Category: Solution Architecture

Will Enterprise IM Survive

Grassy Sun

Stu questions whether Enterprise IM will survive, I think the answer to that is – it depends.

Information passed across an IM session may well be corporate information. In order for enterprises to be comfortable about this information being passed across a public network using an external provider a number of assurances need to be in place:

  • Deliverable service levels, preferably contractually agreed service levels.

  • Protection from malicious attack; virus, malware, etc.

  • Encryption of conversations.

  • Verifiable identity.

Many organisations will also have auditing requirements for a specific set of individuals, so will need the ability to capture and store the information being exchanged.

None of these requirements preclude the use of publicly available IM, but these things are all much easier to control when you are in control of the environment.

The other advantage to operating the environment internally is that you are in control of the end user experience. That control can provide benefits that may not be delivered through the publicly available service.

One example where this might apply in IM terms is in the provision of bots which perform specific business purposes.

Another example would be the creation of an integrated experience for communications. This argument is less clear cut than it used to be. The extensibility of the publicly available services mean has resulted in many enterprise environments being less rich than services that are freely available over the Internet. Many of these services are reaching the point of delivering the entire integrated communications experience anyway.

In conclusion: I don’t see the end of enterprise IM any time soon because the assurance issues are too soft and diverse to be resolved quickly. I do see time, though, when enterprises take more services from external providers over the Internet. I’m not sure IM will be one of the priorities though.

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e-Society Profiler

How many planes?

via BBC

Apparently I have been classified again. This time my household has been classified dependent upon its access to technology services. Each post-code has then been classified into a set of groups and types all made available via a profiler. My area is apparently F19:

Group F : Instrumental E-users

This Group tends to use electronic technologies for purely instrumental purposes, because they provide a practical method of saving time or money. They have plenty of other leisure activities that they enjoy and tend to be light television watchers. However they find the Internet useful for purchasing on line and they are smart enough to realise that they can drive better deals when purchasing goods and services if they fore-arm themselves with consumer information. Generally they use the net to undertake transactions and manage their personal finances rather than to explore.

This Group contains mostly people in well off, middle class, owner occupied suburbia. Many have children.

Type F19 : On-line apparel purchasers

This Type consists of well educated young professionals, many of them women, who are confident users of electronic technologies and communications. They use the Internet for purchases across a wide range of product categories, but in particular for children’s products and fashion wear. They tend not to use this medium to purchase wines or insurance. Many members of this type look after children at home and do not have access to electronic technologies at work. They are not particularly interested in computer magazines.

I’m not sure that this successfully describes me, but perhaps I’m not typical for my area.

Anyone willing to pay me to do this kind of research it sounds like fun?

Another Test

I found another test – this one was different…

Brain Lateralization Test Results
Right Brain (56%) The right hemisphere is the visual, figurative, artistic, and intuitive side of the brain.
Left Brain (50%) The left hemisphere is the logical, articulate, assertive, and practical side of the brain

Are You Right or Left Brained?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Now I’m really confused…

Right Brain v Left Brain Test

The Governors House, Dinan

Am I left-brained or right-brained? How do i decide? Is it even a valid question?

Did some searching around and came across one of those survey things that people put together. You know the ones I mean, the ones that you used to do in magazines when you were 14 . The ones that consist of 20 multiple choice questions, with little explanation.

So I did the test and this is what is said…

You Are 30% Left Brained, 70% Right Brained
The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you’re left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you’re right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

I’m not sure that I’m the right person to judge whether this is correct or not. Does asking the question make me one or the other? It’s very difficult trying to think about your own brain .

The Right Side of the Brain

Quiberon sand artHoliday’s are great times to do something different. On this holiday I did two things which were different for me. The first one is the boring sounding one, I read a business book rather than a novel – The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. The second was spending lots of time on my daughters Nintendo DS playing Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training. While these two things might not sound like they have too much in common – both of them focus on the brain and specifically the use of the right side of the brain.

In the knowledge businesses the brain is obviously a very important asset, and understanding it could help us to look after it better.

Much scientific research has gone into understanding the brain. It would appear that the two  sides of our brain have different roles. The left side of the brain is apparently responsible for thinking things through in a linear way helping us to understand things sequentially. The right side of the brain processes things holistically, it’s about the big picture. The right side is also the side which is the creative side.

The web is littered with information.

In The World is Flat, Friedman argues that all of the left brain activities are the ones ripe for automation by IT systems, or for Outsourcing to other cheaper countries. The people who can see the whole picture and deal with concepts (the right brain people) will be the ones that will be invaluable. This type of people are the ones who will be the versatilists.

The Dr Kawashima game is focussed on exercising the brain – both left and right.

This has left me with a few questions, some of which I think it’s about time I knew the answer to:

  • Is it possible to change the focus of your brain – from left to right?
  • Which am I, left or right?
  • Is it possible to strengthen your brain?
  • If it is possible, how do you strengthen the right side?
  • Will truly right-brained people be the most valuable, or are we talking about people who are balanced?
  • Which type of people are the happier?
  • Will having a more balanced brain make me more employable in the future world?
  • What is creativity anyway?

No answers yet, but I’ll let you know how I get on.

Announcing, announcing, announcing

How big is that cake

Microsoft’s press team have had a busy couple of days.

The first two announcements that caught my eye were virtualisation announcements:

The softricity one is old news, coming as it does on the same day as the XenSource one though it shows a definite shift in the market. While many people are focusing on virtualisation at the server as a way of reducing server footprint and cost, many people are missing the ability of virtualisation to all IT organisation to loosen control without loosing control. This loosening effect will be especially true for the softricity technologies.

Then there were a couple of hosting announcements:

From the first one:

Intergenia, a leading Web hosting company based in Germany, has deployed a wide array of Microsoft hosting solutions to deliver applications and services to its broad customer base. With more than 2.2 million active sites hosted and more than 20,000 dedicated servers in data centers in and the U.S., the company has recently been declared the second-largest Web hosting provider in the world by the British market research firm Netcraft Ltd. More than 95 percent of Intergenia’s active sites are hosted on the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 3.5. In 2005 Intergenia was one of the first German hosting providers to launch Hosted Exchange and has since deployed the solution to a growing number of customers.

“We are seeing a significant upswing in the software-as-a-service market in Germany, and Microsoft solutions for Windows-based Hosting and Hosted Messaging and Collaboration are helping us to capitalize on this opportunity,” said Thomas Strohe, founder, Intergenia AG. “Our customers expect a high level of security and service availability, and because of the ease of deployment and the tools and management capabilities in Microsoft’s solutions, we are able to provide both. As companies become more familiar with the software-as-a-service model, we expect to see demand grow even stronger for more sophisticated services and applications.”

I never really saw hosting and SaaS as the same thing, or perhaps I’m wrong and hosting is a form of SaaS. Michael Platt’s been trying to get his head around the different definitions too. Scoble wrote a number of times about how Microsoft should purchase Web 2.0 companies, perhaps they have a more subtle plan which we are seeing working itself out – perhaps the plan is not to own the applications, but to own the delivery of the applications.

Another interesting announcement was the purchase of wininternals. A very interesting move, particularly the thought of Microsoft trying to integrate another set of talented individuals.

Tags: , , , Softricity

Loosening Control – Increasing the Grey

That plane is huge

Gartner’s High-Performance Workplace Blog highlights a voice I am seeing grow around IT: IT Must Loosen Control Without Loosing Control:

When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become “The Abominable No Man”’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.

We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

I love the phrase “The Abominable No Man”.

So many IT environments are stuck between major refresh and transformation programmes. No change can occur without the large scale testing and control of a large programme, but the environment has to be in a real mess before the pain of a large programme outweighs the pain of keeping things as they are.

When the large programmes does get initiated is does a good job of delivering generic capabilities. Anything that is innovative or complicated will be squeezed out by the needs of the generic.

However hard the corporate IT environment runs it can never deliver the same breadth of capabilities as the Internet. One of the major drivers for adoption of Web 2.0 type services is not that they are better than what the corporate IT organisation could provide, it’s simply that they are available.

The problem for IT organisations is that they are stuck between reducing costs and be innovative. in my experience it never works when conflicting requirements are placed on an organisation – one will always win. In my experience it’s always cost reduction that wins. That why I think that the really smart organisations will not place the conflicting requirements into one organisation, they will run an IT organisation and an innovation organisation (that may well also deliver IT). I’ve written about this previously in the context of CIO’s delivering value rather than just reducing cost. I just don’t see it myself. Engineering organisations don’t have the operation organisation design the new product. The operational organisation are involved but they aren’t setting the agenda that’s the job of the product development organisation.

The problem with loosening control is that IT organisations are generally not good at dealing with grey, they like things to be black and white. They have to deal with grey every day, but they are never comfortable with it. Loosening control requires the addition of a whole load more grey. Perhaps that’s where the versatilists come in .

Versatilists – is that really a word?

If you are going to send out our picture we want to check they are the right ones

ComputerWorld has an article on the changing skill requirements for ‘IT’ people:

The most sought-after corporate IT workers in 2010 may be those with no deep-seated technical skills at all. The nuts-and-bolts programming and easy-to-document support jobs will have all gone to third-party providers in the U.S. or abroad. Instead, IT departments will be populated with “versatilists” — those with a technology background who also know the business sector inside and out, can architect and carry out IT plans that will add business value, and can cultivate relationships both inside and outside the company.

I’m assuming that the newly invented word – “versatilists” – is trying to overcome some of the negative connotations of the more commonly used word – “generalist”. At least that’s my assumption, because the word is never really defined. To be honest I think it’s a terrible word, but I do think that they have a point.

As IT becomes more grown-up it is bound to become more business focussed and less technology focussed. As the technology starts to get out of the way, the purpose for the technology will come to the fore.

The only issue I think I do have is with the time-scales – 2010. From where I am sitting the tide has already turned and people with business understanding are the ones most sought after already. Perhaps I’ve just built a perception because my job is already a “versatilist” job, I have no statistical evidence to support my theory.

Another interesting element from the article was the pronouncement that many of this set of IT people will come from education backgrounds other than IT. In my experience this is, again, already the case. Even though I work in an IT services organisation I know very few people who have an IT educational background. The dominant group are people with old school engineering backgrounds (mechanical, civil, etc.).

Microsoft Changes to Provide Support for ODF: Big Deal?

Grandad goes white water

Microsoft has today announced (information here, here) that it will indeed support the Open Document Format (ODF).

Will it be a big deal, or just another feature that will have very little impact on most users?

What seems to be clear from the information currently available is that users of Microsoft Office will need to think about using ODF, rather than using ODF as the standard format. For starters they will need to download an additional component, and even then it’s not clear that they can make ODF the default format.

Even if users could make ODF the default format what would make them choose it as the day-to-day format that they use?

People tend not to make decisions of principle if it adds to their workload, or the workload of others. In the short term ODF capabilities will not be ubiquitous so sending an ODF file to anyone will be to take a risk that you are adding to your workload because you’ll need to re-send the file if the person at the other end can’t read it. If you do need to re-send the file you obviously gives the person receiving the file a problem.

Large organisations can make a principle decision and then enforce that on the people who need to collaborate with them, but they need to be large enough to be dominant. If large organisations do make a principle decision they just give the little guy (who is collaborating) the problem of working in two worlds; the current file format world and the new ODF file format world. Both worlds will exist for some time because I don’t see any sign that all of the large organisations making a principle decision all at the same time, all in the same direction.

What I do see happening is an ODF based ecosystem being built and potential growing in parallel to the current Microsoft Office file format ecosystem. Building an ecosystem doesn’t happen in weeks or months, building an ecosystem takes years.

I’m not convinced that the ODF ecosystem will succeed though, decision based on principle rarely win when it comes to IT. The simplest and easiest things tends to win.

Is this a big deal? It might be, but it isn’t going to be a big deal for a long time.

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It's about creating links

Grandad, Dad, Mum and Jimmy

That Coyote bloke got me thinking again this morning:

“you need time to see the links between items or areas of knowledge. The brain finds it hard to hang on to disconnected pieces of information. Unlike a computer disc, it doesn’t cope well with large amounts of more or less random data. What it does best is to see connections, linking information together and remembering the patterns, not single pieces of data. Remembering a principle and applying it is far easier to do that recalling some individual “rule” or procedure for handling a situation. Do we see those links instantly? Usually not. It takes time to register them fully and understand them well enough to recall them whenever we want.”

So why do so many of our enterprise information systems do such a poor job of reflecting the links that we have built in our minds between things, and do an even worse job of allowing us to see the links that other individuals have created.

Let’s look at a few example. In the file system I can group a load of files into a folder so that they are all together, but this doesn’t reflect the links that exist between the document. I regularly open a number of files to find the information that I am looking for. I know it’s in one of them because that’s why they are there but there really isn’t any visible linkage. Someone else looking at the set of documents would need to read them all to get a handle on the information contained within.

Document management systems are rarely any better they allow the person who has posted the document to give it a set of key words and to build the taxonomy. Anything information that follows on from this document isn’t reflected and the likely value of each document that has been tagged with a certain keyword isn’t shown either.

Take documents as an entity, particularly technical documents. They are usually a huge blob of data with thousands of internal logical links. The data in this section relates to the data in that section, but we rarely do anything to flag those links. As the links aren’t explicitly shown we need to take in a huge amount of data before we can understand where the links are. It’s rarely possible to structure a technical document in a way that actually makes these links obvious. Lots of people have started making documents out of PowerPoint presentations, it’s something I encouraged initially but now I’m not so sure. The problem with a document is the huge blob problem, the nice thing about a PowerPoint structure is that each page makes a point or a small number of points in this way the huge blob is broken down into a set of smaller blobs. These ‘presentations’ are never going to be presented, they are meant to be read as a set of small chunks which allow people to form their own links.

Blogs are slightly better, assuming people follow the etiquette. Part of the etiquette of blogs is that you do someone the courtesy of referencing their ideas, and rightly so. Because blogs are normally a smaller chunk of data and the links are built in it’s possible to work backward down a subject. Services like track-back and technorati also allow you to follow the links forward.

Tagging services like del.icio.us provide a new way of reflecting the links. They allow items to be tagged by the person consuming the document. Rather than the person who created the item defining the value, the person consuming it does. This capability has taken on the rather ungainly term of folksonomy.

The ability to move beyond taxonomy into folksonomy is rarely available inside an organisation though. Some organisations are getting there – IBM, HP (PDF) (Thanks for the info Stu).

What makes someone tag inside an organisation and how many people does it take. I’m not yet clear about all of the factors that make someone tag, but I can speak from my del.icio.us experience. There are a few reasons why I tag. The main one is a really simple one, I want my voice to be heard. I have valid opinions (or so I think) and I want them to be heard. I’m sure that if I was able to tag within my organisation I would feel exactly the same. Another really important reason is that I tag for my own benefit. As the Coyote says, it take time to register the links in our brains, being able to register the links somewhere helps me to find them in the future. Registering a link also helps me to remember them, I regularly write things down so I don’t forget them, I rarely use the written record because the act of writing it down has implanted the information in my brain, tagging has a similar effect.

We have a long way to go with exposing links, and the value to us humans is in the links rather than in the actual data. The current technologies will take a while to become mainstream in most enterprises, and even longer for the process and social changes to become common practice. There is, however, a new generation who will expect these services to be available and business constrain them at their peril.

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What makes something popular?

The whole family go down the river

What does make something popular? There are, I suspect, thousands of answers to that question.

Where the hell it Matt has become very popular. It’s a bloke, who dances really badly in all sorts of places. I’m sure that if I wrote that on a piece of paper and went to an advertising agency they would have a little chuckle to themselves and show me the exit; but they would have been wrong. Clearly one advertising agency thought it was a good enough idea to pay someone to do it.

As someone involved in large scale IT projects I am interested in this kind of thing, because we have always struggled to get end users engaged in changes to their IT. I’m not talking here about the few ‘experts’ in an organisation, I’m talking about engaging with the masses. In most instances the changes we are planning to make will have a significant impact on a persons ability to do their job. Changes are normally regarded as a problem rather than something exciting to get engaged with.

I’ve seen all sorts of corporate communication techniques used, but none of them have really resulted in a general interest across the user base. That is, until we come along and change it.

WinFS – so long, far well, enjoy your new position

fringe Juglers

WinFS finally left the Windows stable (here, here) over the last few days for residence in a SQL Server existence. Being the insightful watcher of the industry that I am ,  I had just finished the preparation for a presentation I was going to deliver to some colleagues on the subject – now cancelled.

It’s not a surprise, but it is a disappointment.

Anyone who architects or manages a large scale file service knows that they are nearly always in complete anarchy and causing all sorts of problems at every tier in the business. There are compliance people all over the world who are losing hours of sleep every time they think about the file system because they have no idea what is stored there or how incriminating it could be. There are IT managers who would rather do anything other than be buying yet more disks. There are business continuity people who are praying that the feared fire in the computer room never happens, because they know that they have no chance of getting all that data back to where it should be. There are thousands and millions of end users who fear having to try to find a valuable needle among the haystack that is before them.

A number of people have proposed answers. These have normally required the syphoning of data off into another store or application. These additional stores have normally resulted in the data being available in more than one store, rather than the data moving into a the new store, if it got their at all. This hasn’t resolved the problem, it’s just made it worse.

WinFS, had the chance, however slim, of changing this for good. It had the chance to put the business back in control of the data while, at the same time, giving extra functionality to the end user. But alas it was not to be.

The move of the WinFS development work into SQL Server means that it will always be separate from the file service and will be met with the same level of adoption as Oracle iFS. As a Windows function the level of adoption might have been something significantly different, but I can’t see it having anything like the same impact as a SQL Server function.

I don’t think the Web has yet answered this question either.

Tags: WinFS,