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You are what you eat – or your enterprise is what it communicates

If you are a long-serving computing practitioner who has been through mainframes in data centres to mini computers in departmental computing and then to PC networks and IT, you might just recall hearing about Conway’s Law. Well its coming back again as we move into clouds! Melvin Conway’s thesis, the piece of work that gave birth to the concept of Conway’s Law, first surfaced in 1968 as part of the shift into departmental computers. Essentially Conway’s point was that in designing enterprise business models, computer solutions, even products to take an organisation to market, will always mimic the enterprise’s own communication structure.

Conway’s Law = …organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Some good examples of what this might look like, based on the original thesis, can be found on Wikipedia but you can get a more up to date view from 2008 work at Harvard Business School and at Microsoft Research. To understand the interest and why it comes up at times when technology innovation leads to business change, let me provide my own experience relating first to what it meant at the time of PCs and networks, then what it means now in the context of clouds.

Not another word on iPad or eBooks! But what about using it for Capgemini Debate TV?

I question if I, or anyone else, is able to add anything of value to the topic of the moment – the Apple iPad – and more specifically, eBooks, whether as iBooks or any other format such as Amazon’s longer established Kindle format. What I will remark upon however is how the provision of effective content and readers in two years has transformed the market place for buying and reading books in the same way that MP3 players and providers of online music transformed the way we buy and listen to music. Both owe a lot to the availability of low cost broadband, and as access becomes easier with wireless, and available bandwidth grows, the third part of the trilogy must come next. Video.

The progression of ‘I listen’, ‘I read’, and ‘I watch’ is inevitable, providing the connectivity, devices and content are available. Things are progressing nicely with all of these new devices featuring video capability not just in terms of being able to do it, but being able to do it well for several hours owing to the new generation of batteries. In terms of content, on the one hand there is YouTube, but on the other there is a more serious business purpose as increasingly websites replace huge text posts with more and more video clips.

Why are clouds so hard to understand?

If there is a single question that keeps coming up in my travels and meetings it is this one! I would add here that we in the industry are not helping the situation by taking our usual course of focusing on whatever the current hot topic is, and making out that whatever we are selling is connected to it. I have spent a lot of time trying to address this topic in the context of what we can use web and cloud technology for, but very little on what it actually is! The next two posts deal with this question.

It would have been fair question to ask why client-server based IT was so hard to understand back around 1990. Indeed for those of you who remember this time, there was a similar kind of confusion. The benefit of hindsight shows that because client-server covers the entire breadth of business requirements from ERP on one side, through to various ways it can be implemented (thin or thick client, single, or n tier) on the other side. If in 1990 your experience was based on mini computers with terminals, this was a whole new concept, and you pretty well had to learn everything all over again. At the same time the confusion was increased by mini computer vendors making out that they had a role in client- server in various bizarre ways. Anyone remember the MicroVAX desktop machine that was designed to compete with PCs? And of course don’t forget that PC networks and client-servers lay behind the rethinking of business models through business process reengineering and matrix working.

Microsoft + HP; Oracle + Sun and IBM + IBM

So as it looks like Oracle will get its acquisition of Sun approved with all the consequences of creating a second hardware and software combo player in the market (IBM being the first), and all of a sudden a third alternative arrives, the new HP and Microsoft team. But is all of this simple industry consolidation, or is more of a realignment to deal with the new technology and business market that is also emerging? The question is an important one as most CIOs will be worried about the impacts all of this has on their product portfolios and future support.

Just reflect on the on-off nature of things between Oracle and Sun, and Oracle and HP to see this. First it was Oracle and Sun, who partnered, then there was a split and Oracle partnered with HP. One of the powerful fruits of this was Exadata 1.0, so a year or more back this would look like a great high performing combination to install. Then it was Oracle and Sun back together again with the launch of Exadata 2.0, perhaps an even higher performing combination. But what if you have already built around Exadata 1.0? I am not suggesting that any of these players aren’t going to support their technology, but there is a question about just how realistic this is in terms of resources and time spent.

What do we want from business intelligence?

In the current turbulent trading conditions, it’s no surprise that business intelligence tops enterprise IT wish list. However, in this post, I want to try to dig in to what that really means. On one side of the issue, the use of data and information, an excellent series of posts have already been written by my friend Peter Evans-Greenwood. So it’s the other side I want to look at, the way people use information to make decisions, and the tools and techniques that can be used. The single biggest issue this throws up is that one size does not in fact fit all, or, put a little more clearly, one tool will not deliver everything required across the roles and working practices of an enterprise’s employee base.

Some time ago there were a series of classifications made, dividing up the behavior and working characteristics of different age groups. The result was to define four major groups: Traditionalists 64 yrs +; Boomers 45 to 63 yrs; Generation X 26 to 44 yrs and Millennials 18 to 25 yrs. The classifications used age as a broad basis to define attitudes to work, technology and many other issues, including communication styles, problem solving techniques and decision making. These are three major traits that business intelligence is designed to support. Each age group shows vastly different styles (see diagram below).

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by Andy Mulholland on January 18, 2010

Business and IT alignment is getting worse and data/information is the reason

I have this recurring sensation that I’m working in two increasingly different universes. Discussions with business managers are different to discussions with IT managers on one hand. On the other, discussions with people who understand web architecture (meaning solutions driven from the user’s perspective) are very different to a discussion with IT folks. It’s not that either side is wrong, they are just standing in the same place and looking in different directions, and that place is data, if you look towards the computers, or information, if you look towards the users.

Let’s start with a relatively old piece of research by Gartner published at the beginning of the year. It’s on their public website so I think I can share it with you. It’s a worldwide survey of more than 1500 CIOs and look at what they said very carefully. Unless I am mistaken every priority on the business side, with the exception of cost cutting, is about front office activity designed to help a business to win customers and grow revenues. Now look at the technology priorities. There are two, possibly three, that match the business priorities, and all the rest focus on the traditional role of IT as a back office cost-reducing mechanism.

Jugaad v Lean – doing more with less

In a recent article by Reena Jana, Business Week spotlighted the concept of ‘Jugaad’, a Hindi slang word for doing things ‘fast and cheap’ by using innovation to get around conventional barriers and focusing on exactly what the real need is rather than the more aspirational requirement that may be the starting point. As an approach to building and delivering IT requirements in the current tough economic period this is of course immediately recognisable as an interesting concept.

The article quotes a number of well-known companies that claim to be making use of Jugaad and points to training by Indian management gurus. Actually the term goes deeper than this. It means making do with scarce resources, or ‘getting it done’ anyway you can. Stretching the definition, this may even include illegal or dangerous means. To me this is an exact summary of the risks that enterprises are running by allowing ‘shadow IT’ within their business, a term that refers to employees outside the IT department building and deploying their own DIY technology solutions under the radar.

CIOs have their say; the funding model is at the heart of it

My colleagues running the fourth annual Capgemini Global CIO Report went looking for something different, and they found it. As with all surveys the questions inevitably influence the outcome somewhat, for example if you ask a CIO if costs are important then you’ll struggle to find one that says ‘no’!

And so the challenge was to provide an ‘open’ survey that would focus on how CIOs felt in the current economic circumstances, and what role IT was playing in their enterprise. That led quite naturally into a conversation about how well this role was being played, should, or could, IT be playing other roles, and perhaps most crucially of all, a comparison between how IT was used and how successfully their enterprise was weathering the current conditions.

The results showed three common profiles of the CIOs surveyed:
Technology Utility (24%) = IT is managed as a pure utility
Service Centre (39%) = IT assets are packaged to provide specific services
Business Technology (37%) = IT is a key asset in the leadership of the business

Unstructured Events Call for Unstructured Data (But in Context)

As you might expect, I choose topics to write about in response to the conversations and questions that I hear week after week, mostly with clients, sometimes with colleagues and occasionally during industry events. There has been a lot of chatter about the cloud recently for obvious reasons, but this last week has been marked by two interesting conversations with very large global organisations in fast moving markets.

Essentially, it was the same question asked twice, but one that has been coming up in various ways all year. What stuck out in one of the meetings was the way the question was positioned by the CEO. It was clearly designed to be a challenge to the CIO: ‘I want to know the real activity in our key markets and across our product lines as and when I need to focus in. However, I can’t trust either the P&L reporting, as this is a smoothed and massaged set of figures, or the conventional reporting, as this doesn’t give me the flexibility to slice and dice what is actually behind the figures’.

Clouds – is this a critical insight into the mixed messages?

Over the last few weeks there has been a succession of ‘serious’ conferences. By this I mean gatherings of people trying to make sense of, and come up with answers to, issues that matter around people and technology. Sadly the so called ‘Chatham House rules’ mean it is impossible for me to report on the details, but the breadth and depth of the discussions provided fascinating insight into why the topic of clouds seems so confusing in terms of what it covers and delivers.

Is cloud computing the next generation of IT systems offering tremendous cost cutting potential? Is it the ability to create new markets and marketplaces? Or is it an entirely new business model to enable innovation in smaller companies and start-ups by reducing capital, time and skill requirements? Moreover, beneath each of these statements sits differing attitudes about the core approach to the technology elements involved.

During the presentations and the debates something simple, yet quite surprising, hit me. The three major regions – North America, Europe and India’s perspective on clouds are all quite different, and all based on the business models of the leading commercial organisations in their regions. This may be an oversimplification, but it is both recognisable and, I would argue, understandable. So how do I see the drivers that are defining clouds in each region?

About the authors

You are what you eat – or your enterprise is what it communicates

Not another word on iPad or eBooks! But what about using it for Capgemini Debate TV?

Why are clouds so hard to understand?

Microsoft + HP; Oracle + Sun and IBM + IBM

What do we want from business intelligence?

Business and IT alignment is getting worse and data/information is the reason

Jugaad v Lean – doing more with less

CIOs have their say; the funding model is at the heart of it

Unstructured Events Call for Unstructured Data (But in Context)

Clouds – is this a critical insight into the mixed messages?

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