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Some new rules for IT

2010/06/15 in IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

The other week I had a go at capturing the rules of enterprise IT[1]. The starting point was a few of those beery discussions we all have after work, where we came to wonder how the game of enterprise IT was changing. It’s the common refrain of big-to-small, the Sieble to Saleforce.com transition which sees the need for IT services (internal or external) change dramatically. The rules of IT are definitely changing. Now that I’ve had a go at old rules, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what the new rules might be.

As I mentioned before, enterprise IT has historically been seen as an asset management function, a production line for delivering large IT assets into the IT estate and then maintaining them. The rules are the therefore rules of business operations. My attempt at capturing 4 ± 2 rules (with friends) produced the following (in no particular order):

  • Keep the lights on. Much like being a trucker, the trick is to keep the truck rolling (and avoid spending money on tyres). Otherwise known as smooth running applications are the ticket to the strategy table.
  • Save money. Business IT was born as a cost saving exercise (out with the rooms full of people, in with the punch card machines), and most IT business cases are little different.
  • Build what you need. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team building LEO[2] blew their own valve tubes. You couldn’t buy parts of the shelf so you had to make everything. This is still with us in some organisations’ strong desire to build – or at least heavily customise – solutions.
  • Keep the outside outside. We trust whatever’s inside our four walls, while deploying security measures to keep the evil outside. This creates an us (employees) and them (customers, partners, and everyone else) mentality.

Things have changed since these rules were first laid down. From another post of mine on a similar topic[3] (somewhat trimmed and edited):

The recent global financial criss has fundamentally changed the business landscape, with many are even talking about the emergence of a new normal[4]. We’ve also seen the emergence of outsource, offshore, cloud computing, SaaS, Enterprise 2.0 and so much more.

Companies are becoming more focused, while leaning more heavily on partners and services companies (BPO, out-sourcers, consultants, and so on) to cover those areas of the business they don’t want to focus on. We can see this from the global companies who have effectively moved to a franchise model, though to the small end of town where startups are using on-line services such as Amazon S3, rather than building their own internal capabilities.

We’re also seeing more rapid business change: what used to take years now takes months, or even weeks. The constant value-chain optimisation we’ve been working on since the 70s has finally cumulated in product and regulatory life-cycles that change faster than we can keep up.

Money is also becoming (or has become) more expensive, causing companies and deals to operate with less leverage. This means that there is less capital available for major projects, pushing companies to favour renting over buying, as well as creating a preference for smaller, incremental change over the major business transformation of the past.

And finally, companies are starting to take a truly global outlook and operate as one cohesive business across the globe, rather than as a family of cloned business who operate more-or-less independently in each region.

So what are the new 4 ± 2 rules? They’re not the old rules of asset management. We could argue that they’re the rules of modern manoeuvre warfare[5] (which would allow me to sneak in one of my regular John Boyd references[6]), but that would be have the tail wagging the dog as it’s business, and not IT that has that responsibility.

I think that the new rules cast IT as something like that of a pit crew. IT doesn’t make the parts (though we might lash together something when in a pinch), nor do we steer the car. Our job is to swap the tyres, pump the fuel, and straighten the fender, all in that sliver of time available to us, so that the driver can focus on their race strategy and get back out on track as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, the following seems to be a fair (4 ± 2) minimum set to start with.

  • Timeliness. A late solution is often worse than no solution at all, as you’ve spent the money without realising any benefit. Or, as a wise sage once told me, management is the art of making a timely decision, and then making it work. Where before we could take the time to get it right (after all, the solution will be in the field for a long time and needs to support a lot of people, so better to discover problems early rather than later), now we just need to make sure the solution is good enough in the time available, and has the potential to grow to meet future demand. The large “productionisation” efforts of the past need to be broken into a series of incremental improvements (à la Gmail and the land of perpeputal beta), aligning investment with both opportunity and realised value.
  • Availability. Not just up time, but ensuring that all stakeholders (both in and outside the company, including partners and clients) can get access to the solutions and data they need. There’s little value in a sophisticated knowledge base solution if the sales team can’t use it in the field to answer customer questions in real time. Once they’ve had to fire up the laptop, and the 3G card, and the VPN, the moment has passed and the sale lost. Or worse, forcing them to head back to the bricks and mortar office. As I pointed out the other week, decisions are more important than data[7], and success in this environment means empowering stakeholders to make the best possible decisions by ensuring that the have the data and functions they need, where they need, when they need it, and in a format that make it easy to consume.
  • Agility. Agility means creating an IT estate that meet the challenges we can see coming down the road. It doesn’t mean creating an infinitely flexible IT estate. Every bit of flexibility we create, every flex point we add, comes at a cost. Too much flexibility is a bad thing[8], as it weighs us down. Think of formula one cars: they’re fast and they’re agile (which is why driving them tends to be a young mans game), and they’re very stiff. Agility comes from keeping the weight down and being prepared to act quickly. This means keeping things simple, ensuring that we have minimum set of moving parts required. The F1 crowd might have an eye for detail, such as putting nitrogen[9] in the tyres, but unnecessary moving parts that might reduce reliability or performance are eliminated. Agility is the cross product of weight, speed, reliability and flexibility, and we need to work to get them all into balance.
  • Sustainability. Business is not a sprint (ideally), and this means that cost and reliability remain important factors, but not the only factors. While timeliness, availability and agility might be what drive us forward, we need still need to ensure that IT is still a smooth running operation. The old rules saw cost and reliability as absolutes, and we strived to keep costs as low, and reliability as high, as possible. The new rules see us balancing sustainability with need, accepting (slightly) higher costs or lower reliability to provide a more timely, available or agile solution while still meeting business requirements. (I wonder if I should have called this one “balance”.)

While by no mean complete or definitive, I think that’s a fair set of rules to start the discussion.

References
1. The rules of Enterprise IT @ PEG↑
2. LEO: Lyons Electronic Office. The first business computer. @ Wikipedia↑
3. The IT department we have today is not the IT department we’ll need tomorrow @ PEG↑
4. The new normal @ McKinsey Quarterly↑
5. Maneuver warfare @ Wikipedia↑
6. John Boyd @ Wikipedia↑
7. Decisions are more important than data @ PEG↑
8. Having too much SOA is a bad thing (and what we might do about it) @ PEG↑
9. Understanding the sport: Tyres @ formula1.com↑

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Decisions are more important than data

2010/05/13 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

Names and categories are important. Just look at the challenges faced by the archeology community as DNA evidence forces history to be rewritten when it breaks old understandings, changing how we think and feel in the process. Just who invaded who? Or was related to who?

We have the same problem with (enterprise) technology; how we think about the building blocks of the IT estate has a strong influence on how approach the problems we need to solve. Unfortunately our current taxonomy has a very functional basis, rooted as it is in the original challenge of creating the major IT assets we have today. This is a problem, as it’s preventing us to taking full advantage of the technologies available to us. If we want to move forward, creating solutions that will thrive in a post GFC world, then we need to think about enterprise IT in a different way.

Enterprise applications – the applications we often know and love (or hate) – fall into a few distinct types. A taxonomy, if you will. This taxonomy has a very functional basis, founded as it is on the challenge of delivering high performance and stable solutions into difficult operational environments. Categories tend to be focused on the technical role a group of assets have in the overall IT estate. We might quibble over the precise number of categories and their makeup, but for the purposes of this argument I’m going to go with three distinct categories (plus another one).

SABER

SABER @ American Airlines

First, there’s the applications responsible for data storage and coherence: the electronic filing cabinets that replaced rooms full of clerks and accountants back in the day. From the first computerised general ledger through to CRM, their business case is a simple one of automating paper shuffling. Put the data in on place and making access quick and easy; like SABER did, which I’ve mentioned before.

Next, are the data transformation tools. Applications which take a bunch of inputs and generate an answer. This might be a plan (production plan, staffing roster, transport planning or supply chain movements …) or a figure (price, tax, overnight interest calculation). State might be stored somewhere else, but these solutions still need some some serious computing power to cope with hugh bursts in demand.

Third is data presentation: taking corporate information and presenting in some form that humans can consume (though looking at my latest phone bill, there’s no attempt to make the data easy to consume). This might be billing or invoicing engines, application specific GUIs, or even portals.

We can also typically add one more category – data integration – though this is mainly the domain of data warehouses. Solutions that pull together data from multiple sources to create a summary view. This category of solutions wouldn’t exist aside from the fact that our operational, data management solutions, can’t cope with an additional reporting load. This is also the category for all those XLS spreadsheets that spread through business like a virus, as high integration costs or more important projects prevent us from supporting user requests.

A long time ago we’d bake all these layers into the one solution. SABER, I’m sure, did a bit of everything, though its main focus was data management. Client-server changed things a bit by breaking user interface from back-end data management, and then portals took this a step further. Planning tools (and other data transformation tools) started as modules in larger applications, eventually popping out as stand alone solutions when they grew large enough (and complex enough) to justify their own delivery effort. Now we have separate solutions in each of these categories, and a major integration problem.

This categorisation creates a number of problems for me. First and foremost is the disconnection between what business has become, and what technology is trying to be. Back in the day when “computer” referred to someone sitting at a desk computing ballistics tables, we organised data processing in much the same way that Henry Ford organised his production line. Our current approach to technology is simply the latest step in the automation of this production line.

Computers in the past

Computers in the past

Quite a bit has changed since then. We’ve reconfigured out businesses, we’re reconfiguring our IT departments, and we need to reconfigure our approach to IT. Business today is really a network of actors who collaborate to make decisions, with most (if not all) of the heavy data lifting done by technology. Retail chains are trying to reduce the transaction load on their team working the tills so that they can focus on customer relationships. The focus in supply chains to on ensuring that your network of exception managers can work together to effectively manage disruptions in the supply chain. Even head office focused on understanding and responding to market changes, rather than trying to optimise the business in an unchanging market.

The moving parts of business have changed. Henry Ford focused on mass: the challenge of scaling manufacturing processes to get cost down. We’re moved well beyond mass, through velocity, to focus on agility. A modern business is a collection of actors collaborating and making decisions, not a set of statically defined processes backed by technology assets. Trying to force modern business practices into yesterdays IT taxonomy is the source of one of the disconnects between business and IT that we complain so much about.

There’s no finer example of this than Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). What should be a collaborative and fluid process – forward planning among a network of stakeholders – has been shoehorned into a traditional n-tier, database driven, enterprise solution. While an S&OP solution can provided significant cost saving, many companies find it too hard to fit themselves into the solution. It’s not surprising that S&OP has a reputation for being difficult to deploy and use, with many planners preferring to work around the system than with it.

I’ve been toying with a new taxonomy for a little while now, one that tries to reflect the decision, actor and collaboration centric nature of modern business. Rather than fit the people to the factory, which was the approach during the industrial revolution, the idea is to fit the factory to the people, which is the approach we use today post LEAN and flexible manufacturing. While it’s a work in progress, it still provides a good starting point for discussions on how we might use technology to support business in the new normal.

In no particular order…

Fusion solutions blend data and process to create a clear and coherent environment to support specific roles and decisions. The idea is to provide the right data and process, at the right time, in a format that is easy to consume and use, to drive the best possible decisions. This might involve blending internal data with externally sourced data (potentially scraped from a competitor’s web site); whatever data required. Providing a clear and consistent knowledge work environment, rather than the siloed and portaled environment we have today, will improve productivity (more time on work that matters, and less time on busy work) and efficiency (fewer mistakes).

Next, decisioning solutions automate key decisions in the enterprise. These decisions might range from mortgage approvals through office work, such as logistics exception management, to supporting knowledge workers workers in the field. We also need to acknowledge that decisions are often decision making processes which require logic (roles) applied over a number of discrete steps (processes). This should not be seen as replacing knowledge workers, as a more productive approach is to view decision automation as a way of amplifying our users talents.

While we have a lot of information, some information will need to be manufactured ourselves. This might range from simple charts generated from tabular data, through to logistics plans or maintenance scheduling, or even payroll.

Information and process access provide stakeholders (both people and organisations) with access to our corporate services. This is not your traditional portal to web based GUI, as the focus will be on providing stakeholders with access wherever and whenever they need, on whatever device they happen to be using. This would mean embedding your content into a Facebook app, rather than investing in a strategic portal infrastructure project. Or it might involve developing a payment gateway.

Finally we have asset management, responsible for managing your data as a corporate asset. This looks beyond the traditional storage and consistency requires for existing enterprise applications to include the political dimension, accessibility (I can get at my data whenever and wherever I want to) and stability (earthquakes, disaster recovery and the like).

It’s interesting to consider the sort of strategy a company might use around each of these categories. Manufacturing solutions – such as crew scheduling – are very transactional. Old data out, new data in. This makes them easily outsourced, or run as a bureau service. Asset management solutions map very well to SaaS: commoditized, simple and cost effective. Access solutions are similar to asset management.

Fusion and decisioning solutions are interesting. The complete solution is difficult to outsource. For many fusion solutions, the data and process set presented to knowledge workers will be unique and will change frequently, while decisioning solutions contain decisions which can represent our competitive advantage. On the other hand, it’s the intellectual content in these solutions, and not the platform, which makes them special. We could sell our platform to our competitors, or even use a commonly available SaaS platform, and still retain our competitive advantage, as the advantage is in the content, while our barrier to competition is the effort required to recreate the content.

This set of categories seems to map better to where we’re going with enterprise IT at the moment. Consider the S&OP solution I mention before. Rather than construct a large, traditional, data-centric enterprise application and change our work practices to suit, we break the problem into a number of mid-sized components and focus on driving the right decisions: fusion, decisioning, manufacturing, access, and asset management. Our solution strategy becomes more nuanced, as our goal is to blend components from each category to provide planners with the right information at the right time to enable them to make the best possible decision.

After all, when the focus is on business agility, and when we’re drowning in a see of information, decisions are more important than data.

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Is the market for IT services and solutions shrinking or growing?

2010/05/04 in Business-Technology, Cloud & SaaS by peg | View Comments

Here’s an interesting and topical question: is the market for enterprise IT services (SI, BPO, advisory et al) growing or shrinking? I’m doing the rounds at the moment to see where the market is going (a side effect of moving on), and different folk seems to have quite different views.

  • It’s shrinking as the new normal is squeezing budgets and OPEX is the new CAPEX.
  • It’s growing as companies are externalising more functions than ever before as they attempt to create a laser like focus on their core business.
  • It’s shrinking as the transition from on-premsis applications to SaaS implies a dramatic reduction (some folk are saying around 80-90%) in the effort required to deploy and maintain a solution.
  • It’s growing as the mid market is becoming a lot more sophisticated and starting to spend a lot more on enterprise software (witness Microsoft Dynamics huge market share).
  • It’s shrinking as SaaS is replacing BPO, in effect replacing people with cheaper software solutions? (Remember when TrueAdvantage, and Indian BPO, laid off all 150 of its workers after being purchased by InsideView?)
  • It’s growing as the need for more mobility solutions, and the massive growth in the mobile web, is driving us to create a new generation of enterprise solutions.
  • It’s shrinking as cloud computing and netbooks remove what little margin was left in infrastructure services.
  • It’s growing as investment in IT is a bit like gas, and tends to expand until it consumes all available funds. (Remember integration? As the cost of integration went down, we just found more integration projects to fill the gap.)

Like of a lot of these questions, it depends.

Update: Gartner finds that the worldwide IT services declined 5.3% last year, while Computer World UK tells us to expect another year of decline. How much of this is cyclic, and how much is due to a definition of “services” which could be more inclusive?

Updated: It appears that some organisations are not happy with the size and dominance of the IT services industry.

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With cloud computing, the world is not flat

2010/03/09 in Cloud & SaaS, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

Does location matter? Or, put another way, is the world no longer flat? Many cloud and SaaS providers work under the assumption that where we store data where it is most efficient from an application performance point of view, ignoring political considerations. This runs counter to many company and governments who care greatly where their data is stored. Have we entered a time where location does matter, not for technical reasons, but for political reasons? Is globalisation (as a political thing) finally starting to impact IT architecture and strategy?

Just who is taking your order?

Just who is taking your order?

Thomas Friedman‘s book, The World is Flat, contained a number of stories which where real eye openers. The one I remember the most was the McDonald’s drive through. The idea was simple: once you’ve removed direct physical contact from the ordering process, then it’s more efficient to accept orders from a contact centre than from within the restaurant itself. We could event locate that contact centre in a cheaper geography such as another state, or even another country.

Telecommunications made the world flat, as cheap telecommunications allows us to locate work wherever it is cheapest. The opportunity for labour arbitrage this created drove offshoring through the late nineties and into the new millenium. Everything from call centres to tax returns and medical image diagnosis started to migrate to cheaper geographies. Competition to be the cheapest and most efficient service provider, rather than location, determines who does the work. The entire world would compete on a level playing field.

In the background, whilst this was happening, enterprise applications went from common to ubiquitous. Adoption was driven by the productivity benefits the applications brought, which started of as a source of differentiation, but has now become one of the many requirements of being in business. SaaS and cloud are the most recent step in this evolution, leveraging the global market to create solutions operating at such a massive scale that they can provide price points and service levels which are hard, if not impossible, for most companies to achieve internally.

The growth of the U.S. enterprise application market

The growth of the U.S. enterprise application market (via INPUT)

Despite the world being laser levelled within an inch of its life, many companies are finding it difficult to move their operations to the cost-effective nirvana that is cloud and SaaS services. Location matters, it seems. Not for technical reasons, but for political ones.

Where we store our assets is important. Organisations want to put their assets somewhere safe, because without assets these the organisations don’t amount to much. Companies want to keep their information — their confidential trade secrets — hidden from prying eyes. Governments need to ensure they have the trust of their citizens by respecting their privacy. (Not to mention the skullduggery this is international relations.) While communications technology has made it incredibly easy to move this information around and keep it secure, it has yet to solve the political problem of ensuring that we can trust the people responsible for safeguarding our assets. And all these applications we have created — both the traditional on-premesis, hosted or SaaS and cloud versions — are really just asset management tools.

We’re reached a point where one of the a larger hidden assumptions of enterprise applications has been exposed. Each application was designed to live and operate within a single organisation. This organisation might be a company, or it might be a country, or it might be some combination of the two. The application you select to manage your data determines the political boundary it lives within. If you use any U.S. SaaS or cloud solution provider to manage your data, then your data falls under U.S. judicial discovery laws, irregardless of where you yourself are located. If your data transits through the U.S., then assume that the U.S. government has a copy. The world might be flat, but where you store your assets and where you send them still matters.

Country-specific regulations governing privacy and data protection vary greatly.

Global data protection heat map (via Forrester)

We can already see some moves by the vendors to address this problem. Microsoft, for example, has developed a dedicated cloud for the U.S. government, known as BPOS Federal, which is designed to meet the government’s stringent security and privacy standards. Amazon has also taken a portion of the cloud it runs and dedicated it to, and located it in, the EU, for similar reasons.

If we consider enterprise applications to be asset management tools rather than productivity tools, then ideas like private clouds start to make a lot of sense. Cloud technology reifies a lot of the knowledge required to configure and manage a virtualised environment in software, eliminating the data centre voodoo and empowering the development teams to manage the solutions themselves. This makes cloud technology simply a better asset management tool, but we need to freedom to locate the data (and therefore the application) where it makes the most sense from an asset management point of view. Sometimes this might imply a large, location agnostic, public cloud. Other times it might require a much smaller private cloud located within a specific political boundary. (And the need to prevent some data even transiting through a few specific geographies – requiring us to move the code to the data, rather than the data to the code – might be the killer application that mobile agents have been waiting for.)

What we really need are meta-clouds: clouds created by aggregating a number of different clouds, just as the Internet is a network of separate networks. While the clouds would all be technically similar, each would be located in a different political geography. This might be inside vs. outside the organisation, or in different states, or even different countries. The data would be stored and maintained where it made the most sense from an asset management point of view, with few technical considerations, the meta-cloud providing a consistent approach to locating and moving our assets within and across individual clouds as we see fit.

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The benefits of SaaS (beyond low cost)

2010/02/10 in IT Strategy, Posterous by peg | View Comments

I’ve already written about why I think private clouds can be a good idea. Similar arguments can be made for SaaS, and then some. A friend and I did the email-ping-pong thing and ended up with a (shortish) list of reasons why to go with a SaaS solution over an traditional on-premises solution.

  • OPEX rather than CAPEX cost. The CAPEX gulp is minimised, and the ongoing costs are tied to your own operational cost (head count, etc).
  • Faster provisioning. SaaS is can be up to 90% faster to deploy than on-premises solutions. (Weeks/months rather than months/years.)
  • No more upgrades. You’re always on the latest version, and new features are roll out organically rather than every few years as part of a change management process.
  • More focused vendor and community support. As there is only a single version in play, support efforts from the vendor and user community are focused on the version that you’re using. This also avoids the problem of getting left behind on a stale and unsupported platform (been there, done that, and have the scars to prove it).
  • SaaS provides a platform that scales organically with our organization. You’re not required to invest in additional hardware, software, and provisioning processes, letting your business focus on the business.
  • Reduced IT involvement. IT resources can focus on specific business problems rather than the care and feeding of the system.
  • Try before you buy. Instead of a traditional big license gulp at risk, sign up for a handful of SaaS seats for a few weeks and try it out. (From @shermo1.)

Any more?

Posted via web from PEG @ Posterous

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Reducing costs is not the only benefit of cloud computing & SaaS

2010/01/12 in Cloud & SaaS, IT Strategy, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

The wisdom of the crowd seems to have decided that both cloud computing and its sibling SaaS are cost plays. You engage a cloud or SaaS vendor to reduce costs, as their software utility has the scale to deliver the same functionality at a lower price point than you could do yourself.

I think this misses some of the potential benefits that these new delivery models can provide, from reducing your management overhead, allowing you to focus on more important or pressing problems, through to acting as a large flex resource or providing you with a testbed for innovation. In an environment where we’re all racing to keep up, the time and space we can create through intelligently leveraging cloud and SaaS solutions could provide us with the competitive advantage we need.

Sameul Insull

Could and SaaS are going to take over the world, or so I hear. And it increasingly looks that way, from Nicholas Carr‘s entertaining stories about Sameul Insull through to Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon‘s attempts to box-up SaaS and cloud for easy consumption. These companies massive economies of scale enable them to deliver commoditized functionality at a dramatically lower price point that most companies could achieve with even the best on-premises applications.

This simple fact causes many analysts to point out the folly of creating a private cloud. While a private cloud enables a company to avoid the security and ownership issues associated with a public service, they will never be able to realise the same economies of scale as their public brethren. It’s these economies of scale that enables companies like Google to devote significant time and effort into finding new and ever more creative techniques to extract every last drip of efficiency from their data centres, techniques which give them a competitive advantage.

I’ve always had problems with this point of view, as it ignores one important fact: a modern IT estate must deliver more than efficiency. Constant and dramatic business change means that our IT estate must be able to be rapidly reconfigured to support an ever evolving business environment. This might be as simple as scaling up and down, inline with changing transaction volumes, but it might also involve  rewriting business rules and processes as the organisation enters and leaves countries with differing regulation regimes, as well as adapting to mergers, acquisitions and divestments.

Once we look beyond cost, a few interesting potential uses for cloud and SaaS emerge.

First, we can use cloud as a tool to increase the flexibility of our IT estate. Using a standard cloud platform, such as an Amazon Machine Image, provides us with more deployment options than more traditional approaches. Development and testing can be streamlined, compressing development and testing time, while deployed applications can be migrated to the cloud instance which makes the most sense. We might choose to use public cloud for development and testing, while deploying to a private cloud under our own control to address privacy or political concerns. We might develop, test and deploy all into the public cloud. Or we might even use a hybrid strategy, retaining some business functionality in a private cloud, while using one or more public clouds as a flex resource to cope with peak loads.

Second, we can use cloud and SaaS as tools to increase the agility of our IT estate. By externalising the the management of our infrastructure (via cloud), or even the management of entire applications (via SaaS), we can create time and space to worry about more important problems. This enables us to focus on what needs to happen, rather than how to make it happen, and rely on the greater scale of our SaaS or cloud provider to respond more rapidly than we could if we were maintaining a traditional on-premises solution.

And finally, we can use cloud as the basis of an incubator strategy where an organisation may test a new idea using externalised resources, proving the business case before (potentially) moving to a more traditional internal deployment model.

One problem I’ve been thinking about recently is how to make our incredibly stable and reliable IT estates respond better to business change. Cloud and SaaS, with the ability to shape the flexibility and agility of our IT estate to meet what the business needs, might just be the tools we need to do this.

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Balancing our two masters

2009/11/09 in Business-Technology, Mailing List by peg | View Comments

We seem to be torn between two masters. On one hand we’re driven to renew our IT estate, consolidating solutions to deliver long term efficiency and cost savings. On the other hand, the business wants us to deliver new, end user functionality (new consumer kiosks, workforce automation and operational excellence solutions …) to support tactical needs. But how do we balance these conflicting demands, when our vertically integrated solutions tightly bind user interaction to the backend business systems and their multi-year life-cycle? We need to decouple the two, breaking the strong connection between business system and user interface. This will enable us to evolve them separately, delivering long term savings while meeting short term needs.

Business software’s proud history is the story of managing the things we know. From the first tabulation systems through enterprise applications to modern SaaS solutions, the majority of our efforts have been focused data: capturing or manufacturing facts, and pumping them around the enterprise.

We’ve become so adept at delivering these IT assets into the business, that most companies’ IT estates a populated with an overabundance of solutions. Many good solutions, some no so good, and many redundant or overlapping. Gardening our IT estate has become a major preoccupation, as we work to simplify and streamline our collection of applications to deliver cost savings and operational improvements. These efforts are often significant undertakings, with numbers like “5 years” and “$50 million” not uncommon.

While we’ve become quite sophisticated at delivering modular business functionality (via methods such as SOA), our approach to supporting users is still dominated by a focus on isolated solutions. Most user interfaces are slapped on as nearly an after thought, providing stakeholders with a means to interact with the vast, data processing monsters we create. Tightly coupled to the business system (or systems) they are deployed with, these user interfaces are restricted to evolving at a similar pace.

Business has changed while we’ve been honing our application development skills. What used to take years, now takes months, if not weeks. What used to make sense now seems confusing. Business is often left waiting while we catch up, working to improve our IT estate to the point that we can support their demands for new consumer kiosks, solutions to support operational excellence, and so on.

What was one problem has now become two. We solved the first order challenge of managing the vast volumes of data an enterprise contains, only to unearth a second challenge: delivering the right information, at the right time, to users so that they can make the best possible decision. Tying user interaction to the back end business systems forces our solutions for these two problems to evolve at a similar pace. If we break this connection, we can evolve users interfaces at a more rapid pace. A pace more in line with business demand.

We’ve been chipping away at this second problem for a quite a while. Our first green screen and client-server solutions were over taken from portals, which promised to solve the problem of swivel-chair integration. However, portals seem to be have been defeated by browser tabs. While these allowed us to bring together the screens from a collection of applications, providing a productivity boost by reducing the number of interfaces a user interacted with, it didn’t break the user interfaces explicit dependancy on the back end business systems.

We need to create a modular approach to composing new, task focused user interfaces, doing to user interfaces what SOA has done for back-end business functionality. The view users see should be focused on supporting the decision they are making. Data and function sourced from multiple back-end systems, broken into reusable modules and mashed together, creating an enterprise mash-up. A mashup spanning multiple screens to fuse both data and process.

Some users will find little need an enterprise mash-up—typically users who spend the vast majority of their time working within a single application. Others, who work between applications, will see a dramatic benefit. These users typically include the knowledge rich workers who drive the majority of value in a modern enterprise. These users are the logistics exception managers, who can make the difference between a “best of breed” supply chain and a category leading one. They are the call centre operators, whose focus should be on solving the caller’s problem, and not worrying about which backend system might have the data they need. Or they could be field personnel (sales, repairs …), working between a range of systems as they engage with you customer’s or repair your infrastructure.

By reducing the number of ancillary decisions required, and thereby reducing the number of mistakes made, enterprise mash-ups make knowledge workers more effective. By reducing the need to manually synchronise applications, copying data between them, we make them more efficient.

But more importantly, enterprise mash-ups enable us to decouple development of user interfaces from the evolution of the backend systems. This enables us to evolve the two at different rates, delivering long term savings while meeting short term need, and mitigating one of the biggest risks confronting IT departments today: the risk of becoming irrelevant to the business.

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What Australia does well

2009/11/06 in Business-Technology, Posterous by peg | View Comments

Australia is a long way from anywhere, making it hard (historically) to lean on overseas skills to solve problems. This has breed a strong streak of pragmatism into the Australian DNA pool, leading us to find pragmatic solutions to real problems.

Embracing Innovation: a new methodology for feature film production in Australia

Embracing Innovation: a new methodology for feature film production in Australia

Robert Connolly published a brilliant white paper in February 2008 which is a great example of this in action. Showing a a strong sense of realism and common sense, Robert pulls apart the Australian film industry and, using clear and direct language, provides a set of good recommendations on how we might address the challenges the Australian film industry faces.

There’s a lot of good ideas in the paper for the IT services industry. To a certain extent we’re caught in a similar situation, caught between the low budget films of SaaS (software-as-a-service), and spiralling demands from our star talent (architects, project managers, …) who’s careers drive them toward block buster projects. The top four measures he proposes might even provide us with a template to create a new engagement model that incentivises the IT industry to deliver business outcomes, rather than IT assets:

  • a first dollar share for filmmakers,
  • fair returns for cast and crew,
  • more realistic budget models, and
  • simplified reporting obligations.

Robert’s recommendations provide us with valuable grist for the mill as we, in the IT industry, work our way through the current evolutionary phase our industry is going through, driven by the shift from large, on premises applications to a future increasingly dominated by cloud solutions. His approach to the problem is also an excellent model of how to engage with the wholesale transformation of an industry.

Posted via email from PEG

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The NBN wants to be free

2009/10/14 in Business-Technology, Innovation by peg | View Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion on what Austalia’s national broadband network (NBN) will cost when it’s finally delivered to consumers. How much will we need to stump up to take part in today’s knowledge economy? Most cost recovery models have ISPs charging monthly fees of over $200, which is a lot more than the $50 per month most of us are used to paying. Who’s gonna pay that? A lot of folk have been pointing out the folly of forcing through a broadband network that few of us can afford, let alone be bothered to pay for.

Is this missing the point though? What if the government’s intention is to make the NBN free (or close enough to as to make no difference)? Much like most other public infrastructure such as roads. There’s precedents for this, from the New Deal though the recent government report on supporting innovation and the fact that the government is sitting on a large pile of money that they intend to spend.

The global financial crunch has had a dramatic impact on everyone’s lives, though Australia has been in the lucky position of avoiding the worst of the down turn. Australia is even the first large, rich country to raise interest rates on the back of the world recovery. Discussion has now turned to the nature of this recovery: will it be V or W shaped? Most of the smart money (including the RBA’s) seems to be settling on W shaped, with the potential for unemployment to rise in the short to mid term. The war chest the government accumulated to fight recession is still quite full, and the government has stated that it plans to stick to the large stimulus plan announced earlier in the year.

Recessions often to bring governments to think about major infrastructure projects. The U.S. went down this route mid century, with Congress having a few attempts at chartering a “National System of Interstate Highways” before Eisenhower made it a reality. I haven’t seen a figure for the investment required, but I expect it to be scary. The impact, though, was profound on the U.S. in general, and the economy in particular. Through the years, various estimates have been made of the contribution of the interstate highway system to the economy, generally finding that the interstate highway system has more than paid for itself in improved commercial productivity, with each dollar of investment in highways producing an annual reduction in product costs of 23.4 cents. It is estimated that the interstate highway system is now producing approximately $14 billion. All this from something you can use for free.

Fast forward to the future, and we can find an interesting report, Powering Ideas, recently published by the Australian government, outlining how what Australia might do to support innovation domestically. The report is quite long but at its nub, it points to a strategy of funding the infrastructure required by innovators it make it easy (and cheap) for them to innovate. This doesn’t mean that the government is getting out of the grant business, but it is an admission that the government doesn’t have a great track record of picking winners in this space. Cheap (if not free) infrastructure helps those grant dollars go further, while at the same time helping every innovator in Australia who wasn’t lucky enough to receive a grant.

Put the two of these together and it makes you wonder: what if they Australian government makes the the NBN free? Back in the 30′s the U.S. economy was driven by interstate commerce. Reducing the cost of trucking goods across the country (reducing the transaction costs) helped drive the economy forward. Today, in Australia, knowledge and collaboration are the back bone of the commerce. Reducing the cost of sharing information and collaborating has the potential to have a similar impact .

Like free and efficient roads, very cheap broadband access would help the entrepreneurs and innovators thrive. This would provide Australian’s with powerful platform to build businesses in a today’s knowledge economy. We could capitalise on the current trend for software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups replacing business process outsources (BPO), replacing a human labour driven solution is a software driven solution, servicing the world’s needs from our home base Research driven startups would have cheap and efficient access to the massive data sets which drive modern research, having the world at their fingertips.

You would probably still need to pay for the last mile, connecting your abode to the NBN backbone, but this is similar to the current energy delivery commitment from the government: they get the power lines to the property boundary, and then you pay someone to connect it into the house. Local ISPs could provide (or organises) the connection service, along with sorting out the home network and providing support. The NBN would also probably need to expand to include the link overseas, complimenting (or replacing) the network of links funded and managed by the existing telcos and ISPs.

And finally: where do the major Australian telcos fit in this? Interesting question. One probably better left to them to answer.

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From doctrine to dogma: when did a good idea become the only idea

2009/08/17 in Business-Technology by peg | View Comments

When does a good method become the only method? The one true approach to solving a problem; the approach which will bind them all. The last few decades has seen radical change in our social and business environments, while the practice of business seems to have changed relatively little since the birth of the corporation. The problem of running a business, the problem we work every day to solve, has changed so much that the best practice of yesterday has become an albatross. The methods and practices that have brought us to the current level of performance are also one of the larger impediments to achieving the next level. When did the yesterday’s doctrine become today’s dogma? And what can we do about it?

Our methodologies and practices have been carefully designed to help steer our leviathan ships of industry, tuning their performance to with five and three year plans. The newspapers of today, for example, hold a marked resemblance to the news papers of 100 years ago, structured as large content factories churning out the stories with some ads slapped in the page next to them.

The best practices evident in companies today represent the culmination of generations of effort in building, running and improving our businesses. The doctrine embodied in each industry in a huge, a immensely valuable body of knowledge, tuned to solving the problem of business as we know it.

doctrine |ˈdäktrin|
noun
a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group : the doctrine of predestination.
• a stated principle of government policy, mainly in foreign or military affairs: the Monroe Doctrine.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, from Latin doctrina ‘teaching, learning,’ from doctor ‘teacher,’ from docere ‘teach.’

OS X Dictionary, © Apple 2007

However, a number of fundamental changes have taken hold in recent years. The pace of business has increased markedly; what used to take years now takes months, or even weeks. The role of technology in business has changed as applications have become ubiquitous and commoditized. The assumptions which existing doctrine were developed under no longer hold.

Today, most (if not all) newspapers are watching their as revenue is eroded by the likes of Craigslist, who have used modern web technology to come up with a new take on the decades (if not centuries) old classified ad.

Let’s look at Craiglist. I’ve heard people estimate that they are doing close to $100mm in annual revenues at this point. Many say, “they could be doing so much more”. But the Craigslist profit equation is interesting. They apparently have less than 30 employees. That’s about $4mm/year in employee costs. Let’s assume that they spend another $6mm per year on hosting and bandwidth costs and other costs. So it’s very possible that Craigslist’s annual costs are around $10mm/year. Their value equation then is 10 x (100-10) = $900mm. That’s almost a billion dollars in value for a company with only 30 employees.

Fred Wilson, A VC

Craigslist has taken a fresh look at what it means to be in the business of classified ads, and used technology in a new way to help create business value, rather than restrict it to controlling costs and delivering process effencies; an approach Forrester have labeled Business-Technology.

The challenge is to acknowledge that the rules of business have changed, and modify our best practices to suit the new business environment because, as Albert Einstein pointed out “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If we can’t change our best practices to suit, then our valuable doctrine has become worthless dogma.

dogma |ˈdôgmə|
noun
a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true: the Christian dogma of the Trinity | the rejection of political dogma.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek dogma ‘opinion,’ from dokein ‘seem good, think.’

OS X Dictionary, © Apple 2007

Enterprise architecture (EA) is prime example. As a doctrine, enterprise architecture has a proud history all the way back to John Zachman’s work in the 70s and the architecture framework which carries his name. EA has leveraged large, multi-year transformation programs to deliver huge operational effencies into the business. These programs have delivered a level of business performance unimaginable just a generation ago.

The pace of business has accelerated so much in recent years that the multiyear engagement model these transformations imply is no longer appropriate. What use is a five or three year plan in a world that changes every quarter? Transformation projects have been struggling recently. Some recent transformations edge across the line, at which point everyone moves onto the next project exhausted, and the promised benefits are neither identified or realized. Some transformations are simply declared a success after an appropriate effort has been applied, allowing the team to move on. A few explode, often quite publicly.

This approach made sense a decade or more ago, where IT was focused on delivering the next big IT asset into the enterprise. It’s application strategy, rather than technology strategy. However, the business and technology environment has changed radically recently since the emergence of the Internet as a public utility. The IT departments we’ve created as application factories have become an albatross for the business; making us incapable of engaging anything but a multiyear project worth tens of millions of dollars. They actively prevent the business from leveraging in innovative solutions or business opportunities. Even when there is a compelling reason to do so.

Simply put, the value created by enterprise architecture has moved, and the doctrine, or at least our approach to applying it, hasn’t kept up. For example, a common practice when establishing a new EA team seems to involve hiring architects to fill each role defined TOGAF’s IT Architecture Role and Skill Definitions to provide us with complete skills coverage. Driving this is a desire to align ourselves with best practice, and ensure we do the job properly.

Some of TOGAFs IT Architecture Role and Skill Definitions

Some of TOGAF's IT Architecture Role and Skill Definitions

Most companies don’t need, nor can they can afford, a complete toolbox of enterprise architecture skills inside the business. A strict approach to the the doctrine will result in a larger EA team than the company can sustain. A smarter approach is to balance the demands and available resources of the company against the skill requirements and possible outcomes. We can tune our approach by aligning it with new techniques, tools and capabilities, or integrating elements from other doctrines—agile or business planning techniques, for example—to create a broader pallet of tools to solve our problem with. This might involve new engagement models. We can buy some skills while renting others. Some skills might be sustainable at a lower levels. It is also possible multi-skill, playing the role of both enterprise and solution architect. Similarly, leveraging software as a service (SaaS) solutions can also force changes in our engagement model, as a methodology suitable for scoping a three year and $50 million investment in on-premises CRM might not be appropriate for a SaaS solution which only requires 10% of the effort and investment as the on-premises solution.

Treating doctrine as prescriptive converts it into dogma. As John Boyd pointed out, we should assume that all doctrine is not right—that it’s incomplete or incorrect to some extent. You need to challenge all assumptions and look outside your own doctrine for new ideas.

Our own, personal resistance to change is the strongest thing holding us back. It seems that we learn something in our early to mid twenties, and then spend the rest of our career happily doing the same thing over and over again. We define ourselves in terms of what we did yesterday. If we create an environment where we define ourselves in terms of how we will help the organization evolve, rather than in terms of the assets we manage or doctrine we apply, then we can convert change from an enemy into an opportunity.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. For all the talk of the end of newspapers, some journalists are banding together to create new business models which can hold their own in a post-Craigslist world. Some old school journalists have taken a fresh look at what it means to be a newspaper. Young but growing strong and profitable, Politico’s news room is 100 strong and they have more people in the white house bureau than any other brand.

As TechCrunch pointed out:

Journalists still matter. A lot. Especially the good ones.

The challenge is to focus on what really matters, get close to your customers and find what really drives your business, question all the common sense (which is neither common or sensible in many cases) in your industry’s doctrine, look into the doctrine of other industries to see what they are doing that you can use, and use technology to create a business which their more traditional competitors will find it impossible to compete against.

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