Outsourcing News

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.

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Why are clouds so hard to understand?

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

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Microsoft + HP; Oracle + Sun and IBM + IBM

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

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What do we want from business intelligence?

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

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

I have consolidated below links to articles describing the various types of Information Technology Outsourcing Models. Have a good read! Governance Based Models Professional Services or Staff Augmentation Managed Services Model – Pros and Cons Co-Managed Technology Outsourcing Model Pricing Based Models Time and Material: Pricing based Information Technology Outsourcing Model Managed Capacity-Pricing based Information Technology Outsourcing Model Fixed Price or Fixed Bid Information Technology

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Information Technology Outsourcing Models

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

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Jugaad v Lean – doing more with less

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 Posted by Andy Mulholland on December 21, 2009

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

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.

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Unstructured Events Call for Unstructured Data (But in Context)

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.

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

I was very surprised and gratified last Wednesday to find how many of you had all been kind enough to vote again this year for the CTOblog in the annual Computer Weekly competition , I was even more surprised to find against a strong field of nominations that we won!. So many thanks to all of you who voted, Ron and I really appreciate it, and it makes it easier to try to keep up the work of coming up with good insights into this every changing industry of ours. I was even more delighted to find that my friends and colleagues who collectively produce the Capgemini Capping IT Off blog exploring in more depth various technology matters also won their category and that the leader of our social networking practice Rick Mans was runner up as the Twitter leader , especially as it was to Stephen Fry a well known anglophile TV and Media personality. All of us really do appreciate your support and promise we will do our best to try to live up to the awards. Posted by Andy Mulholland on November 30, 2009

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Thank You!

Back around 1990 I remember my amazement at learning that Iceland had the largest router network of any European business or government, at around 50 routers. There was a pretty sensible explanation for this, given the low density of the population and the quick realisation that a step change in the country’s economy as well as social and cultural life could be achieved through improving digital communications. Oddly I don’t remember the operating speed for the network, or more specifically the end point/final miles, but in those text-oriented days, 19.2 Kbits to the home seemed pretty good. Over recent years it’s been Australia that has held my interest about what government can gain from its online services. It was not easy for the Australians who initially took a tough line on Digital Rights Management some years ago. However they swiftly adjusted their stance to a more liberal view of DRM to suit today’s environment. It attracted its fair share of comments but overall the outcome has been a ‘workable’ balance

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Government (or Enterprise Governance) for the People, not the Computer!

Currently my life is full of puzzled people from various sections of the IT community asking for enlightenment on ‘cloud technology’. Their puzzlement usually stems from the simple fact that they can’t make a whole lot of sense about when, and where, they would gain by deploying cloud technology in their current operations. A barrage of questions then follows, mostly about their doubts over security and reliability if they were to take important legacy systems outside their enterprise into a shared environment. Then comes the inevitable question, does this mean they should be building an internal, or private, cloud

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Clouds are not always the answer!

I’ve wanted to do a post on the growing recognition of a shift towards ‘externalisation’ or ‘edge’ based systems – if you can call them systems at all – but couldn’t quite think of a topical reason to raise the subject. There’s a saying in London that you wait forever for a big red bus to turn up and then three come along at once! (Funnily enough there is mathematical proof for why this happens, with the basic premise being that the first bus is delayed by stopping to pick up passengers and the following buses don’t have to collect so many people at each stop and therefore catch the first one!) Well, three things have indeed come along at once and the first ‘bus’ is, I suspect, the result of the pressure of ‘passengers’ needing advice on how to travel the new road. In advance of their Enterprise Architecture (EA) summits being held in Orlando and London, Gartner has published a report entitled a ‘New Approach for Enterprise Architecture’. The analyst firm recommends a shift based on the ‘growing variety and complexity in markets, economies, nations, networks and companies’, which it describes as ‘middle out EA’ or ‘light EA’. This is all about using new technologies around the edge, or externally, that are based on some principles and business purposes different to traditional IT, with the focus on ‘state full’ business transactions in tight coupled integrations for mainly centralised core enterprise processes

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Decentralised Enterprise Architecture: The Beginnings of Change

most organizations, a hybrid model of information technology outsourcing can be seen in operation. The hybrid model may comprise Staff Augmentation, Managed Services,

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By: Project or Engagement based model or Hybrid model of Information Technology Outsourcing | Information Technology Outsourcing

the most mature of models. An earlier article that was published on this site describes all the information technology outsourcing models in existence

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By: Fixed Price or Fixed Bid Information Technology Outsourcing Model | Information Technology Outsourcing

I recently posted on the question of whether we really understand business intelligence (BI) http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2009/08/have_we_really_understood_what.php and quite quickly got into a lively debate. Everybody seemed in agreement that traditional BI really meant internal intelligence on how well the enterprise was performing against the targets it had set itself. But the challenge was how to gain external intelligence about current opportunities in order to make quality decisions that would optimise the options and boost performance. That’s not so easy if you really break it down into practical steps. After all, we don’t know what we don’t know, so have no way of knowing how complete a picture we are using to form our decisions. Think of it this way: you’re hungry (event), and see what looks like a good restaurant (opportunity). Then you study the menu (knowledge), and subsequently decide to eat there (decision). The food is okay, but the evening is not great as you are lonely, so the experience is poor (optimisation). Posted by Andy Mulholland on October 26, 2009

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From Knowledge to Knowing

I am obviously old enough to remember Charles Bronson in his most famous acting role: as a vigilante , ruthlessly taking care of any criminal crossing his path. Deserted by the police and judges, he has nothing but himself – and a few nasty street fighting skills – to get his justice. And he is quite good at it too, although admittedly half of the city is blown up and the resulting mess takes weeks to clean up. Not exactly your regular art film house movie, no. But a useful metaphor here: slowly but surely we are seeing the birth of IT Vigilantes : people outside the scope of the IT department that create their own solutions, simply because they feel that they are not enough supported by the corporate entities. In our TechnoVision approach we refer to it as a pent-up demand : as consumers, we know exactly how to use technology to achieve our goals. And we expect nothing less than the same experience when we return to the offices on Monday morning. If there is a gap – and usually there is – this can lead to a lot of frustration, especially with the IT department in denial or too absorbed by the challenge of keeping their existing, aging systems alive

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IT Vigilante: how Charles Bronson would develop applications

Silly question, we all know the answer. It’s a way of providing a consolidated view of a large amount of data in a manner that suits the user. In case you want reassurance read the standard Wikipedia definition Regular readers will recognise that this again stresses the need to concentrate on the delivery pattern which is traditionally from raw data to the computer and then to the user. A change taking place in our daily environment right now is the reversing of this direction. The trend toward user-defined environments is being supported by individuals’ options around devices and web places. So are user-driven portals mashups ? Not necessarily.

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What is a Portal For?

Who said that IT does not create economic value? Oracle proved differently this week at their OpenWorld 2009 conference in San Francisco. At least, so did the 40000 conference attendees that swarmed the city and almost single-handedly reanimated the financial position of the troubled state of California. For the rest, I am not so sure. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘ powering innovation ’, but the messaging turned out to be quite pragmatic and down-to-earth. Apparently – no, obviously – innovation in 2009 is about consolidation and making better use of what you already have.

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Oracle OpenWorld: innovation. 2009 style.

I recently blogged about changes in the meaning of business intelligence and how we can better use it to support real-time decision making. This raised a lot of great comments . Larry Ellison made his own impact on this topic with a webcast to introduce the second generation Oracle/Sun Exadata 2.0. This was an early indication of what Oracle hopes to achieve with the Sun acquisition. It raised all the usual comments on this unhappy with the acquisition given the resulting monopoly it would give Oracle in databases, due to gaining control of OpenSQL topic, even including whether the approval for completion of the deal will go through (The EU is apparently ). What was announced was the first online transaction processing database using Sun FlashFire technology to provide in a single 1u rack tray as a single cohesive unit. It has eighty flash drives and four SAS disk connections – providing a massive (multi terabytes) memory – with a capacity of one million input/output operations per second

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Business Intelligence with 1.3 Terabytes of in-memory Database