Outsourcing News

It took some organising to meet with each of these vendors for a briefing on their views in the course of a single week in the Bay area, but it really does work in terms of being able to make comparisons. Not competitive comparisons of the products, but comparisons between their vision of how the next couple of years will develop and how that affects the way they are designing their products and solution capabilities. The common vision is of a world dominated by services, paid for on demand, removing the need for capital investment, or monolithic large scale projects, and focussed on supporting a decentralisation of the edge of the business. The focus is on user centricity or enablement of the front office in its go-to-market activities, supported by effective ‘on the fly’ data analysis to optimise decisions, collaboration to increase employee effectiveness in leveraging expertise, with an overall change in the way of working resulting in a rise in the productivity of individuals. Posted by Andy Mulholland on April 26, 2010

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A week of visits; Cisco, HP, Oracle, SAP and VMware (in alphabetical order!)

There seems to be a number of people doing some pretty serious thinking at the moment. On the one side there are CIOs and business managers grappling with some very real challenges and on the other some very good work on identifying the key factors that underlie these challenges. I think the playing field for CIOs was pretty well defined by the phrase; ‘Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Web 2.0; (is this a) Business Transformation or a Train Wreck?’ I suspect you spotted that there was no mention of clouds in this, well that may be because it is actually the title of a free Oracle white paper and Oracle are a little reticent on clouds. On the other hand there does seem to be a dawning recognition that clouds are merely a collection of technologies, and the change factor is where, and why, you need to deploy these technologies in a particular manner to solve new business requirements. (I have covered various aspects of this in previous blogs such as ‘ why are clouds so hard to understand ‘) . So actually the Oracle focus on three major aspects and their use in solutions, rather than just throwing in the term ‘clouds’ does make sense. But what is the change in focus, where are the CIO issues, or what’s wrong with IT as we currently know it? Posted by Andy Mulholland on April 19, 2010

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A seriously deep post on the changes to IT & Enterprise 2.0

Architecture has claimed its place in the IT landscape over recent years as the need to understand how increasingly integrated environments, if not entire enterprises, fit together. Unfortunately, rather like standards, we now have a number of options as to which architecture method to follow. Even worse we increasingly find we need a lighter weight solution approach that will span more than one architectural model. This sounds like a cue for making life more difficult and even more complex, but maybe, just maybe, there could be a way of doing this. So please suspend instant judgment and take some time to understand the proposed way you could achieve this in the thoroughly practical approach outlined by my colleagues Theo Elzinga, Joost van der Vlies and Léon Smiers. They call it a Common Reference Architecture, or CORA for short, and this blog post outlines what is in their book ‘The CORA Model’ available from www.coramodel.com

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The CORA model

It seems fitting in a week when Facebook reportedly overtook Google as the most visited site on the Internet to try to revisit exactly why social networks are rapidly becoming the transforming force for business created by the new era of technology (whatever we define that technology era to be based on, or to include; i.e cloud, web 2.0, mobility, collaboration, etc). But first back to the report by HitWise who analyse numbers of web visits and have, by the narrowest of margins, positioned Facebook in the lead with 7.07 % over Google at 7.03%. This also means that just these two sites – Facebook and Google – account for more than 14% of all visits on the web today. Put another way, 1 in 8 online activities is concerned with either finding content, or interacting with people, around a shared topic. In the external context of consumers deciding what to buy, the impact of how we decide what to buy from any business is reflected by the growing focus in how that business’s products and services appear in an online world. We all know that it is wise to research any significant purchase to find what is on offer, and where to buy at the best price, hence why we refer to ‘googling’, but why did Facebook grow an astonishing 185% in the year? Posted by Andy Mulholland on April 4, 2010

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Facebook over takes Google as the most visited site; why?

About a year back there was a very popular slide show going around about the consequences of change. One of the ‘facts’, it claimed, was that owing to the incredible rate of change in the industry, most of the content from a three year degree course on technology would be out of date by the time the course actually finished. Of course a lot would depend on how up to date the teaching and the course was in the first place, but it is fair to say that this is a key part of the academic challenge that universities face, and why they are so keen to perform real innovative research to keep up to date. However most universities have a real problem with what I can only call the ‘science of appliance’, and perversely that’s what we all want! Tell me how to make a difference – now! That’s presumably at least part of the reason you are reading this blog, the same reason that I am always looking for sources for interesting blogs too. My definition of interesting means qualified opinions on practical topics, and/or examples of practical experience, both of which provide insights into the issues that I can recognise. However it also means that I search and think within defined and understood profiles in terms of technology, business or capability, and as I will explain in a minute this narrow but deep approach may not be the answer we need to get the ‘quantum shift’ we seek. Posted by Andy Mulholland on March 28, 2010

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The Singularity University – Technology that creates exponential growth

Regular readers – and thank you, as ever, for your time – will know that I have a passion for trying to dig into a topic to find the one or two key points that, once you find them, provide real clarity of insight into what is actually happening. I have a great intellectual curiosity about technology, how it is used and what the benefit of it actually is. Although, I read widely, I don’t think I have seen the following point made in a simple manner anywhere. Then again, maybe you will disagree! So if you take the starting point as one of my previous posts ‘why are clouds so hard to understand’ then this week is all about providing the single simple point that we all need to grasp. Get this into your mind and all that flows from it becomes relatively easy to understand in context! Posted by Andy Mulholland on March 22, 2010

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Grasping the single point that is powering a lot of the change

It has been one of those interesting points in the year when three big industry events occur almost at the same time, and it is possible to make some interesting comparisons. First we had Mobile World Congress providing some illuminating insights into how the focus of the mobile industry has changed from devices and their specifications to the content delivery model. If you want a more detailed look at how I see this change developing then take a look at my post from 1st March which brought a wonderful stream of posts and builds which is always good to see. Thanks everyone! Another of the shows has been RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco , a candidate for the definitive security event. Now everyone knows security is a big issue but in truth have we really seen approaches that match up to the problem we are facing? The world we are all working and playing in is no longer finite in any recognisable sense of the word, i.e

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Three Conferences; MWC, RSA Security Conference and CeBIT – what did we see and what can we learn from them?

Relax! It’s not meant to be a real formula, just a way of trying to think about the relationship between all of these. There is a great deal of growing interest in cloud services for the enterprise and more factors are coming into the mix expected to transform enterprises and impact their business models. Over the last few months – together with my colleagues – we have been closely examining what’s really happening, why it’s happening, and what’s needed. The result is a whole new Capgemini global business unit called Infostructure Technology Services which is designed to address the expertise ‘gap’ rapidly emerging within most enterprises. This is a summary of what we have identified and what is needed in outline, for the full story go to Capgemini Infostructure Technology Services . The majority of enterprises can be summed up around four activities: buying something, adding value to it reselling it at a profit and the associated administering/operational management. Information Technology has done an excellent job on the two internal activities of adding value and administration/operational management, but has not achieved the same kind of impact on the two other aspects of buying and selling.

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(Information Technology) + (Business Technology) ÷ Clouds = Infostructure

Mobility has seen fast growth and been a hot topic the in last couple of years and at Mobile World Congress this year, it turned a corner and moved beyond being just a procession of breakthrough devices and new forms of wireless. The question is who noticed this in the IT or enterprise IT community and will they make the connection in terms of the enterprise user and models for cloud delivery? The focus, announcements and fun have – in the past – always seemed to centre on new devices with incredible capabilities that invited the comparison with the functionality of a PC. Much less time was given to what people are using mobile devices for. That is the real game change to look at and at least one group of 24 operators grasped this and established a new alliance. The alliance is focussed on one simple objective: to take on Apple and its App Store dominance . Under the old rules of the game anything that increased connection time and usage was good, so as long as you were part of the Apple game all those extra call minutes and data were just what you wanted. Posted by Andy Mulholland on March 1, 2010

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Mobile World Congress 2010 – behind the obvious …

If you have been reading my blog for long enough you will remember that during the Second Life boom, I was supportive of the principle that media would be changed by new capabilities around ‘virtual’ or ‘reality’, even if Second Life might or might not turn out to be ‘next big thing’ in quite the way some of its supporters believed. My new HP laptop features a built in web cam and 3G card, (it has even got a rather cute keyboard light that on transatlantic flights has been useful when they darken the cabin!). So though its form factor is large, it’s a perfectly capable full communication and interaction device at every level from connected to wireless, sound to video. In other words a decent PC today is a fully functional multimedia device. Posted by Andy Mulholland on February 22, 2010

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Augmented reality arrives in a commercial magazine

Staff Augmentation is widely used by IT managers as a model of choice for outsourcing. Due to the inherent nature of the model, controlling quality of output or delivery is quite a challenge.  This article explores how a certain level of quality can be maintained in a Staff Augmentation situation. More often than not, the following

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Quality Control in Staff Augmentation Technology Outsourcing Model

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. Posted by Andy Mulholland on February 8, 2010

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

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.

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

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