This is my blog post about the Master class given at #E20summit today.
Due to my flight schedule I was only able to attend part of the pre-summit master class events.
So I was absent from the following sessions:
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Principles about Web 2.0 in the Enterprise and Corporate Social Computing
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Models and Strategic Pillars for the Conceptionalization of Enterprise 2.0
The Master class was hosted by Dion Hinchcliffe, of Hinchcliffe & Company
The start of the afternoon sessions I attended were:
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Implementation Model for Enterprise 2.0: The Three-Legged Stool
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Succeeding in Enterprise 2.0 Challenges: Adoption, IT issues and Governance
At the start of the afternoon Dion offered the following model (as a typical example):
Identify, Prepare, Assess, Pilot, Roll-out, & Manage – a sample ‘waterfall’ mechanism on ‘Implementing Enterprise 2.0’
One interesting point Dion offered was that pilot’s should be small – allowing mistakes to be made, and not in front of the masses. There was a worthwhile case study where something happened that resulted in a mass lock down of the system. This is quite different to the approach that we took in CSC. Obviously what size and how to run the pilot is very much debated within the industry at the moment and needs to be a choice taking into account a lot of the nuances of the business in mind.
On the Model and Platforms for E20:
Dion asked “Should it be a single integrated system, or a set of ‘best of breed’ integrated products that speak to a common set of standards?” Dion indicated that the later model is reflected by the web itself (so has been proven as a model), with the unifying service of these bundles would be enterprise search. Of course, single systems also do work, but perhaps the quality of each facet may not be as high a niche ‘best of breed’ product.
Dion outlined the top listing players in this space at the moment, saying that industry leaders need to be prepared to hear and learn about new names such as start-ups and other establish external community players.
In speaking about some of more advanced areas of Enterprise 2.0 Dion said that true “crowd sourcing” is something that normally would take a different DNA (in comparison to most common corporate cultures) of a company to do this and feel comfortable about it.
In reference to models of delivery. Enterprise Portals are still the most common platform for E2.0 implementation. However, they do suffer from a struggle to evolve or remain as up to date as stand alone modern Enterprise 2.0 applications.
Dion outlined a list of adoptions strategies to use to gain adoption in the E2.0 environment. Participation models need to be a simple as possible, any additional barriers can 1/2 participation and adoption. Great tools stand out by having an intuitive complexity gradient that allows users to set the complexity to a level of which they are comfortable (e.g. Gmail).
Then Dion touched on some complimentary (or key – depending on preference) extensions to E2.0 systems – e.g. reputation systems, and social analytics and advanced expertise location (tacit analysis) and community management.
Social analytics: A good tip – focus on cultivating “weak ties”, because they bring more innovation and insight than strong and well understood relationships.
Community management: will be a key proportion of the budget of the implementation and then maintenance of the E2.0 environment.
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Session on Strategies for Change Management:
Dion began this session saying it was important to “Understand that some cultures that tend to stifle collaboration” – for this he gave the following examples:
- Cultures that…
- have a singular focus on individual achievement
- do not value sharing knowledge or expertise
- does not place value on new ideas
- are not proficient in applying technology
All these culture types can hinder the ability to adopt E2.0 principles and technologies.
Dion went on to discuss how important leadership is in managing & influencing the outcome of E2.0 within the organisation some of the key points are:
- Are they leading by example?
- Are they setting clear expectations?
- Are they inspiring the right behaviours?
- How do they react to critical incidents?
- Are they victims of the fear factor of engaging with a large network in a public manner?
- Are they allocating resources to the right areas?
Dion then talked through the importance of managing collaboration based at the team, community and network level. As you move up this chain, the definition and role of individual becomes more unclear, less mandatory and less visible because of surrounding noise. It is important to condition support and community management around these factors as appropriate.
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Case Studies
Serena Software – moved their intranet to Facebook. Started as 30% of the workforce was already on Facebook. 800 highly distributed global employee based is on Facebook.
DKW – German Investment Banking a well recognised case study use of blogs and wikis (AMcAfee). Ease of use, and no set predicated expectations of use, and extensive managerial support did help, but the top-down lead approach was characterised by slow process of adoption. However, once established it did prove viral adoption works.
Interactive Services: AARF – based their E2.0 environment on Mediawiki (Wikipedia). Spent a lot of time ensuring content and tagging worked well, and gave a lot of useful feedback (dynamic/automatic) to the users. This produced a very lively and interactive environment.
T. Rowe Price – Investment Bank. Struggling to find a platform that enabled knowledge management in a high-speed chaotic, high turnover business environment – their call centre! Needed something that was easy to use, and easily reference able. Used Confluence wiki, to produce a locked down set of reference documents, but with ability to add pages, comments, tags and blogs. Made this available to whole business organisation. Tags and comments were very beneficial immediately, in part because of the young age of the workforce and the facilitation of the search engine (Google search appliance) – returning a high percentage of useful search results. This environment produced visible drop in call times and increased customer satisfaction.
A great wrap up from @frogpond : “@dhinchcliffe sums up the full day workshop at #e20s – it’s repeatable, medium risk, proven benefit, rapid RoI -> ready for wide adoption”
I’m thrilled to be able to say… I’ll be more than just an attendee in Frankfurt on Nov 10-12 for the E2.0 Summit.
The event is about how corporations have to change to be more productive as well as innovative and competitive for their markets by the use of social software. With the presentation of European and international best-practices coupled with a gathering of the international expert’s community the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is helping participants in gaining new ideas and inspiration for their projects as well as learning about the real-life opportunities and challenges.
This is certainly one of if not THE premier summit on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 in Europe this autumn.
I’ll be joining my esteemed colleagues: Simon Scullion and Alexander Schellong in presenting a case study on
Best-Practices on Collaboration 2.0
Improvement in collaboration is a clear objective for Enterprise 2.0. Different best-practice presentations demonstrate how the effectiveness and efficiency of internal collaboration can be increased by social applications such as internal social networks and socially-enhanced portal solutions.
Our panel will be discussing the best practices and strategies we used to help foster the adoption of C3 our social collaboration platform. You may even catch a glimpse of Mark Masterson too! 
For more about see C3 see these posts by Claire Flanagan
CSC Announces “C3: Connect | Communicate | Collaborate.”
CSC’s C3 Reaches Milestone In User Registrations
In fact as testament to Claire’s hard work and the enthusiasm and energy of the rest of the advocacy team Jive awarded CSC the “Community Adoption” award at the recent Jiveworld ‘09 event.
Recently I attended an event the Oracle Middleware 11g Forum around the launch & release of their Fusion Middleware 11g suite of products.
Oracle should be commended on the swift work they have done of incorporating the technologies and services they have acquired into their own product set. Within the 11g release there is the unified and integration of mainstream Oracle products with the product set acquired from BEA Systems (WebLogic and AquaLogic etc.) There is a clear standardisation around the Weblogic server as the strategic application server within the Fusion Middleware stack.
The pending acquisition and integration of Sun Microsystems into Oracle will pose a few interesting questions around existing complementary product set. But also to give the obvious capability of singlehanded delivery of hardware, OS, middleware, and application stack.
Both of these acquisition brings much more of a level set between Oracle and IBM in the J2EE space around enterprise portal, application server, content management, SOA and middleware. This should bring another boost of invigoration to this marketplace, which is already looking lively because of innovative adoption around consumer social computing services and mash up or widget integration technologies.
An example of the IBM Middleware stack: (taken from an article about “Develop and Deploy Multi-Tenant Web-delivered Solutions using IBM middleware”)
An example of the Oracle Middleware stack: (taken from an article on the blog of Eric Marcoux “What do you want to know about Fusion Middleware ?”)
However this doesn’t rule out other players in this space, such as Microsoft, Autonomy, Opentext etc. While they may not be so closely aligned around the technology or industry space, or perhaps bring such a broad offering, as IBM or Oracle they should not be ignored. In fact their strengths or niche plays should be significant influencers on the strategic enterprise architecture of an organisation.
What then are the questions that should be asked to ascertain that the Strategic Enterprise Architecture choices are optimal for your organisation? Caveat :– I am not claiming to be an enterprise architect! However I hope these should be reasonably logical and common sense, and the answers should go some way to revealing the degree of alignment between the enterprise architecture and business requirements.
- How does my End-User (desktop and productivity suite choices/need) integrate or align with choices around Portal and Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Applications?
- Do they complement or conflict?
- Do they offer the integration that enables users to engage in business processes, or does inflict conflicts and hindrances?
- Is there a sensible balance between departmental application choice and autonomy in comparison to corporate mandates and direction?
- Are there governance policies in place that sustains a level of commonality across business units?
- Is there a that framework allows departmental processes and requirements to be surfaced and delivered in a uniform way?
- Is Identity and Access management provided centrally?
- Are compliance, security and risk management services provided in a consistent manner?
- Are the Strategic Enterprise Architecture choices enabling or preventing the evolution of a competitive business model?
- Is the architecture promoting an agile and adaptive business model & culture?
- Is it helping to make the best of the human interactions and capital within the business?
- Is it serving to optimise TCO and reduce overheads, via enabling virtualisation, centralisation or cloud services technologies?
- Is it serving the business through enabling a greater percentage of core business orientated employees, by reducing the focus on operating non-differentiating IT services & functions?
- Is it enabling the business to serve the influential outliers – business partners, suppliers and customers?
These are by no means a definitive list, but I hope you think them relevant and helpful. I’m sure there will be areas I’ve over looked or ignored so please chip-in with more, comments and feedback.
There some good material here :
There was the opportunity to learn more about IBM’s developing story around ‘cloud’ within IBM the Lotus software brand. The techjam at IBM South Bank, was attended by representatives from the IBM business partner community and some larger SI’s.
As the event coincided with recent announcements around the Lotus Notes 8.5.1 client release (announcement details) and the availability of LotusLive iNotes (not sure why that is the service name – when it’s not really anything to do with Lotus Notes). This seemed to be a good moment, to gain fresh insight on this part of the Lotus roadmap and an understanding of the market place from the IBM view point.
The day comprised of talks around the following key areas.
IBM’s Cloud Story – Wayne Leone
Wayne introduced the IBM cloud strategy a tier delivery model of IAAS, PAAS and SAAS. He also outlined their development of capability in helping their customers make the most of type of cloud model they want to use, whether private (on-premise internal cloud solutions), public (using standardised services from a provider) or hybrid (spanning both private and public types).
He gave some insights into the development of their cloudburst technology. Particularly interesting with the intention to incorporate TSAM (Tivoli System Automation Manager) into a forth coming release, to allow existing suitable hardware within the client footprint to be incorporated into the ‘private cloud’ delivered by cloudburst and managed through the same interface.
This will be an interesting feature as centralisation and efficiency of ‘cloud’ services administration is key to making the some of promised cost savings compared to running distributed systems, especially as the client can continue to leverage that hardware investment that they previously made.
Social Networking – The business case – Jon Mell (Headshift)
Jon outlined Headshift’s established credentials in helping businesses grasp and take advantage of social software technology. Primarily by their consultancy expertise in supporting the business through process and cultural change needed to occur by bringing to light and addressing the most relevant and compelling use cases.
He underlined that social software technology is first and foremost about people. The advantage comes as social software enhances, augments the human interaction within or across businesses, and helps change business approaches from high-friction process centred organisations into lower-friction, people centred rather than process.
When adopted correctly (not just implemented) this makes business agility a tangible reality, but this should be recognised it’s as a by-product of unselfish and deliberate acts of collaboration and sharing information, and knowledge within the context of business process at hand. Social software just provides an enabling platform, primarily to make visible artefacts and social interaction meta data that was hidden or non-existent before hand.
Jon gave some very useful thoughts and comments to how assist on the work of user adoption. He described the categorisation of the user population in 80% of indifference and job focussed workers. a top 10% of natural adopters and pioneers, and the 10% of perhaps change averse luddites. There is sometimes a disproportionate amount of attention or effort spent on finding and supporting the top or bottom 10%, when the best business advantage will be realised through the careful support of generating compelling use cases for the large majority of workers.
It is important that the ROI is rarely measured hard dollar savings or gains, but rather very compelling and powerful anecdotal stories of how the approach moved the business forward. This is achieved in the making the tools and use cases to culture and processes that exist in the business. Successful adoption by busy people doesn’t come through full immersion within the collaborative environment but through small steps such as tagging, commenting, files or content as part of a person day-to-day working routine.
By moving to a culture of trust rather than control is an important aspect of the cultural adoption of social software by an organisation. Understanding and encouraging the time spent in ‘virtual’ water cooler, as much as expecting a more flexible workforce in terms of extending working hours, as this brings a further blurring of the work life balance.
Once the adoption has got momentum it will then become natural for the business to drive the next level of adoption or integration with other line of business applications or processes. The significant of offerings of enterprise grade social software solutions, means it is easier to drive adoption through the top-down sponsor and use as an example tied in with the viral ground-swell adoption from the bottom up.
The LotusLive Portfolio & Partner Value – Richard Bye
Richard is the Business Unit Executive in EMEA for LotusLive, and was transitioned across into IBM through the acquisition of the OutBlaze messaging assets in Apr ‘09.
He echoed the cloud strategy model given by Wayne and described how IBM were making their products and services conscious that a “one size fits all” isn’t what customers want from their cloud providers. That they expect an enterprise class service, offering attractive variations in services levels and feature sets. That will help businesses take advantage of cost efficiencies as they deliver the features and services that make sense to each segment or section of their workforce. Regardless of the service choice, that they should share, common features of enterprise grade security, scalability, availability, accessibility with the self-service and on-demand nature of a cloud service.
He described the feature set and background of each of services that comprise LotusLive. In particular described the credentials of the OutBlaze messaging assets that were brought into IBM, and what has gone into the formation of LotusLive iNotes. He then described the opportunities for business partners to interface and play a part with IBM in the delivery of a LotusLive service.
LotusLive technical view – Anders Sabra
Anders gave a very comprehensive overview of the underlying technology of LotusLive, and how and where it is delivered from. At the moment the main data centres are located in the US, however they have local caching points of presence located in all major geographies. They also have plans to expand upon the location of the main data centres to locations outside of US in 2010.
He talked a lot about both the care to ensure the integrity of the security model at the infrastructure and application level, incorporation AES 128 bit encryption, mandatory use of HTTPS (SSL) connections, and secure encryption of traffic for the LotusLive Sametime instant messaging service. But more importantly the care taken to make choices for security in the user interface, simple to understand, action and intuitive to the types of security and controls functions user want to put on files, or services available in LotusLive.
He described the nature of application integration available in LotusLive utilising standards such as SAML, Opensocial, OpenID, so that SSO hand shakes are possible between LotusLive and the integrated application. He gave the example of SalesForce.com, and others. There are now well documented REST APIs for all LotusLive services, that provide powerful and extensive methods of interacting with LotusLive services. Examples of that include the client side integration of Activities into the Notes 8.5.x client.
Anders gave descriptions of mechanisms and processes for serving LotusLive webmail (Notes or iNotes) in a hybrid model, where there is a mixture of on-premise and cloud served mail. LotusLive services support and integrate with directories based on Domino, Active Directory and other LDAP Directory sources, and so can serve both Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange messaging environments.
He also described the migration process for the ingest of mail and other data services into LotusLive and how partners or SI’s can play a part in the provision, support of services around that.
Demo of LotusLive Engage and LotusLive iNotes – Baiju McCubbins
The final part of the day was a demonstrate of LotusLive Engage given by Baiju. This provided a great insight into how LotusLive is helping to bridge the gaps in collaboration services especially for those working with contacts outside of the corporate firewall.
One of the compelling features of the LotusLive model is the availability of guest accounts that can be given to contacts outside of the subscription service. Guest users can receive shared files, and tasks & actions through activities. They can then interact with those files and activities in a limited manner, such as comment, download or create child entries within that activity, they can even upload up to 25MB of files. The advantage of the guest account is that it enables subscription users to interact and involve whosoever they need to to help achieve their business objectives, this is a self-service function at the discretion of the user and circumvents any need to involve IT administrators or invoke complex business processes to involve that 3rd party individual.
In Conclusion:
IBM have obviously worked hard, to bring to the market an offering that meets the expectations of the enterprise, while incorporating features that provide differentiation against it’s competitors. IBM’s recent announcements make it clear that is ready to compete with both Google (comment) and Microsoft (another review) in offering cloud based collaboration services, with perhaps only Cisco remaining to reveal it product set and strategy there is a lot to look forward to as this market place evolves.
Gartner hosted the 4th annual Europe based “Gartner : Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit” (pcce4) in London this week. From statistics given the delegates had a good cross industry and European countries (and further afield) representation.
The summit host Toby Bell and his colleague Debra Logan welcomed us by providing a grounding for the event through a key note “Certain Strategies for Uncertain Times”. This contextualised the summit, technologies, and business objectives of the delegates against the backdrop of the current business and economic climate. They underlined the need for IT to re-shape its role in their business, and shift the perception of being a cost centre into a facilitator and necessary partner to achieve growth and business revenue.
A challenge indeed! Especially when the business will continue to demand cost optimisation or look for significant strategies and approaches to deliver reductions in cost overhead from the operational maintenance of IT systems within the business. Which is backed-up by the Gartner indicating “8 out of 10 dollars spent in IT is ‘dead money’” – spent just to keep things running, and protecting existing investments in people and technology.
Achieving this role change doesn’t lie in a technical solution. But comes back to the people, corporate culture and the manner in which communication between different but inter-dependant business (departments/teams/individuals) transpires. The resulting business strategies and goals either foster better mutual understanding, respect and cooperation and can produce transformational attitudes and benefits. Or result in strategies that continue to reinforce the siloed thinking, divisional structures and misalignment of roles that hinder and hamper mutually beneficial events and results for the business.
I think that though not clearly emphasised by the summit, in terms of a ‘track’ or major session, “people and culture rather than technology”, became a significantly re-occurring comment or phrase that was a common thread throughout the summit. Underlining it as an important concern, and fuelling enquiry and debate amongst both delegates and analysts.
The summit also provided stimulus and examples for new and innovative approaches and methodologies in the format of thought leadership and model case studies.
None more so than the excellent guest keynote from highly respected author, thinker, inventor and speaker Dr. Edward de Bono (author of ‘Mechanism of the Mind’ and ‘Lateral Thinking’), on “Why our Current Thinking is not Enough”.
His talk on creative thinking and the need to overhaul the underlying mechanisms and approaches to thinking that have been so dominant for the last 2400 years in the Western culture, was very well received. I’m sure it will prove a fruitful ground for much personal, and you hope, corporate and societal introspection and contemplation.
He gave some great examples on the use of challenge, provocation, and random introduction to stimulate and produce creative and value ideas and approaches to established conventional and logical thought.
This post describes some excellent examples of where his thinking has been used.
He also described his 6 hats parallel thinking technique which can prove extremely beneficial when understood and correctly applied.
There is a concern that his thought leadership, proposals and hypotheses have been widely adopted or practiced without the appropriate analysis and enquiry to show whether they are most optimal ‘thinking behaviours and patterns’ to be adopted and used. It makes sense to me, to have that debate, enquire, study and draw conclusions in this area before further advocacy of major changes to society ‘thinking behaviours and patterns’ is more fully utilised. Whatever that result, the contribution from Dr. de Bono is immensely valuable and it was a privilege to hear him speak.
The model case study presented to the full body of the summit was that of “Building the stacks for a Mutualised Newspaper” by Dr. Chris Thorpe from the Guardian. He provided tremendous insight into how the Guardian is developing it’s ‘Open Platform’ (content API and data store). Made to serve out its contents & its people for the mutual use and benefit, co-creation, co-fabrication/co-distribution and co-monetisation of both itself and its ‘collective community’. So that what is contributed, aggregated, used and consumed helps integrate the Guardian “into the fabric of the internet.”
When you consider the ‘doomsayer’ stories, articles and events that envelope the ‘traditional push media and publishing model’ – the transformational approach and interactivity that the Guardian have achieved via this open data, content and platform approach is nothing short of revolutionary! And as Chris Thorpe described is fully deserving of the accolades prescribed by Tom Watson MP.
“I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid.
Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up.”
Furthermore their achievements in the use of cutting-edge content enabled cloud based mass-media applications is to be applauded. Demonstrating clear prowess, leadership and innovation in the development, design and delivery of these applications. There are perhaps more example of such temporal cloud based mass-media applications out there. That aside, however, I think these indicate a ‘new’ breed or model of application delivered from cloud based resources, which will become the frequent offspring of event driven interaction between the “collective” and their social media and content.
A great example of this is The Guardian’s use of the community in the analysis and review of the UK MPs expenses receipts and claims.
In conclusion:
The Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration summit main sessions and keynotes, provided much for the delegates to take away and contemplate, which should then be followed up by evaluation and incorporation of appropriate strategy for that organisation. For me one the key tenet to build a clear strategy of utilising the “collective web intelligence” as it relates and is relevant to your organisation.
Disclaimer: Permission for publication was sought and granted by Gartner
Overview:
A major set of vendors were present in Manchester to promote their products and services. The focus was in small & medium business spectrum but there were elements that were relevant to the enterprise scale as well. The vendors represented were also across the spectrum of the IT and computer services industry – memory and chip manufacturers, hardware manufacturers, infrastructure software to specialist application software vendors.
The most prominent stands (key sponsors) at the show being the Blackberry, Microsoft, Symantec and Sony, though as the host Insight was also well represented throughout.
Keynote talks were given on a number of current hot topics – Security (Symantec), ‘Recession proofing your IT department’ (Quocirca), Windows 7 (Microsoft) and Cloud computing (Google).
I attended both the Microsoft and Google keynotes – and you can find the my overview and conclusions on them here:
Google Cloud Computing Keynote
Conclusion:
I wonder if this moment in time cross-section of service (software, hardware, services) providers reflects in some ways the roll-call or roster of the early-millennial IT market at the end of that era? With the economic and delivery models of IT evolving towards utility based industrial-scale services, and businesses keen to reduce cost, complexity and overhead, perhaps this combination will precipitate some sort of consolidation and simplification in the range and breadth of service providers (even in the SMB market) – rather like the reduction of motor vehicle manufacturers during the period between and post the 2nd World war, as a large-scale industrial players absorbed, out sold and out played smaller less nimble providers and manufacturers.
On Google:
Google gave a keynote on Cloud Computing, their stand was focussed on promoting their cloud based Enterprise computing suite – Google Apps. What came across in my discussions with their representative was the keenness to compete with Microsoft in the area of cloud based productivity services. They were also eager to emphasise their experience has been proven in area of cloud delivery gained through their consumer based services. Their keynote was delivered by Robert Whiteside – head of Google Enterprise UK, Ireland and Benelux. Overall the talk was well attended, but being the last talk of day, some delegates would have already departed than stay to attend.
Google’s presentation followed a clear and well known set of topic headings.
Trends – Consumerisation of IT:
Robert outlined the what is commonly understood that Innovation is strongest in the consumer market. For example, the iPhone bringing simplicity and comprehensive services to an existing consumer device – making it ‘easier to use’ has dramatically changed that particular consumer market. He outlined the reversal of the place of advanced innovation changing from the environment of the corporation to the environment of consumer over the last 15 years.
We recognise that the “Consumer market is Darwinian in nature” – consumer can switch vendor almost immediately (e.g. internet search engine).–Howeverm that is not the case of Enterprise or business user where technology whether good or bad does have a residual time of residency.
Within the ‘Darwinian’ consumer market we have a ‘Natural selection of Technology’. For example look at the way Facebook and Twitter have come dominant their respective markets, in terms of mindshare, user base and in spite of a good deal of competition.
The people that use consumer technology at home have bring those expectations of ‘ease of use’ and ‘consumability’ into their workplace, they are after all the same people!
Robert emphasised that Google has established their credentials in the consumer market place, and therefore understand how to give the simplest and best user experience and can apply to the benefit of the enterprise user.
Trends – Cloud Computing:
Here Robert again talked about the well understood evolution of the internet from simply published static content to a fully fledged application platform that we experience today..
Read(BBC). Search(Yahoo, Google), Buy(Amazon), Trade (ebay), Talk (Skype), Publish (blogger), Share (Twitter) and Collaborate (Google Apps)
He wisely avoided debating the definition of cloud computing or the various delivery models but simply stated that for cloud users it is “ Data and applications reside in the cloud – infrastructure free IT – accessible & available as needed”. In comparison he mentioned all the effort and cost required for on-premise (pre-cloud) solutions – hardware, software, patching & maintenance, storage, support, administration and change control.
Other key trends he mentioned were where now we have the internet as a platform, it is the browser increased functionality that makes it possible to realise the fullness of the internet as an application platform, that combined with the ubiquitous availability of connection to the internet (at least in much of Western World). Also there is now a very rich mobile access experience where powerful phones, reliable connection and speed bring about a very compelling location independent experience. He also outlined that Google haven’t ignored the disconnected worker, and they have the ‘Google gears’ project as a means to run offline application in the browser.
He talked through the concern about security, in which the Google argument and premise is that the cloud enables the ‘engineering out’ of certain security issues such as data loss from remote or disconnected devices e.g. laptops being stolen, usb storage devices being lost. Within the cloud model where users log on, access and manipulate their data and log off but don’t move data out cloud the security facilities remain essentially uncompromised.
The biggest driver or trend toward the cloud is the economic model presented, the mega-economies of scale made make it possible to bring in powerful new capabilities that weren’t achievable with previously computing models. An example of this is multi-language group chat (instant messaging) with real-time translation between the languages of the various participants.
Google has in part achieved these mega-economies of scale through it’s very deliberate planning around the construction and location of it’s data centres, for example their Oregon state, situated to take advantage of cooler climates, good infrastructure connectivity and cheap local electricity generation – some of it by sustainable means (hydro). Only very few companies can afford to build infrastructures such as these which such a demanding scope and feature set, something that is out of the question for regular companies seeking use or construct data centres.
Through the provision of cloud services from such massive and highly efficient infrastructure allows Google to bring to market true utility scale computing services. A fact that Robert related to what is described by Nick Carr in his book “The Big Switch” – ‘This time, it’s computing that is turning into a utility’. Companies are able to switch their IT spend from a heavy capital spend focus to a monthly subscription and operational expenditure mechanism by utilises cloud computing services from companies such as Google. When in at a time where Gartner says “ $8 out of $10 in IT is ‘dead money’ “ this is an extremely attractive proposition. IT can also switch focus from dealing with mundane, run of the mill IT issues – ‘patching, upgrades, hardware, change control etc.’ to being business focussed and move to a position to be in dialogue of line of business issues and help push their business forward.
Google Apps Suite:
Then Robert moved on relating how Google has taken what they set out to achieve “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and make that relevant to enterprises.
To date Google has indexed the contents of the Web, made Video a medium of the internet, has plans a foot for the digitalisation of the World’s Books, is a News (real-time – not quite yet) and content aggregator, and is also working with Enterprise content too.
Robert outlined that ‘Google Enterprise’ is about bringing the breadth of what Google do on the internet to the business context.
He gave the following overview – Google Enterprise about 5 years old.
- Apps & collaboration online [receiving about 3K signs up per day]
- Security and compliance
- Search
- Geo
Their Google Apps suite provides:
- Messaging :- Gmail, Gtalk and calendar
- Collaboration :– Google Docs, Sites & video (sites & documents allows people to work on same item in real time)
- Security and perimeter services
They’ve learnt a lot using apps simply and to great scale from their consumer experience. In delivering it via the cloud they some good analyst data to show it is reliable and compares more favourably in comparison to the average down-time of on-premise solutions. In fact their SLA is 99.9%, and in 3 years there have been 2 outages (the very pubic 1.5 hours last Tuesday) made Google miss the SLAs and so compensated it customers appropriately.
Their Google Apps suite focuses on collaboration and communication tools, because they realised that these are staple to how every organisation needs to communicate, organise and interact. But these are very complex infrastructures to assemble, run and maintenance in an on-premise scenario. Google’s service releases IT department from that burden and allows the organisation to thrive on use of Google’s app suite. It provides a constant seamless stream of innovation and is essentially a versionless system, not hampered by a regular issued upgraded application. An example of significant savings in this area is the ‘Daily Telegraph who’s savings on software licensing only was enough to justify the business case to switch from a cost perspective. For a service at £33 per user per year it is a compelling cost case.
Other key reference metrics for Google Apps – 1.7 million business using it, 20K Motorola employees have been moved to Google apps.
However Robert stated that a key principle of Internet services is the openness, and so though they can migrate data-into Google apps, there is an open API to take data out, so that there is no lock-in to the service on the data side.
Summing up Robert gave an overview of what services companies should consider as possible candidates to move to the cloud.
- Build one business case at a time
- Look to move the most complex or costly in-house applications into the cloud, while perhaps not justifiable for every app, this will release the most time or funds from IT back into the business
When considering choosing cloud service providers he gave the following hints and tips.
- What is the cost for 1 user? If it is a true cloud service, the costs should be clear and transparent, and the unit cost should also be uniform irrespective of volume requested.
- Does it provide true elasticity? It should provide unrestricted demand modelling either for increasing or decreasing volume requirements
In-conclusion Google:
Google Enterprise is youthful compared to the more established players in the Business & Enterprise software and services market. However, Google’s track record has shown them to be extremely innovative and competent in developing appropriate services & markets for those services they create. Google is a founding member of cloud computing paradigm and brings tremendous resources and know-how to bear on how it build and serves it enterprise grade products.
Google does have a long way to go to perhaps establishing a really credible bridge-head into the Enterprise service market, but with the high rate of innovation it delivers as well as a very compelling price point. It will certainly make it on the ‘short list’ for many businesses considering making use of ‘collaboration as a service’ genre of cloud offerings.
The true scale of their enterprise ambitions perhaps lie in the forthcoming releases of Google Chrome OS (perhaps not the 1st), and what impact and shift Google wave brings to mechanisms by which collaboration occurs. I can certainly see Google Enterprise stand tall amongst its peers in Enterprise software and services market.
On Microsoft:
The Microsoft stand had demonstration available on Exchange 2010, BPOS (S), Dynamics, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and ForeFront their security and perimeter protection product.
Microsoft gave a keynote on Windows 7 (with a short preview of Office 2010), given by James Akrigg – head of technology for Partners, Microsoft UK. This was very well attended, with all seats taken in the auditorium. This was a very timely presentation for Microsoft on the verge of the public Windows 7 launch.
He asked at the beginning how many were already using or trailing Windows 7 and a good percentage of hands of raised to show that Windows 7 was in use already for that sort of purpose.
In the context of the talk James outlined the continuing emphasis by Microsoft on R&D, they have an annual budget of around $9.5 billion (larger than NASA’s R&D budget), with around $7 billion being assigned to their communication and productivity product area (office suite etc.). This clearly highlighted the race to innovate is key component of ‘arms race’ amongst software vendors!
He outlined the main component or service areas that Microsoft was tackling in bringing Windows 7, Office 2010 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to market :- “improved virtualisation”, “software + services” [choice for customers – in platform and delivery], “business information & data”[more visible and available data], “unified communications” and “desktop & server” [closer linkage between services and management between client & server]. [emphasis mine]
The main part of the presentation focussed on demonstrating Windows 7 – so there was both the gimmicky (playing to the audience parts) – as well as items delivering real business value in this section.
A look at the desktop and user experience of Windows 7:
- Drag to the side and snap into position for Windows being worked – useful for work across two or more windows
- The Windows wiggle, joggle the window in focus and the others disappear (minimize), joggle again the others re-appear again in their positions – useful for un-cluttering the desktop.
- Mouse-over actions
- In the corner to make windows transparent and show desktop
- Over minimised desktop icons or internet explorer tabs to preview and select if required
- Problem step recorder – combining audio and step by step screen shots to show the issue or provide training help.
A look at the ‘Desktop & Server” side efficiencies which focus on reducing delivery and management costs:
There was demonstration of ‘Direct Access’ service (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2), which provided IPSEC (IPv6) tunnelling without the need for separate VPN clients. Enabling much more simple yet secure remote access into corporate environments, as well as allowing better management of corporate end-points even while not directly connected to the corporate network.
He talked about the ‘Branch Cache’ feature (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2), where duplication of data transfers across the WAN are reduced by invoking a peer-to-peer transfer of files between clients – upon the request of that asset from the server (the requesting client is re-directed to another client peer to obtain that data).
He demonstrated the use of encryption on USB key -“Bitlocker-go” and how that policies could enforce that all USB storage keys are read-only, and data can’t be copy on to them, a great feature to help the heads of security rest and relax. Another enterprise-wide policy that would help the environment and provide ‘energy’ savings was the use of group policies to set the power management settings for all devices.
For those concerned about application compatibility between previous versions of Windows “the previous version of Windows” – was the comment used to address that product beginning with a ‘V’ – his words not mine He demonstrated the ‘XP Mode’ of Virtual PC – where applications are launched in windows from a virtualised XP instance hidden and running in the background. This is particular useful for example where a web application still bound to IE6 is required, and therefore can be used without hampering the transition to Windows 7. He also mentioned the application compatibility toolkit available to help in application assessment for Windows 7.
Other server or management enhancement briefly mentioned were improvements to virtualisation in the Hyper-V, bringing in a similar feature to ‘v-motion’, the fact that System Center 2010 will consolidate the management of both Vmware and Hyper-V infrastructures into a single admin tool. App-V and App-locker also got a brief mention.
The last demonstration was the use of OCS communicator to do VOIP calls as well as instant messaging, which was ambitious for a live-demo – the remote voice didn’t come through on the auditorium speakers 
– But not really what I’d attribute to being a feature of Office 2010 - OCS clients have been able to do peer VOIP for a long time.
There wasn’t much in demonstrating relating to “software + services” for cloud and on the productivity side of things, presence embedded on OWA 2010 and “ignore conversation” conversations feature – again a little bit of mixed bag in terms of what was really new.
In wrapped up he again mentioned the portfolio of offering from Windows Azure, BPOS, Windows Live to Windows client and server on-premise solutions, which give the user a good choice the type & delivery of services that they need.
In-conclusion Microsoft & Windows 7:
There can be no doubt that Microsoft have really taken on the feedback about “that previous version of Windows” and produced a very compelling desktop operating system combined with some very attractive server side integration features. They’ve made significant advances in feature and functionality across their product set, and augmented their portfolio of offering (BPOS & Azure etc.) to remain competitive and relevant in a time of tremendous change in the mechanisms of how IT services are provided and consumed.
Their position at the ‘heart of the enterprise’ remains intact and secure, having survived the fall out from “previous version of Windows” and the longevity of Windows XP. This has been in part to great brand inertia and loyalty Microsoft have established around their Windows and Office products, something their competitors find very difficult to overcome. However, what I feel will really demonstrate Microsoft’s prowess as an Enterprise software and services provider, is getting their customers to remain ‘sticky’ to Microsoft’ but not ‘sticky’ to a particular Microsoft product. I don’t think it will be Microsoft’s business plan to see Windows 7 remaining as their most deployed client operating system for the next 7 years!
Competitors of Microsoft will see their opportunities to get customers to switch to their products at the points of transition, as in the past transition paths from one version to the next has not be an easy and straight forward process. I expect Microsoft will improve in this area and take advantage of virtualisation & hypervisor technologies to help alleviate any teething issues that occur. Other competitors will continue to focus on gaining significantly in a specialist market (not necessarily enterprise), Microsoft will need to stay focussed and on the ball to ensure they relevant and valued in all their markets.
As an almost constant home worker, my work connections are 90%+ virtual. I rely heavily on a variety of collaboration tools to help me overcome the barriers to successful engagement, construction of trusted networks and getting the job done in a geographically dispersed team.
This clip from Phil Montero (via Michael’s news updates) rings true with me at many levels, so I thought it was worth a plug (tweet and blog post) to echo and add my comments.
- I like how Phil puts across the plethora of tools and scenarios that are available and that the choice of tool really matters in influencing the success factor of the collaboration.
- I like how he emphasises the need for informal communication and collaboration tools like (Facebook & Twitter) to help build trust and relationships and help to bridge that gap/void of human contact in the virtual space.
- I like how he describes the appropriate uses of asynchronous and synchronous communication and collaboration tools to meet the needs of the scenario or size of team involved.
- I like the workflow framework – it’s a great launch point for starting this conversation in your team or organisation, to drive out the thought processes of the community involved to choose the best set of tools to suit their needs.
As someone who is passionate about increasing the collaborative momentum within the teams I work in, I’ll be using this framework as launch point for some of those conversations. These conversations may not be ‘game changers’ for everyone, everyone is different and experiences different levels of comfort around making a change.
However, I do believe if organisations and enterprises are going to bring about a cultural shift in how they collaborate and communicate.
It needs to recognise:
- The need to change – if things stay the same, then they’ll get worse not better
- People and situations need different tools, and they need to invest in providing that variety – so that people can make choices
- People need to educated and shown how to change, finding and using ‘champions’ is a great way to help that happen.
Steve Richards has mentioned that he has used another approach to analysing the appropriate types of collaboration required.
thx for the input Steve.
As a follow on to my recent post, I’d thought I post my thoughts on what I’ve discovered about keeping these devices (small computers after all) in good working order.
Handy maintenance tips
This post from BBGeeks is a great start point:
8 ways to trim the fat from your Blackberry
Some of the less obvious or well known which may deliver a good return on the performance are:
- Delete your Event Logs
- Use the BlackBerry Memory Cleaner
However, if things get really bad you may need a more comprehensive option… wipe the device and restore.
Blackberry Wipe and Restore
This is a fairly well documented process and I followed the step by step outlined here:
How do I wipe the BlackBerry using Jl Cmder from BlackberryFAQ
The stuff about Java Loader Cmder can be a little tricky, especially on an x64 system so I also found this post useful.
I also changed the choice application (it’s a 16 bit app from the install) with the 32 bit one from the system root.. (Windows\system32)
This is a screen shot of the DOS interface warning before the wipe!
Using the Javaloader interface was rather clunky, and sometimes the connections were flaky, it may be useful to have another laptop or machine to run it that doesn’t have an internal USB hub. Or you could run the commands via the command line see – here.
I also found that I could wipe and install with the battery still in the device, rather than removed.
Unfortunately, unlike an OS upgrade upon the rebuild I wasn’t able to restore the applications I had been using previously. This I had to do manually, which where possible I did via Blackberry App World, however, it is another consideration to take into account when contemplating a full wipe.
What I will try and investigate and post about in due course is the BlackBerry Master Control Program (MCP) – it could make all this a lot easier.
BookMark
