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Aug 18 2005, Aligning Business and IT
Continuing the theme discussed in my posting of Aug 7 2005, Connected Systems and Talking IT to the Board, my colleague Jonathan Murray has been developing some ideas based on work he commissioned in 1997 from McKinsey. These ideas build on the evidence we've been seeing about the way that leading organisations are adopting interesting similarities in the way they marry IT and business needs together. My US-based colleague, Dave Welsh, does a great talk where he adapts a well known theme to talk about business being from Mars and IT from Venus. The point is that we need to find some common reference points and vocabulary that will enable us to construct business and IT processes and solutions that mutually reinforce each other - rather than competing with or impeding each other. And we do now have a means of doing this, oriented on the services model.
It's interesting to observe those organisations who have continued to evolve and adapt their models to increase the alignment between business and IT, and those who still seem to be inhabiting the late 1990's model of IT. During the late 1990's, perhaps compounded by the Year 2000 problem, IT spend grew rapidly, albeit with operations and maintenance dominating the budget. The complexity of multi-vendor, distributed computing environments was also becoming more and more of an issue - and new services and IT often proved ineffective in deployment and never realised the benefits that had been sought (or promised to the board). Alongside this and into the early 2000s, we saw the increasing power and influence of the Internet. It impacted thinking about IT architectures (reinforcing the Web-based distributed computing model and simplistic, browser based delivery) alongside a governance model that has been characterised as 'anarchic'. Procurement tended to follow a trend of consuming 'one of everything' in the vain hope that doing so would bubble the best possible solutions to the top of the heap - and development was silod and boutique, with little re-use of smart thinking about design.
The leading organisations of today have moved on from this unproductive maelstrom. IT architectures are now based on abstraction and service orientation, using the Web as the underlying fabric. Governance has moved to a federal model, marrying a sensible mix of what needs to be done centrally and what locally (and hence getting us out of the unproductive swing between inflexible central monolith and absurd anarchic autonomy). Procurement has matured alongside these developments, enabling strategic partnerships to be developed built on industry standards and combined with a shared service model.
But there is still evidence that many organisations remain in that late 1990's model. Too much spend remains focused on supporting old infrastructure and too little on the innovation and productivity that would be derived from enabling systems to be better aligned to business needs. As we see for example these best principles applied to the public sector, they will enable more effective support of the transformation agenda that underpins e-government projects. And enhance the speed and efficiency of government service delivery working in partnership with IT.
There are broader and more strategic underlying currents and changes at play here too: not just the adoption of the services model across the business and IT communities, but also the numerous shifts we are witnessing in the IT industry around virtualisation, multi-core processors, 64-bit computing and grid computing. The convergence of these developments provides us with a great opportunity to re-think the whole way we will plan and design the next generation of services: services that will be far more successfully entwined with business requirements and better suited to the constant change and adaptation that businesses require.
This is, of course, far too broad a topic to discuss on a single thread: I'll return to the many undercurrents and the strategic issues here in future postings.
Aug 10 2005, Internet Explorer 7 Beta
I've been trying out the beta of Internet Explorer - IE 7. One of the features that jumps out immediately is its built in support for RSS. Below I've included a screen snapshot of the RSS feed version of this blog as it appears inside the beta of IE 7 - which, as you will see, looks better than the official Web page version!
At the moment, by design, the RSS feed only includes the opening paragraph of my postings - clicking the title on the feed then takes you to the full article hosted on the National Technology Office UK Website. With native support for RSS, I'm rethinking that design and contemplating making the full text of the postings available directly in the feed as well.
There is a more important strategic change going on here of course then merely seeing IE updated to support RSS: this is another practical example of how the browser/dumb client and server-centric model of the Internet is beginning to change. RSS is one of many technologies in a world that is increasingly moving to componentised Web services that will make the idea of having to physical browse to different server-based sites a thing of the past: instead, information will be directly pumped (or pulled) to you on your PC. And not just into Web browsers: RSS and similar technologies will increasingly surface relevant information inside other applications, including for example Microsoft Office, media monitoring applications and specialist financial packages.
I believe we are witnessing the start of probably the most significant shift in the way the Internet works since its conception. Although the browsing and associated hyperlink paradigm made popular by the ideas of Tim Berners-Lee has made the Internet a ubiquitous tool, the World Wide Web of hyperlinks was really a very incremental change from the previous generation of similar Internet tools such as Gopher.
But these new changes seem to me to be very different, moving the Internet away from a world in which you manually need to find and connect to servers to one in which services and information are made available directly to you on your PC. And it may well not just be you, as a human user, interacting with information: this new world is as much about machine to machine communication, enabling applications to directly share data with each other. This new world of information interoperability will of course bring new challenges - notably around security, privacy and complex inter-system topics such as metadata. But they are already issues which we are facing anyway - and tackling - inside organisations (to enable information to flow more easily between separate application systems) and in support of programmes such as joined-up public services.
As these changes gather pace, at some future point I may well drop the Web page version of my site altogether and make it an RSS-only service. That seems to me the way things are heading. And the day that happens, we will be in a new phase of the Internet - one that will enable us to make far more productive use of its resources than we can at present. And one in which edge devices, such as our home PCs, play as active a role as the current generation of centrally hosted servers.
Aug 9 2005, The future of Broadcasting and Multimedia
We've seen the impact that the Internet and file sharing have had on the music industry. The traditional record companies were slow to change and take advantage of the new ways in which they could license and sell music - albeit now they do seem to be catching up. So too it looks like the film industry is about to go through a similar upheaval as it adapts to the idea of real-time streaming direct into the home: and even the capability in future for fully digital cinemas to select, download and screen any movie on demand. That could be great news for those of us who would like to see back catalogue movies on a big screen: get enough people together prepared to turn up at the same cinema at the same time, and any movie could potentially be made available for viewing.
But these are just small beer compared to the changes that are on the way. In the coming age, every consumer is as likely to be a broadcaster as they are a consumer - even if those 'broadcasts' merely consist of family holiday video footage being broadcast back out from a PC to friends and family. And in the move to digital radio and television, the end device may not be a radio or television: it is equally - if not more - likely to be a PC or PC-based device. So instead of everyone rushing out to buy new DAB radios and digital televisions, perhaps instead we will see people buy high quality wide-screens and speakers: and then plug a PC or set-top, PC-based box into them instead. And this will raise a lot more questions - not least here in the UK given the way the BBC is funded. In this near-term future many homes receiving television might not actually need to possess a TV tuner. Instead, they could use a PC-based media player that would stream content to their device in real time over the Internet (like the way you can already listen to many radio stations directly over the Internet without a radio receiver). So how, then, would the BBC be paid? Once people can receive television without TV tuners, one thing's for sure: it's all going to get very complicated.
The proposed analogue switch-off was really designed assuming that the replacement would still be traditional TVs and radios, but making use of digital technology instead. Another future clearly exists in which we don't have single purpose devices such as televisions and radios, but merely media devices able to access and stream content to us when it's needed (either from online storage elsewhere in the home - such as a digital photo archive - or from service providers on the Internet). Being PC-based, the material may also be downloaded at any time, cached and played back at another. Streaming high definition TV is going to push the limits of what is currently possible with broadband, even if we do manage to get everyone over to the ADSL2+ standard or better. And how will the regulators cope with a world in which every end-point on the Internet is itself a potential broadcaster? Such broadcasts are as likely to be peer-to-peer as they are to be routed through central server infrastructure: and possibly encrypted too.
It will be interesting to see how consumers, the industry and regulators alike adapt to this rapidly changing landscape. Looking through the recent Ofcom report (The Communications Market 2005), there are many interesting discussions of what has happened and is happening in this fast-moving industry.
Aug 7 2005, Connected Systems and Talking IT to the Board
Later in the summer I'll be delivering a keynote on the topic 'Services Oriented Architecture - how to talk to the Board'. It's a deliberate setup of course: if anyone were to entitle a conference address 'How to talk TCP/IP to the Board' we would see through it immediately (either that or think the speaker completely insane). The reality is that SOA is a means to an end and one that the Board should not concern itself with.
Instead, we're increasingly using the phrase 'connected systems' to articulate the value proposition to the business community. It's an approach that enables the contracts between IT and business to be renegotiated. The best alignment of IT to business occurs in those organisations where the CIO understands the business equally as well as they understand technology - and connected systems helps both the business and IT share the some vocabulary and understanding. Business services and IT services may be orthogonal in concept, but they are also similar enough to suggest that concepts of business services can be mapped to equivalent concepts of IT services.
With connected systems, an organisation is able to create a new ‘functioning core’ of services (both business and IT). In creating this new functioning core, the contracts between business users and IT are being rewritten: which we should be thankful for - the traditional boundaries between business and IT need to blur. Businesses are naturally service oriented and event driven and well formed business models increase the value of IT. Potential blockers to the success of this approach are any disconnected business units and IT processes, all of which may choose to play outside the new rules and run divisively around a connected functioning core. Successful organisations are those which manage to align their CEO and CIO thinking and prevent such divisions.
I'll continue to develop these themes as I prepare my Keynote - and will continue to discuss issues around business and IT alignment in future postings.
Aug 1 2005, Unst and how can IT help
I've been following the news about the closure of the RAF base on Unst - the northernmost of the Shetland Islands - with interest. It was always a concern that should the Saxa Vord base ever be reduced in size or abandoned it would have a disproportionate impact on the local economy and society: and now that is about to happen. Often, when driving through Unst on the way to the north (which has the wonderfully named Muckle Flugga - the most northerly part of the UK) it struck me how vulnerable the place was to a change in its circumstances. A large part of the local economy will effectively vanish as the RAF mothballs this most northerly of listening stations. The schools will lose a large number of their pupils - the loss of RAF personnel will reduce the school and nursery roll in Unst from 121 to 85. Any economy and society would find such a radical adjustment hard to make: in somewhere as remote as Unst, it makes it all the harder. And the suddenness and speed with which these changes are happening makes it all the more challenging.
The Economic Development Unit of Shetland Islands Council reports that:
The future success of Unst will depend upon the success of the North Isles as a whole and the ability of the area to secure long-term commitment and significant resources for regeneration
This raises difficult issues for those of us who believe technology can help with the economic development of remote rural locations like this. It's hard to see how IT can have an immediate impact on those businesses whose main income was associated with serving the RAF facilities. Of course, it can help such communities become part of a wider ecosystem in terms of using the Internet for both social and business purposes. But nothing will replace the immediate economic needs of those directly impacted by the changes at Saxa Vord. For the children, the story is probably more encouraging since IT can be a help - enabling those children remaining in Unst and their friends who relocate elsewhere to keep in touch using email, instant messaging and Webcam conversations. Hopefully this will soften the blow as this community sees around a third of its pupils move away.
I'll be continuing to investigate other ways in which IT can help in situations like this - consulting with my other National Technology Officer colleagues to see whether similar problems have been successfully tackled elsewhere in the world.
| (C) 2004/2005 J Fishenden
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