the idea that the goal of perfection is counter-productive. Failure-oblivious computing, recovery-oriented computing, "resilient actors" (all being academic topics at the moment) are some other approaches to the fact of imperfection.
More practical solutions include autonomy (limiting risky dependencies and increase resilience, maybe as a failover solution), allowing human intervention, software updatability.
From a social point of view, politicians are also a risk, because they don' t understand IT. Users should be educated (think of something on the line of "there is a 30% risk of rain today" or MS Outlook telling you that "there is an 80% chance that your mail reaches its recipient"). But the politicians would probably interfere.
There is an opportunity with massively parallel low cost processing + unpredictable computing: genetic algorithms, hybrid human / cloud solutions (e.g. mTurk or HumanGrid). Find where these things could be used.
Green IT is progressing for economic reasons rather than for environmental ones, but this is more balanced in Europe.
Issues at hand are data centre floor space, energy consumption and the IT capacity required.
What is the cost of a green data center? About 17-18% more than a non-green one.
Alarmingly, 70% of US CIOs are not concerned with energy consumption, although the cost is rising rapidly (on a 3 year span, it represents more than the capital costs).
There is not sufficient focus on green initiatives, and on operational energy issues first. The problem should remain in the hand of IT operations.
Negative effects of IT: energy consumption, use of scarce and non renewable resources, e-waste (re-use does not work), hazardous substances, GHG emissions.
Positive effects: transportation optimization, e-business, e-government, environmental control system (e.g. intelligent building), travel substitution.
Enterprise have to assume the energy consumption will go up in the next 10 years). Deja vu;-) However, the slope of growth is not linear. When maxing out, the recommendation is not to build a new data centre, use hosting service instead if consolidation and rationalization is not enough.
From the energy at the production point, about 27% arrives at the data centre. Cooling may consume up to 50% of this, power systems use up to 40%. And the server tends to waste 80% of what is left. Savings cascade back up this stack.
Recommendations:
Beware greenwash: you better look for short-term benefits. The 6 sins of greenwashing are hidden trade-offs, no proof, vagueness, irrelevance, lesser of 2 evils, fibbing (lying).
Regulation and standards: WEEE, RoHS, REACH, EUCCDC (EU code of conduct on data centres, voluntary, about how to run an energy-efficient DC), LEED (for buildings, not only DCs).
Metrics is the biggest problem. 6 key principles to define the right metrics:
On a very agressive design, the PUE reaches 1.28, from 3.0 with an archaic design and 2.0 on conventional designs. The break-off point (where cost goes past value) is 1.7 or 1.8. Be careful when doing comparisons in different conditions, though.
Where to start: cold and warm aisles, remove obstructions beneath the raised floor… Sensors and software tools will enable temperature management.
On new data centres, mix chilled air, chilled water and free cooling.
There is not much efficiency difference between AC and DC.
Recommendations: start measuring and reporting, look at consolidation, virtualization…
Enterprises tend to tackle short-term issues but sooner or later they will have to innovate and think about these people coming in.
The digital natives (the concept was invented in 2001, for people born after 1980) are those who were born after the computer, digital telephones… and never lived without them. They do not think about technology, they just use it. The rest of us are "digital immigrants".
They expect some tools and communication modes in the enterprise which are very different from what we use today. They will drive continuous innovation in the organization, by bringing new skills, cultures, preferences…
Four technology areas are relevant:
Human motivation evolves:
IT has historically been used for 1 and 2. New technologies (social networks, mobile) touch on 3 and 4. Virtual worlds will reach 5. The type of needs addressed by a technology must be figured out among the workforce as well as among the customers.
Digital natives have a different attitude toward belonging to an organization (hierarchy and authority are touchy issues) as well as on collaboration. They must be able to work closer together and managers must adapt. They work a lot by assembling pieces found here & there. They have a non-linear way of thinking (using a tactical approaches to problems).
More diversity is coming beyond the digital natives: women (closer to the technology) with different expectations, seniors (more influence in the society) with specific challenges, cultural and ethnic groups.
Changes in the market also occur with more "long tail": from content to products, for example in consumer electronics (3D printing) or in IT, with commoditized components & customized solutions. This is driven by the democratization of distribution and production and the ease of connection between supply and demand. The question to ask is how the new workforce can help innovate on the business models.
Vote (this is a voting session): people in the room see the change in the workforce more as an opportunity.
The effect on the organization stems from the increased diversity that will be brought in. You need to start to think of solutions that are more individualized (one size does not fit all). By 2015, people will customize 90% of the information, tools and resources they use at work (and elsewhere).
There will be a need to establish trusted relationship networks, across organizational boundaries, where people will work with their contacts to get the job done.
The management and leadership will have to be deeply tranformed to adapt to the new workforce.
Recommendations: accept the change and start explore the social networks.
The BEA acquisition by Oracle has changed the application infrastructure and middleware market, creating a stronger competitor for IBM (with a 18% vs. 29% market share). Note that Microsoft is not visible in the market share comparison because its middlewares are embedded in the OS, but it is among the leaders. When removing MQ and TP (dominated by IBM), Oracle is the potential new leader.
Massimo then spends about 10 minutes explaining what an application server is. Pretty boring…
The MQ still includes the legacy "application servers" (Tuxedo, CICS/IMS) because they are still in heavy demand. The current generation of application servers includes IBM, Oracle, Microsoft… And, more interesting, a new generation of platforms is emerging in the Visionaries quadrant. Massimo will spend time on the latter.
Salesforce represents a new delivery model: PaaS. There are already 6 or 7 other companies with this model. Their environment is proprietary, although java-like sometimes and there issues to consider before comitting to them (externalized data, SLAs...).
The other visionaries are innovative in trying to solve 2 different problems: ultra-fast processing (WareLite, Kabira…, this is what Gartner calls the "EDA application servers") and ultra-high scalability and availability on commodity boxes (called the "grid-based application servers", to be thought as Google-like elastic environments, the providers are Appistry, GigaSpaces, OpenCloud…). As a whole, these vendors are classified in the "extreme transaction processing" category by Gartner.
Many of the visionaries will die but some will certainly emerge as leaders because of the innovation they bring.
Those are technologies to watch if there is a business case (examples: trading software, telcos operations...). The same holds true for the PaaS model as well.
A strategic technology is one you have to think about, with high impact potential or may become disruptive.
The first 4 strategic technologies (virtualization, BI, cloud computing and green IT) are and should be on CIO agendas, the following ones (UCC, social software, WOA...) may be deprioritized in the current environment.
Virtualization
The point of view is changing: it's now about ROI. Virtualization affects the servers, storage, networks, clients (hosted virtual desktops and "portable personalities": carry a "bubble" of variable size, with or without an OS, which raises new challenges, such as security).
This may or not be applicable to all or some situations but this must be assessed by enterprises.
Business Intelligence
It has been present for long but not so well executed. It is now about to be put in the hands of managers who know what is needed.
More sources are involved and the analyses get more complex.
BI will also be "built into" business processes.
Cloud Computing
The hype dissolves the message. It's not an evolution only. It builds upon real-time infrastructure, SOA, SaaS, grid computing, web… and is the intersection of these existing technologies. And it can be seen the future of outsourcing.
It is a computing style, massively scalable and elastic, providing a full range of +services+.
There are 3 perspectives to consider: what is available (enterprise-grade), what can be delivered from the cloud, what can be learned from cloud computing.
Multiple cloud services are available: server infrastructure, application infrastructure, applications, information, processes (e.g. Amazon fulfillment). The lower layers (infrastructures) are not very mature.
Behind the services, there are enablers, which are important for the customers (due diligence) although "invisible".
Usage patterns: hosting in the cloud, building in the cloud (e.g. GAE), everything in cloud.
Beware of management and security (they are lagging) and start planning for some appplications in the cloud at an 8 years horizon.
Green IT
For the next 2 years, Green IT will be about reducing the energy consumption, in the data centre and at the desktop.
Unified Communications (UCC)
It is the consolidation of different tools and software. Now there are too many vendors (half will disappear) and this is a risk. UCC will imply changes in how IT manages different technologies (managed by different people).
Social Software
This is the next-generation collaboration. The digital natives will bring it in the enterprise. Enterprises should try to understand the concept and benefits, and determine how it can be used inside the corporate walls.
Focus first on profiles, connections, expertise-location. Installing a software is not enough: plant seeds.
Web-Oriented Architectures (WOA)
They are strategic because it is tightly coupled to the cloud, it is a sub-style of SOA (and use some of the best practices associated). It requires new paradigms, skills and development processes… It is not only about delivering an application on a web browser.
Principles: simplicity (it promotes re-use), interoperability, providing extensibility…
The innovator's dilemna is that this technology is not mainstream and not for all applications.
Enterprise Mashups
Mashups are composite applications based on WOA. They may well be the first steps of the enterprise in the cloud. The technology is being merged inside portal and will also be embedded in enterprise applications.
Mashups are useful for "long-tail" applications, addressing dynamic processes, situational awareness…
Enterprises should inventory their existing services and put some governance in place in order to prepare for the mashups. Dashboards are the high-value target for the first applications.
Specialized Systems
These try to bring together the concepts of general-purpose systems and specialized appliances, leading to heterogeneous systems with different parts, each designed for a specialized task. This is currently seen mostly on the HPC market.
It encompasses specific architectures, processors (FPGA, GPU).
Beyond Blades
They now represent about 10% of shipments but are growing fast. They begin to expand to storage, network, I/O (like a complete data centre in a rack), but with a steep increase in the energy consumption.
Recommendations for the short term:
With the value of virtualization, things are going toward a real-time infrastructure, which requires a lot of complex additional services. There are several phases on the road to this goal: managing physical systems, consolidating storage, rationalizing the infrastructure and finally consolidating workloads.
Key infrastructure challenges are: the server sprawl (physical and virtual), low CPU utilization rates, capacity planning, silos and "wait time" (the time to get a server operational, long because of silos in the organization), energy costs, HA (high availability) costs.
Martin Riley (HP Infrastructure Software Marketing) then talks about HP's take on the next data center: adaptative infrastructure. One key to make it all work is management. Other technology enablers are security, virtualization, automation (for HA).
The presentation then goes on with HP solution advertisement (again!): server virtualization, virtual infrastructure, storage virtualization, client virtualization and infrastructure management at the middle.
Insight to Action to Results: the process (helped by HP tools) leads to continuous consolidation (with monitoring and adapting in real time), everyday HA (servicing the infrastructure in real time), dynamic test and development infrastructure, energy-aware planning (deep inside the cabinet, the rack and the server).
A lot of the workload will not be virtualized, so HP imagined the concept of a tool allowing reallocation of "physical" workloads, and everything else you can do with virtual machines. It leads to the idea of a "logical server", which is a server profile (or "template") that can move across virtual and physical servers
Insight manager VSE is a single tool for capacity planning, provisioning (quick), energy monitoring…
Real-time infrastructure is the ultimate objective: being able to allocate and deallocate resources automatically and in real time. The problem currently is that the infrastructure is only seen as plumbing.
Server evolution
Huge amounts of money are spent but there is also a tendency to commoditization. From mainframes (still alive and well) to blades, it is getting more complex, with virtualization, compliance & regulation, management…
Affecting the landscape are cloud computing, software appliances…
Blades are still proprietary but it is becoming componentized (although they remain proprietary). Blades will soon touch everything: server, storage, switch, memory…
Blades are the highest growing area in the server space but it has a power problem (a cabinet will require 25 to 30kW of power in a few years).
Client evolution
This is a battle digital natives & immigrants: the former will want to bring their "toys" at work. It translates into a battle between losing and loosening control.
There are also emerging "devices" (non-enterprise owned, mobile, bubbles - virtual machines for different environments -, streamed applications).
IT must still provide the basics (minimal management, security).
Green IT (power & cooling)
Green IT is and is only about energy management, for the short term, essentially because of the energy cost issue.
There are also problems getting the power needed for new deployments. When planning for the future, you've got to make the assumption that the energy consumption will go up (x2 in 4 to 6 years).
Virtualization
This is the number 1 subject for Gartner clients. Rakesh presents a comparison table between VMWare, Citrix, VirtualIron, Oracle, Sun, Microsoft on major criteria (VMWare and Microsoft are considered the most important to watch now).
This is a huge market with a lot of potential. Virtualization will go from 8% (of x86 servers) today to 50-60% in 5 or 6 years.
There will be a high level of heterogeneity because of applications delivered "virtualized".
The "V-Hive" shows the diversity of the ecosystem. Not one vendor covers every domain. Make sure your ROI is short, many vendors will disappear.
Data Center networking
A new ethernet-based standard is emerging (I must admit I probably missed a point here), along with new devices managing security, compression…
Storage
Thin provisioning helps improve utilization (up to 65-80%) and automating storage capacity management. The storage virtualization level remains low today.
Another subject is about optimizing capacity and reducing the volume, using deduplication, single instance store, compression.
The main issues for storage are: energy consumption (but still, remember the real energy issue is not on the storage side), storage costs, space, data availability, performance.
Management repositories
CMDB is critical but the way it is used is often not right. It allows to make good impact analysis, provides a common asset database also showing relationships between the assets.
You have to make sure that your data sources can be trusted and that the CMDB is accompanied by change management processes to keep the DB up to date.
The PMDB (performance management database) will become mainstream by 2012. This will help make better decisions.
Automation
There are a new set of technologies for improving the business alignment (e.g. on SLAs), predictability, supporting best practices, saving time, mitigating risk. These tools are federating the whole picture of change management.
It is already used for disaster recovery.
It is worth assessing in large data centers.
SaaS & cloud computing
There is not much to learn here, compared to yesterday's talk except that the associated risks are pointed out (the data being externalized, the issue with service level agreements…).
Steve Chambers (CIO Visa Europe) & Valerie Dias (Chief Risk & Compliance Officer) talk about how IT & business work together: they have set up joint project boards, the IT always ask "why" in business terms.
They're all part of one business and don't consider they are in different organizations. There is an IT director with the CRCO, he is the one getting to the "why".
IT and its (tight) relationship with the business "have to" provide a competitive advantage (this is how Steve puts it).
The CIO has to manage the back-end (availability, security…) but there is no gap with the business on this either: it always end up as a business issue.
The project management is processed through "gates", checking and reviewing the ideas, depending on the size of the projects.
Visa has a poor reputation for innovation, although it conducts one of the most innovative experiments at the moment (mobile payment). Steve sees a contradiction between innovation and running a critical business. But innovation is fueled by the customers (one current project he cited is real-time scoring). It is the job of everyone at Visa: all employees are measured up on the same objectives.
Conflicts between business & IT can be constructive & healthy (and there are conflicts), as long as the dialogue is ongoing.
IT efficiency is achieved by stressing simplification in everything that is done.
The biggest challenge for the CIO is skepticism when trying to make the right choice: so he has to demonstrate that what is suggested actually works. Then some people begin to change (and trust installs) and it snowballs. There is also a need for the right engagement at every level.
Learning points: engagement and trust (Valerie), keep asking "why" until you're satisfied with the answer (Steve).
And we're at last getting some sun in Cannes!
The point of the presentation is about the 30% of the IT budget spent on sourcing client devices.
User requests are changing and the enterprise still must manage the PCs. The PCs are now seen as tactical (vs. strategic) assets. There is opportunity for optimization.
Today, there are options: virtualization, at every level (decoupling between hardware and software or between applications when they are packaged in a VM), is getting mainstream.
Server-based computing: access to an application running on the server through a display protocol (e.g. RDP). It leads to great economies of scale (50 to 80 users per server), it is scalable, mature, it has a large ecosystem of vendors BUT it is not for every user and application, it may even reduce productivity.
Blade PCs (it's a niche solution): the PC is in a cabinet dedicated to 1 or - better - a few users, accessed from a remote terminal. It provides good manageability, is used for vertical solutions mostly BUT the TCO is not so good (the capital investment remains high) and solutions are proprietary.
Hosted virtual desktop (hottest now!): servers hosting one VM for each user (with an average ratio of about 4 to 5 users per core), accessed through RDP. It allows to use standard software and gives users their usual experience, in total independance. Third-party tools are still evolving in this ecosystem.
Not a client technology by itself is the brokering software: sitting between the user and the server, its job is to "recognize" and connect the user to the appropriate environment. There are 2 types of brokers: simple "connectors" or "gateways" providing more services. Tools may evolve to provide a "wise" choice about application distribution (selecting the most appropriate model for every application: for example, hosted office applications and local AutoCad).
Shared desktop (intriguing): trying to use the idle cycles on desktop PCs (and increase CPU utilization) by sharing one between multiple users. But the Microsoft licensing model is not favourable to this model. Ncomputing has sold more than one million seats of their offering on this model (mostly in education market).
OS and application streaming: distribute software on demand, piece by piece. Applications are only "cached" (not installed) and generally virtualized on the client, eliminating incompatibility risks. One avantage is in offline use. BUT scalability is not proven, the market may be unstable and cost tend to go high. Vendors: MS & Softricity, Citrix & Ardence…
How to choose: Federica presents a table with the most important criteria. Usually 2 or 3 solutions are required to cover all needs, one size does not fit all. Some of the solutions (i.e. streaming or web-based client computing) take advantage of the power of the PC.
One central question is how much control you want to keep on users or how much autonomy you want to give them.
TCO is more than capital costs: a comparison between PCs and virtualized PCs shows the difference is not tremendous (most of the savings come from end-user costs), at about 10-15% savings.
Server-based computing appears to be the most attractive (on TCO) but it is true only if all the applications can be delivered on the server.
Beware of the confusion and mismarketing on virtualization.
Recommendations:
The presentation starts with some facts and figures over energy consumption and carbon emissions. The largest losses on energy are on the generation, then the cooling and third the idle systems.
The DC reliability is not affected by efficiency initiatives, partly because the UPS units are not the most critical energy wasters.
On a sample of 15 assessments done by EYP, the PUE (power usage efficiency) sorts out as very different from one data centre to another, from 1.8 to 3.5 and more (the average is 2.2, normal for legacy data centres). EYP claims it can reach 1.2 on new installations.
Robert presents a description of a typical assessment, with 2 scenarios (quick wins and not so quick).
Key strategy points:
Analyzing all the parts and pieces consuming energy and describing where optimization can be done, in a scientific manner.
The presentation goes in deep details about what can be done (for example: 3 different ways of separating cold and warm aisles).Since chips run at about 80° (higher than any temperature on the globe), cooling should not be necessary. HP is trying to act on this idea.
The presentation went into deep details about the assessment and the possible optimization. It is probably very interesting for the people directly involved in this domain.
David Willis looks at a concept which has been in laboratories for quite a long time and begins to get adopted. The presentation still refers mostly to academic research...
Context is about bringing additional information (device, location, "presence", social attributes…) to applications, to help make better decisions and bring better service - to anticipate an end-user needs. "It is time to know the 'digital me'". The mobile device can be seen as essential in the context-aware applications, because it is attached to an individual, always on, linked to an invoice...
Prediction for the context world, 2015: personal search, personnel commerce, sensors, socialization (manage identity, reputation), personal services, knowledge work and collaboration. All this may requires "context brokers" to have it work together.
How to assess context-aware approaches? Based on examples:
Roadmap of 5 to 10 years (Hype Cycle), but some components are mainstream (e.g. presence).
Layers of architecture: technology infrastructure (rationalized, multichannel, communication-enabled, context delivery architecture), context-enriched services (process, environment, community, identity), quality of context (services will be only as good as the inputs), 7 different styles (client-side, server-side mixed with federation & broker and hybrids), various business views.
There is a virtuous ecosystem with context: the more the users share their "status", the more value they get.
Examples: Digby (client, application), Locative Art (client, device), Nokia / Plazes (client, federation), Xora (server), Fire Eagle / Yahoo! (server, broker), Cisco on a raiologist application (server, federation).
70 vendors are identified by Gartner in wireless, location, web, unified communications, social software (mySpace, Facebook not yet on the enterprise market, but…). There is an interesting battle going on between Microsoft and Cisco. The main vendors are MS & Cisco (enterprise), Nokia, Google & Yahoo! on the consumer side.
Recommendations for business:
Technology recommendations:
Identify informations sources then create a provisioning model.
This presentation was quite unlike the others: it tended to appear quite disconnected from the current issues that banks are trying to resolve. There still may be some ideas in context and the domain should probably be monitored...
The portal is the swiss army knife of enterprise software. It encompasses functions aggregation, personnalization, application integration, creation & delivery of content, delivery to multiple devices, search engine… The Gartner definition is " an infrastructure that provide access and interaction to assets, in a highly personalized manner."
The web evolves from indexing content to encompassing social objects: social graph, online interaction… Digital natives have different online facets (identities). Within the enterprise, That implies moving to "work streams", with profiles, activity stream, contacts list, social search…
Social objects aggregation will be required from portals: people and their relationships, internal and external content/services (consumer sites)…
Requirements are coming up with fundamental pattern elements (familiar to the social network paradigm): people, reputation, identity, relationships, interactions, shared objects, messages, access privileges, tagging, voting, rating.
On another register, portals will integrate with BPM, for facilitation and automation and to provide the user experience (through the business process platform).
Four different visions of composite application development and assembly: tactical (it is more important to do quick than well), strategic, portal (was seen as combining advantages of tactical and strategic but did not deliver), mashup (even quicker than tactical solutions and accessible to more users).
Enterprise mashup and portals can enhance each other. Mashups, inside a portal infrastructure, target the need for quick and easy assembly (tactical), while taking into account the constraints of the enterprise (security, management…).
Tomorrow, the "myPortal" will provide users with the aggregation mechanism for the portal fabric, with user-controlled UI (client-side or hybrid). New technologies complement the portlet approach (open social, REST/POX, RSS, open AJAX…).
New user interfaces (haptic, touch screen, 3D graphics…) will have to be dealt with in the portal. But it's not happening yet.
5 dimensions of change: mashed data, gadgets (interaction), widgets (logic pushed to portals and other containers), agile methods (process, more P2P-enabled), social media (content).
Open-source packages: they historically address different kind of needs (compared to the enterprise portals), they would be better labelled as "community centered publishing system", often mixing portal and CMS. Anyway, the OSS portals are now getting closer to the enterprise needs (Liferay is an example). The advantage of licensing cost for open-source portals is not significant because the cost is on integration (75 to 80% of a portal project).
Future of the external-facing portal: syndicating content and logic to broad communities, folding in AJAX & RIA, injecting social networks…
Recommendations: check on the digital native needs (now), learn about REST (soon), understand the myPortal fabric concept (later).
Digital natives vs. immigrants: the population of natives (born after 86, by Gartner's definition) is rapidly growing and will soon invade the enteprise.
The previous financial crisis has "invented" e-banking while cutting costs and head count and increasing activity. Innovation is the answer to a crisis!
Digital natives require business & social mix, superior service experience, transparency, real-time…
Trends: the consumer is in control, the cost structures change, there is a fight for top talent, the equation "trusted + local = value" is redefined.
Productivity? It varies in a scale of 1 to 10. Natives are changing their view from processes to "employee situation".
Keys: people centricity, "Share, learn and contribute".
He started with 8 myths about cloud computing:
From this, the Gartner definition of cloud computing is "a style of computing, massively scalable and elastic, in which IT-related capabilities are provided as a service to multiple customers, using internet technologies". In the cloud, users care about what is delivered, not how it is delivered.
Key aspects:
4 perspectives and their attributes:
There is a trend to an actual industrialization of IT. Gartner plans a high-growth period for the cloud in 2008-2012. 3 things will make it happen: service-orientation (helped by SOA), virtualization and the internet (with the web and WOA).
The cloud leads to a new provider-consumer relationship, different from the previous vendor-user relationship.
We are going from a stuff-in-the-box model where the user has to do everything (from installation to administration), to the hosted box where the vendor takes care of the installation, to "X as a Service" where the provider manages the infrastructure, to the cloud where the provider also administers the solution. At this last stage the user only cares about using the solution.
Elasticity is not really here today but it will be the sweet spot for the cloud. It will erase the headaches of capacity planning.
Offerings: Google is targeting the consumer (tactical applications, targeted at small teams of experts) whereas Amazon is the solution of choice for and is growing in the enterprise (50% of all cloud offerings are presently based upon AWS).
The "internal cloud" concept may be valid if all the attributes of the cloud are present: it means it has to be "global-class" (and not only "enterprise-class"), with the major difference being that it supports multi-tenancy.
And finally, a word about trust: the cloud provider should just be considered as the other partners, like all those the enterprises rely upon to do business (just consider the partners involved when a customer applies for a loan at a branch).
The starting point is about what's going on out there. There are 3 major trends to aknowledge:
The consequences are:
Innovation is not technology. It is the association of (multiple) technologies, (multiple) people and user experience (you have to think about HOW people use the technology).
I = Tn + Pn + E
"Technology succeed when it meets a need that people care about." Watch how people are using technology. Or think about what is not being delivered (for example, employees using Gmail because it has no space limitations, contrary to the internal mail applications)…
What can you do? Nothing! Otherwise you might kill the innovation.
Technology does not run the business, people do. Innovation does not grow the business, people do. People are the ONLY way to tranform the business.
The presentation did not mean to answer questions (there are no easy answers) but to raise the audience curiosity.
The offerings comprise:
The presentation follows on with the example of HP applying its methodology to itself.
Nothing tremendously interesting in this session...
Crowdsourcing: ideas, comments, voting. By 2010, most of your ideas will come from outside. 3 rules to leverage crowdsourcing:
Idea marketplaces: a new business model that facilitates exchange. It is quite difficult to imagine sharing innovative ideas publicly, but the value (in the exchange itself) should outweigh the risk. Exemples: InnoCentive, TopCoders.
References:
Monitor social trends.
IT consumerization and the explosion of the web create new venues for innovation. It has already transformed marketing. The web (especially the public opinion sites, the blogs) should be constantly monitored. There is a new attitude toward time and money, that needs to be accounted for. The attitude toward technology is also changing: it becomes "invisible" (or should be kept invisible for tech refusers) and becomes only a mean to achieve a goal.
Listen to the voice of the customer! To remain focused, it helps to identify and engage the innovators among the customers. The same holds true with partners.
There are different approaches:
Sue defines 4 steps in the innovation process:
This process MUST be transparent.
Each stage requires different skills:
Sue presents an interesting comparison chart between first movers and fast followers, which should help position oneself (which is important to determine the right innovation process to setup).
Key point: it's time to think differently, we need to focus…
And finally: innovate on innovation!
Not every technology on the consumer web is appropriate for the enterprise but it can be learned upon. In a point to point comparison between consumer and enterprise needs, the conclusion is they are very similar and then can be addressed similarily.
Some lessons can be learned from the web: volume (scale), participation and reputation (& recognition) matter. Weak ties, in large groups and among many different channels, are essential. But before it works in an enterprise, some level of top-down management may be required.
Social networking technologies come along 4 axes: create, organize, find information and interact. Most enterprise tools are good at creation but not on the rest: this is where the difference is made and where the selection process should focus.
The end value is in connecting people and manage implicit knowledge. But to "sell" a project in the enterprise, we can talk about: driving change, improving efficiency (e.g. support), raising organizational performance (more creativity with people from different horizons), leveraging the external networks (e.g. for marketing).
Recommendations: avoid over-engineering. Focus on:
Of course, there are risks:
The presentation ended with the new MQ for team collaboration, including 38 vendors. It is highly questionnable to have Microsoft at the top, though…
Innovation is dictated by changes in the market: new business models and new entrants (which, by the way, are difficult to identify quickly with the usual competitive intelligence), consumers being more informed about products and prices than the bank staff…
For example, there is a change driven by the giant internet retailers (eBay, Amazon...), who are the catalysts for some innovation, e.g. on payments. New trends, such as the social networks or the new social finance services, are even more difficult to predict. One recommendation would be to assess possible partnerships with these new entrants.
In the current economic conditions, we can choose between innovating or hibernating (as a conscious choice, while still preparing for action). But the in-between choice, incremental modernization, is plainly wrong (does not provide a clear value).
Generally speaking, innovation can derive either from distress (reaction to poor condition, e.g. Xerox) or success (e.g. Google). This can be represented as an innovation curve with a trough between distress and success. Banks are traditionnally in the middle of this trough, thus not very innovative (even if the financial crisis tends to increase the level of distress): the average level of innovation must be raised through emulating distress (e.g. creating tension and healthy competition) or success (e.g. allocating dedicated "think" time à la Google).
Customer-driven innovation and new "uses" of staff (example: let staff open accounts at competitors and report about the experience) are good practices. For example, Smarty Pig was created because some people could not find the products they wanted at banks.
5 proposed key steps:
IT must change. 75% of IT users are web consumers. Stop trying to control everything.
Innovation is needed. Managers must be able to respond to new unknown demands.
Susan Landry (Innovation) - Now's the time to crank up the creativity.
An example with mashups: end-users are far more advanced than IT people think. They will build what they need if IT does not provide it.
Build collaborative environments.
Share ideas (they should not be kept secret).
Turn innovation inside out. Thers is no time and budget for innovation unless we change how we innovate.
Andy Kite (Applications)
Same stuff as yesterday, still funny.
Brian Gammage (IT infrastructure)
Modernization is required in the data centre, network…, there is too much risk associated if you do nothing. Have a long term view if budget cuts have to be made. Some parts are non-negotiable, you may have choice on others.
Commoditization can help control cost. Look at the clouds… Re-focus and re-prioritize.
Take stock of your infrastructure portfolio. That's the critical first step. Distinguish the critical from the important, and the important from the commoditized.
Richard Hunter
Decide what has to be spent (quick analogy for the selection: stop the bleeding before worrying about the broken arm): measure performance, build a transparent framework and manage the human aspects of change.
Plan for multiple futures, you can't guess it right with only one scenario.
The average budget growth for 2009 will be 0 to 2.3%, the worst case would be -2.5% (because of financial services and the public sector). The reasons why it should not dive: IT must be kept running and multi-years programs can't all be stopped.
The IT market (vendors and providers) will be most affected in Europe (-0.8 to 2.8% growth).
Focus for 2009: cost optimization, virtualization, IT modernization (will represent 30% of all projects by 2010, because of obsolete applications and departing skills), green IT, workforce, SOA & BPM, multi-sourcing.
Top 10 disruptive "technologies" (more on this later during the week). Massive shift will occur in IT (there is a "reinvention" cycle every 10 years).
Top 10 Recommendations:10. Change leadership
9. Mothball business
8. Project prioritization
7. Investment shutdown
6. Leverage offshore
5. Outsource commodity
4. Consolidate
3. Curtail data centre expansion
2. Renegotiate
1. People!
Among his recommendations: watch global expansion (some regions are unaffected by the recession), prepare for future business growth…
He started with a simple question: what is the value of your application portfolio? The point being that the business must start to see IT as an asset and not only an expense. This means that the CIO should also report the IT asset value (not only the expense) and the value of what IT delivers to the business.
A first step to estimate the asset value would be to measure the cost of replacement (what would it cost if you had to re-build your IT from scratch?). According to Andy, the application portfolio represents a value of about 10 times the annual IT budget in financial services (3 to 5 times in other industries).
As for any other, "material", assets, the IT assets (the applications, the "information", the processes...) depreciate over time and should be amortized, in a meaningful way.
IT planning is often only budget planning but there are many other issues to take into account, including, for example, "people": when the baby boomers retire, there is a major risk and associated cost (the issue being in the knowledge of the "system": even if the legacy applications are outsourced to someone with the right skills, this deep knowledge disappears and then the quality of service degrades).
Historically, IT is good at acquiring applications but these applications are "good" for how ever long they will last: that implies maintenance, upgrades, keeping a skill set...The role of the application strategy is to have a plan covering the full lifecycle of the applications. And this will also affect the ROI.
Recommendation (rule of thumb): the application strategy should plan for 7 years or, if longer, half the life expectancy of the applications.Application strategy is about planning for change and implies trade-offs between conflicting demands. To help make the right choices, the CIO needs the right measures and metering, he has to know the current state and decide the future desired "state" of the IT.
How to build an application strategy: the planning must be based on documented assumptions (about 10 to 20, shared among the entire organization) and it should have options (the assumptions may prove wrong and the CIO has to be prepared to revise the strategy over time).
The first step is to build a simple application inventory (using an APM - Application Portfolio Management - tool), measuring the value of the applications (based on their utilization, the user satisfaction...), their cost (over time), the risks associated...
She started with a prediction that 55% of EA programs will be stopped in the coming years because they are not perceived as delivering value. In most cases, the EA tells people what they should do and this is not well accepted.
What EA is: a process of creating artifacts - a facilitator - serving business AND IT. It is not only about technology but about bridging the gap between business and IT. It's about enabling change.
When building an EA strategy, it is best to start with the future (desired) state. Starting with the present state tends to cloud or constrain the view on the future.
EA is not, but it is related to (in one way or another):
By the way, it's raining quite a bit in Cannes, so the sessions are crowded…
I will be at the Gartner Symposium in Cannes from November 3rd to 7th. I plan to report on the event here, with "almost" live comments on the sessions I will attend (depending on my ability to post from my cell phone).
