Simon's Irish Technology Blog

Deloitte surveys show Ireland seriously lags in Cloud Computing Adoption

2011-11-03T02:23:00.000-07:00

The results of two recent Deloitte surveys of Cloud Computing adoption have revealed that Ireland is seriously lagging in its adoption of Cloud Computing. In the European survey 80% of respondents said that they already use (or will use within 6 months) Cloud Computing within their organisation. The result of the Deloitte Ireland survey make for surprising reading against this backdrop with adoption rates at only half of the European level. Given our national drive to brand ourselves as a cloud computing hot spot this is a very disappointing result. On a more positive note over three quarters of respondents plan to increase their cloud usage in the next 18 months.

Why then are Irish adoption rates so low?
The answer to this is partly speculative and one cannot discount the high level of uncertainty and very tough business and IT budgetary climate in which all organisations have been operating in the past few years. However this cannot be the full story. The survey results suggests some of the reasons behind the reticence to adopt, including reaction to high profile outages in the last year which caused nearly 25% of Irish respondents to review or even cancel cloud computing projects. Availability of skills, Data protection legislation and the adequacy of Ireland's communications infrastructure were also identified by respondents as obstacles the government needs to overcome in order to drive the Cloud Computing agenda in Ireland. These last three might be the most telling but I suspect that the truth of the matter is that it a combination of all these factors as well as the profound impact that Cloud adoption has on an organisation's IT operating model (and the threat this can pose to individuals) has limited adoption to date.

I firmly believe that this low level of adoption will only be short lived as the alternative is stagnation for IT departments, damage to our international reputation as a technology hub and a loss in competitiveness for Irish business - none of which Ireland inc. can afford.

The Deloitte Ireland CIO survey and accompaying iPhone app can be found at: www.deloitte.com/ie/ciosurvey2011
The European survey result can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/6b362v4

End of my Indian Odyssey

2011-06-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

On Monday in Bangalore I visited a major international IT service provider that had established an Indian presence. It was an interesting contrast to the other service providers given its global presence. There was a different feel to this service provider that in the main felt related to the fact that it was initially a global organisation that brached into India as a mechanism to deliver lower cost services as opposed to an organisation that was born and bred in India. The experience was different. It felt much more like a visit to a service provider in Europe and less that one in India. In some ways the difference was felt most palpably in how they treated their staff. Over a lunch with a range of people from different levels in the organisation (and without any management
presence) I commented that they all seemed to be very smart people and could get a job with any company. Why then had they chosen this organisation? Career opportunities and high quality training was the common theme that came through. This was a fascinating insight that proves what many organisations, including my own, think at home and most especially given the quality of the people that I met during my visit to this organisation.

Having completed my visit to Bangalore I moved on to Pune where I visited two organisations. One in particular is worthy of mention as it was such as contrast to the organisations I visited. For the sake of clarity the other organisations I visited would be regarded as tier 1 or near tier 1 organisations. This organisation on the other hand was relatively new to delivering offshore IT services. While the people we met tried their best it was clear that in terms of almost all the criteria we were evaluating they were in a different league. For this discovery alone our visit was worthwhile.

A couple of other points from my trip this week are also worth noting:

1. IT Salaries in India are growing at 15% per annum and some Indian commentators feel that very soon it will be as cheap to deliver services from parts of Europe or the USA as India. India needs to decide how to respond to this.

2. The importance of a Disaster Recovery and BCP plan cannot be overstated. One service provider we talked to told us of a recent event where one of their offshore delivery centers experienced 900mm of rain in one day alone!

3. Visas continue to be a major issue for Indian vendors wishing to provide landed resources. Those that can provide locally based onshore resources clearly have an advantage in this environment.

4. The view of individual CIOs and position in the outsourcing contract can mean that previously outsourced services are insourced to a local or captive offshoring organisation at short notice and for no obvious reason.

In less than four hours I will be heading to the airport in Chennai to fly home. It has been an interesting trip covering 4 cities and 21,000kms. It is clear to me that European organisations cannot ignore the opportunities that Indian offshore service providers offer and need to find more effective ways of leveraging them. Likewise, Indian service providers need to figure out how to continue to provide cost effective services in a high inflation environment. I look forward to seeing how things develop.

Indian Odyssey Part II - Banaglore to Chennai and Back Again

2011-06-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

Following my trip to Delhi I moved on to Bangalore for two days to complete my assessment of the first service provider and start my assessment of the second one. From Bangalore I then moved on to Chennai on the South West coast on Wednesday evening.

There are a couple of things from these visits that I thought worth sharing:

The power cuts I refered to in my previously blogs continued with nobody, including me, even blinking now when we temporarily lost light during meetings as the backup generators kicked in.

Physical Security is big business in these outsourcing centers. In all locations I have visited there is a thorough check at the entrance gate of the taxi I arrive in for bombs or similar material. This includes scanning the car, using mirrors to check underneath the body and opening every door and boot to examine the inside of the car. Incidentally this also happens at all the good hotels and while it feels unusual initially you become very accustomed to it.
Once inside the building you go through the usual sign in procedures, however they also take down the serial number of your laptop, ask you how many USB sticks you have and sometimes if you have any cameras. While on the face of it this security seems to make sense I am always surprised when I just walk straight out the door at the end of the day without any checks. This begs the question as to what the purpose of the entry check was as they have no idea if I have switched laptops or put data on the USB sticks!
Internally the buildings are divided into Offshore Delivery Centers (ODCs). Typically each ODC serves an individual client and in some cases an individual client project or programme if security requirements differ between projects. Physical access to the ODCs is determined by client requirements. The most stringent I have seen is the one where access to the ODC is based on a fingerprint scan, employees must leave their mobile phone with the security guard at the door to the ODC and once inside is unable to print anything, access the internet or send emails outside the client network. Secure indeed.

What we have seen in terms of retained client organisational models is also interesting. To date we have discussed at least 6 client retained organisational models and none are the same. The models have varied from 10:90 onshore/offshore ratios to 50:50, to clients having their own management staff in the offshore locations to ultra thin models where the client has a relatively thin vendor management organisation only. The choice of model is largely driven by the maturity of the relationship between the client and offshore provider, the complexity of the programmes being delivered and the client's risk appetite. Interestingly when we spoke to the client who had their own management staff co-located with the offshore provider they were convinced that the quality of the work delivered had improved significantly as a result.

The other thing that strikes you as you go from one provider to another is the number of well known organisations exploiting offshore IT services and the scale of the engagements which in some instances is in the 1000's. This is also reflected in the hotels which seem to survive largely on the presence of groups of business people visiting their offshore teams.

The final thing of note is the company cultures which were evident in each of the service providers we visited this week. Despite the obvious cultural difference we could clearly detect a difference in company culture between the two service providers we met. We will have to consider the consequence that these differences would have on service delivery.

It has been an interesting week with a huge amount of information absorbed and a detailed on the ground view of industry here emerging. I am currently back in Bangalore in preparation for a two day visit to the next service provider beginning Monday. I will blog again after that visit.

India Installment 1

2011-06-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Having arrived safely in India in over the weekend after a long but comfortable flight, grabbed a few hours sleep and taken a very quick tour of some of the sights of Delhi I visited the first of 4 IT Service providers I will visit on this trip.
My first impressions are of a vast, highly capable IT industry. IT companies are concentrated in dedicated IT parks. Everywhere you go in these parks you see the big IT names from IBM to Wipro to Dell. Yesterday I spent in Delhi, one of the many locations that this service provider operates from in India. Today I spent in Bangalore in another facility of the same organisation. Both IT parks and facilities were of a very high standard, though much building is still underway and the road infrastructure is stretched beyond capacity (driving by the way is not for the faint of heart over here and indicators seem to be rarely if ever used in favour of car horns). One interesting thing I discovered this evening was that there are frequent, purposeful power cuts all over India in an attempt to match supply and demand. I noticed the lights dimming several times during meetings yesterday but had put this down to motion sensors doing their job. Today I found out that this was actually the UPS devices kicking in and out. It must have happened 4 or 5 times during the day. Every company has their own generators and the IT business parks can typically run for 7 days in the event of a power outage. Given their importance there are also backup UPS devices for each generator.
Beyond facilities I have been very impressed with the calibre of people I met at all levels. Additionally, many of the stories I had been told around behaviours in terms of blind deference to more senior managers and always saying 'yes' have certainly been dispelled in terms of those I have met to date.
Tomorrow I am staying in Bangalore to start a 3 day visit (again split across two cities in India) to another service provider. Tomorrow night I move to Chennai to visit their second facility.
I'll post again after that visit.

Watch here for my Impressions on Offshore Indian Technology Service Providers

2011-06-05T01:54:00.000-07:00

Next weekend I am heading to India for two weeks to visit four offshore technology service providers as part of a vendor evaluation process. I won't be able to provide specific details on what I see at each service provider as I am undertaking the visit for a client, however I will be able to provide you with my overall impression of the industry as I travel around India.

Watch here for my impressions on what I see - time and wifi permitting!

Lessons from the Amazon Crash

2011-04-29T00:43:00.000-07:00

I had originally planned to blog on the innovative and environmentally friendly temperature control systems used by cloud computing service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft. These systems are extremely simple and unlike most in house data centres don't rely on traditional air conditioning systems.

However the recent Amazon outage and subsequent revelations have meant that my focus needs to be on a much more fundamental aspect of the services delivered by these data centres. The recent Amazon outage has rocked the confidence of existing and potential cloud computing users to the point that I believe businesses need to re-examine their cloud strategies and the business risks (in particular the business continuity risk) associated with them. Some Amazon customers effectively lost all their data as the email below which was sent to an Amazon customer highlights. There are several such emails circulating on the web currently so this doesn't appear to be an isolated occurrence.
Cloud computing promises and deliver much, however we should all learn from this in terms of taking nothing for granted in relation to cloud services even when from the big players such as Amazon. Ultimately the business risks still lies with the user and our cloud strategies and risk approach needs to take this into account.

Finally, while this was a serious incident that no doubt has set back cloud adoption in the short term I believe and hope that ultimately it will not derail the larger cloud computing movement.

"Hello,

A few days ago we sent you an email letting you know that we were
working on recovering an inconsistent data snapshot of one or more of
your Amazon EBS volumes. We are very sorry, but ultimately our efforts
to manually recover your volume were unsuccessful. The hardware failed
in such a way that we could not forensically restore the data.

What we were able to recover has been made available via a snapshot,
although the data is in such a state that it may have little to no
utility.

If you have no need for this snapshot, please delete it to avoid
incurring storage charges.

We apologize for this volume loss and any impact to your business.
Sincerely,
Amazon Web Services, EBS Support"

A Tale from the Agile Coalface

2011-03-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

In Deloitte we have always adopted a very practical approach to agile software development and have developed this over the years into a repeatable approach that we have used with numerous clients. At an internal meeting last Friday a client of ours who had experienced our agile approach for the first time spoke about her experiences. It was very encouraging, and a testament to the quality of our team who worked with her, to see how positive an experience it was. The fact that she was willing to take this time out of her diary at all to do this spoke volumes for the experience she must have had. By way of background the project adopted an agile approach to the building of a self service ordering and customer service portal based on SalesForce.com. In summary the client felt that:

It was a very refreshing customer centric approach when compared to her previous experiences.

It produced tangible results quickly that didn't involve dry requirements documents which in itself encouraged more involvement from the business.

It facilitated change easily without the need for change requests - they even dropped some of their original requirements and added new ones they hadn't thought of as the project progressed.

It enabled her customers to be a part of the development process (the portal was targeted at them)

The speed at which a first production version of the software was available (8 weeks) was amazing (she quoted previous experiences where you would be lucky to have environments available after 8 weeks). In addition, at this 8 week point they had one of their most strategic customer live on the beta version.

The speed to market facilitated by the agile approach and the salesforce.com customer portal provided them with a competitive advantage that has since enabled them to win a number of very significant contracts.

We Need More IT Graduates and Now!

2010-12-30T01:01:00.001-08:00

I read with dismay in the Irish Independent lately of Intel's decision to move a project apparently earmarked for Ireland to Romania because of a lack of IT graduates in Ireland. Apparently this is not the only case of this happening. It is also reflective of what I have been seeing during our latest graduate recruitment drive in Deloitte.

A constant supply of quality IT graduates is a necessity for businesses generally but most especially for software development companies and IT services organisations. Graduates are the lifeblood of these organisations in terms of expanding, getting the work done and developing the next generation of senior IT professionals. There is no doubt that their long term growth and the development of the smart economy is inhibited by a lack of these graduates.

In an era of such high unemployment it seems crazy to be complaining about a lack of staff but that is the actual situation that companies are grappling with at the moment. Unfortunately there is no quick fix to the problem as it takes three to four years to educate an IT graduate. Nevertheless there are actions that we can start to take now:

1. Immediately establish a working group consisting of individuals from the IT industry, academia and any relevant government agencies to tackle the problem. The members of the group must be chosen carefully and it must be an active, outcome driven group with an ability to make things happen. It should not waste any time producing reports or fancy strategy documents but should instead focus on outcomes and what actions need to be taken to achieve them.

2. Actively Promote IT as a career. For too long IT has been suffering from poor PR. We need to actively promote IT as a career in secondary schools, highlighting the benefits and rewards of a career in the sector. The industry needs to support this by attending and hosting career events, supporting work experience initiatives etc.

3. Encourage Post graduate qualifications in IT. The third level sector is producing a large number of graduates with non IT degrees who are finding it impossible to find jobs. We need to encourage a greater number of these to do post graduate degrees or diplomas in IT. The third level sector may need to consider increasing capacity in this regard.

I don't pretend to have to have all the answers. However I believe that the steps above will serve as a good starting point to addressing what is becoming a critical problem and a lost opportunity.

Software Testing is easy and Other Myths

2010-12-27T00:49:00.000-08:00

A colleague of mine recently published a paper Software Testing is Easy and Other Myths (http://tinyurl.com/28aymok) which makes for a great read.

This caused me to reflect on a recent assignment I completed for a client where I assisted them in developing an operating model, business case and implementation roadmap for a testing center of excellence. The engagement was challenging and ultimately successful and for me once again proved that some of the often repeated critical success factors for consulting projects such as these are true:

1. Executive sponsorship. We had great executive sponsorship which allowed us to cut through a lot of the 'noise' associated with projects such as these quickly. I can contrast this with similar engagement I undertook a couple of years ago in the same sector where this wasn't the case and the project was consequently less successful.

2. Staff buy-in. The creation of the CoE is going to mean a lot of change for existing testing (and non testing) staff. We recognised this early on and decided that we needed to make testing a recognised and supported career path and make people feel that they were part of a team/community. Some of the things we did in this regard included making communications a key component of the rollout plan and defining a testing career model with associated training and external certification. The idea was to make testing an attractive and valued career path in the organisation. Without this why would staff engage with the programme at all?

3. Understand the as-is situation. Ultimately the Testing Center of Excellence was being created for two reasons - to improve efficiency and quality. However to measure the success of the CoE it is important to understand and measure the current situation so that progress can be objectively assessed. This is often easier said than done as many of the metrics or KPIs that you would like to track often do not exist today and need to be created or estimated. We certainly had to do this on this engagement but clearly called out where we had extrapolated and committed to start building more accurate as-is metrics as the CoE was rolled out.

While there were many other critical elements to the success of this engagement the three above once again proved the most critical. We are just about to start the first phase of the rollout of the center of excellence which no doubt will prove just as challenging, interesting and successful. In either case I'll let you know!

Productivity in the Cloud - A Practical Example

2010-12-26T01:45:00.000-08:00

I have blogged previously on cloud computing and its benefits. Consequently I thought it would be worth sharing a real world example of its benefits.

I work for Deloitte in Ireland where I am a director in our technology consulting practice. Recently we have been undertaking more and more projects for clients based on software as a service. One project in particular serves as a great example of how much more efficient software development in the cloud is to more traditional methods. The goal of the project was to automate a sales and fulfilment process for a major commercial client and thus significantly reduce the time it took to both take and fulfil a customer order. Some of the members of the current team had built a key part of the existing solution over 10 years ago. At the time the design phase alone of that project took somewhere between 3 and 4 months. Using a SaaS based solution combined with agile techniques we managed to build and deploy into production the new solution in just over 10 weeks and that included functionality (such as mobile) not available in the current solution and was undertaken by a smaller team. This is a truly huge saving in IT time and effort, let alone the time to market gains made by the client. Internally we have reflected on what a win this is for our client and ultimately for us but you can't help but ponder on what this ultimately means for the systems integration business model.

Enterprise Architecture Blueprinting

2010-09-19T00:37:00.000-07:00

The soon to be published results of the Deloitte 2010 CIO Survey suggests that Irish IT organisations are beginning to emerge from the worst of the recession and look to the future. The question for these organisations is what does this future like and how do they get there. Enterprise Architecture Blueprinting is a technique for helping organisations to answer this question. The diagram below provides a high level overview of the blueprinting process.
The first step in the process is to develop a high level view of the current business and technology landscape. They key items to identify are the current organisational capabilities (sales, backoffice, marketing, manufacturing etc.) and the business processes, people and organisational structures that deliver these capabilities. Supporting IT capabilities (systems, people, process) should then be mapped to this model.

The next step is to decide what the future should look like. They key input to this process is the Business strategy (in whatever form it is available). This is used to identify the organisational capabilities required and the business processes, people, organisational structures and projects required to provide these capabilities. Based on this the required IT capabilities (systems, people, process, information) can be identified and mapped to this model.

Undertaking a gap analysis to identify the IT capabilities that should be retired, built or bought is the next step. This leads to the final step where a roadmap for the delivery of the future state architecture is developed and ultimately implemented.

This in turns leads back to the first step where the architecture is maintained and governed on an ongoing basis.

This simple process can scale from individual projects to large scale entire enteprise programmes and provides IT organisations with a fraemwork in which they can attain (the often elusive) goal of IT/Business alignment.

Up Close & Personal with Vendors' SaaS Plans

2010-08-22T02:32:00.000-07:00

I am currently assisting a client in the definition of their strategy for the next three to five years. As a part of the process I have engaged with the vendors of the key applications in my client’s application architecture. There is a good variety of applications from ERP systems to finance, HR and payroll as well as a few other nice products. It was particularly interesting to get up close and personal with the vendors in terms of their SaaS plans. A couple of things struck me in this regard.

Firstly there was a strong move towards Software As a Service amongst ‘traditional’ software vendors for whom SaaS threatens traditional license and professional service fees. All of the vendors to a greater or lesser extent were planning cloud based versions of their applications. While for many this was not necessarily a great commercial proposition it was clear that customers were demanding SaaS offerings and that the vendors were beginning to respond.

Secondly, it was clear that while SaaS versions of the applications were being planned, for many vendors the multi tenant model demanded by SaaS was going to mean a significant change to the technology platform and data models underpinning their applications. Given this customers should consider carefully when it is the right time for them to migrate to these offerings!

Thirdly, all the vendors I met were planning to begin by delivering point or module based SaaS solutions that could be used standalone or in some cases interfaced with on premises versions of their applications rather than starting by completely rebuilding their current application.

Finally and perhaps most importantly I suspect that the vendors, while outwardly committed to SaaS based offerings, were unsure how it would really impact their business and that of their customers. Nevertheless given the variety of applications and vendors I met I became even more convinced that SaaS is going mainstream.

We Need an IT Talent Strategy for Ireland's Smart Economy

2010-06-27T05:58:00.000-07:00

The ‘Smart Economy’ is at the core of the government’s strategy for Ireland’s economic recovery and for our long term growth. A key element of this strategy is to invest heavily in research and development and incentivise multi-nationals to locate more R&D capacity in Ireland. A workforce with the right skills and in sufficient quantity are key to achieving this. Indeed the government’s paper ‘Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economical Renewal’ recognises this and states that ‘A key feature of this approach is building the innovation or ‘ideas’ component of the economy through the utilisation of human capital – the knowledge, skills and creativity of people - and its ability and effectiveness in translating ideas into valuable processes, products and services.’.

What then are the skills that will be key to incentivising multinationals to locate more R&D here? A recent report by Deloitte and CIO – ‘Mind the Talent Gap – Key Findings from a global executive survey on IT Talent’ provides some valuable insights in to the type of IT Skills that are required by multi-nationals and in particular those that are in short supply. The report highlights the fact that for many organisations a lack of IT skills was hampering their ability to innovate and was having a material impact on their key measures of success including quality, time to market, customer relationships and growth. The IT skills that they cited as being in particular shortage were of a strategic nature and included Enterprise Architects, IT Architects, Risk managers and project managers. These were also seen as key roles that had a disproportionately high impact on the organisations’ overall performance as well as representing the key leadership required during good and bad economic times.

Ireland has an opportunity to differentiate itself from the competition for the R&D dollars of multi-nationals by ensuring that we can fill this IT talent gap. After all, what better incentive can we offer than to show multi-nationals that we have a ready supply of strategic IT talent that will have a disproportionally positive impact on their company’s performance?

The report authors call for companies to develop an IT Talent Strategy. Ireland Inc. needs to do the same in order to make sure that we are a part of these talent strategies. The Smart economy depends on it.

The full report ‘Mind the Talent Gap – Key Findings from a global executive survey on IT Talent’ can be found here.

Contactless Payments On a Sticker

2010-06-10T04:49:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a couple of projects over the last year where contactless payment devices have been a current or future requirement. Therefore a headline caught my eye today on Finextra regarding CitiBank's rollout of a sticker based contactless payment device. The idea is that CitiBank customers attach the sticker to the back of their mobile phone and tap it at any MasterCard PayPass terminal. The sticker uses RFID technology to transmit card information to the PayPass terminal and the customer completes the transaction by tapping on the PayPass terminal. The sticker is tied to a prepaid account, presumably with a relatively low top up amount.

The sticker technology was developed by a company called BlazeMobile(http://www.blazemobile.com/). Various versions of contactless payment technology have existed for years, but this sticker based version is a simple but very smart innovation. It will be interesting to see if it takes off and with 50 million Mastercard PayPass devices in use worldwide (not to mention the competing alternative from Visa) hopefully we will see it soon in Ireland too.

The original Fixextra article can be found at: http://www.finextra.com/News/Fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21481

SOA - So What?

2010-06-04T22:45:00.001-07:00

In conversation with a client of mine recently I was reminded of the need to always look deeper before embracing technology change. My client's IT architecture consists of a number of packaged applications, with one core ERP style application at its heart. Interfacing between these applications is currently achieved using a number of ETL style interfaces. Not necessarily pretty, but it works.

The vendor of this core application has recently announced that it is effectively rebuilding the application and in a SOA style. Sounds good on the face of it. My client and I were having a conversation as to what this would mean to him and his business users. We talked about all the nice things SOA would bring around loose coupling, agility etc. and agreed that these were good things. However, when we asked ourselves why this would be a good thing for the business users we came up short - there were very few reasons we could come up with regarding why they would (as opposed to should) care. It was a classic example of why it is so difficult to make a business case for SOA. We instinctively knew it made sense but couldn't assign any monetary value to any of it. Sure it might bring benefits in the future, but not now.

My client will migrate towards a SOA, at least in the context of this core application, but it will be driven by a need to stay in support as opposed to any great desire to go through the large migration project and all the headaches that the upgrade will inevitably bring.

We are both big advocates of SOA, but in this instance and in the current budgetary climate we were left saying SOA - So What?

What do you want to see covered in the Deloitte 2010 CIO Survey?

2010-04-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

Last year in Deloitte I ran our inaugural and very successful first CIO Survey. (see http://short.ie/rn2oe2 for more details). We made great use of Social Media tools to generate discussion around the results and I blogged about the success of it here.

We currently planning the 2010 survey and plan to launch it in the next month or so.
The survey is split in two parts, the first part is fixed from year to year so we can map trends and the second part is reserved for topical issues.We are currently considering topics such as Cloud Computing, Green IT and Regulatory reporting in this category. This year we want to reserve one of these topics/trends for the ideas of the IT community in Ireland.

I would like to get your input regarding topics/trends you would like to see the survey cover.

Let me know what you would like to see here - add a comment!

Cloud Computing firmly on the Public Sector CIO Agenda

2010-04-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing is firmly on the agenda of the public sector in the U.S. in an attempt to drive down the costs of their huge IT budget - and Obama is talking about it.

A recently article in SearchCIO on Cloud Computing highlighted efforts being made in the U.S. to drive greater use of cloud computing services. The U.S. Federal CIO Vivek KundraFederal recently launched a website apps.gov to explain, promote and facilitate the procurement of cloud computing services in the U.S. public sector. Through the site, agencies can not only learn about cloud computing, but can also purchase a range of services including Business, Productivity and Social Media Applications.

Here in Ireland we have the same or, arguably, more serious budget pressures in the public sector. The U.S. has provided us with a great example of how to promote innovation in the public sector. A similar approach in Ireland is surely required?

XBRL - What is and Why Should You Care?

2010-03-14T01:37:00.000-08:00

XBRL has been around for quite some time but has only recently begun to grab people's attention in any serious way as regulatory authorities have started to mandate it use for the filing of company annual returns. In Ireland the Revenue Commissioners have recently announced support for XBRL, resulting in a heightened awareness amongst Irish companies of their need to understand what XBRL is and what it offers.

So What Is XBRL?
XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language and has been designed specifically for financial reporting. Essentially it is an XML schema and associated taxonomy for communicating and exchanging financial information. XBRL can be used by companies to report their financial results to governments, tax authorities, stock exchanges and anyone else that is interested in a single, consistent manner, thereby saving both sides time and money.

An example of some XBRL is shown below:

<?xml:namespace prefix = xbrli /><xbrli:context id="BJ2004">
<xbrli:entity>
<xbrli:identifier scheme="www.iqinfo.com/xbrl">ACME</xbrli:identifier> </xbrli:entity>
<xbrli:period>
<xbrli:instan>2004-01-01</xbrli:instant>
</xbrli:period>
</xbrli:context^gt;

As you can see from the example XBRL in of itself is not technically unique or challenging - in essence technically it is just an XML schema. The real power lies in the fact that it is an open standard and that it brings together the technical financial reporting/accounting world and XML to create something simple, effective and extensible that can save both companies and regulatory authorities time and money.

Why Should You Care?
As I alluded to earlier XBRL is gaining momentum worldwide. In the U.S. the SEC has made it mandatory for filers above 5 billion dollars to report in XBRL and this is sure to be extended in the near future. In the U.K. companies currently have the ability to report using XBRL and it will be mandatory from 2011. Similar moves are afoot or have already been taken in Australia and the Netherlands amongst others. Here in Ireland the Revenue Commissioners recently announced that they will provide the ability for large cases to report in XBRL from September of 2010. Mandatory filing cannot be far away.
Apart from the emerging requirement to report in XBRL, there are other benefits to companies using XBRL such as the ability to provide data once and in a standard format to multiple government agencies as part of an attempt by governments in Ireland and abroad to reduce the administrative burden on companies. For example by filing annual returns once in XBRL with the tax authorities there is no reason why this could not be passed on automatically to companies registration offices and other statistical bodies without any additional burden on the submitter. For the submitter there are also advantages in streamlining the preparation of financial accounts, particularly in organisations with multiple subsidiaries whose accounts need to be consolidated before submission.

More Information

More information on XBRL in Ireland can be found http://www.xbrl-ie.org/ or through BRIL members such as Deloitte (for whom I work) - http://www.deloitte.ie/.

Challenges for CIOs in 2010

2010-02-18T04:56:00.000-08:00

I have recently published a paper on Deloitte's website regarding the challenges facing CIOs in 2010 and beyond. See http://short.ie/jybug0. I thought it would be worth recapping what those challenges are here:

1. Take Control
Working in partnership with suppliers requires fostering a positive relationship but also means controlling costs and focusing on business value. CIOs should be actively managing service delivery, reviewing long-running deals and enforcing favourable rates where possible, without impairing service delivery to the business.

2. Transform your costs
CIOs should be exploring the benefits of migrating business services into the cloud; particularly in areas such as email and office productivity tools where proven alternatives are available. Cloud-based services offer the ability to flex service capacity and replace capital expenditure with operating expenditure.

3. A virtual reality
A focus on controlling spending should include examination of service delivery transformation by exploring innovative methods. Virtualising desktop and server assets can offer greater control over service delivery without limiting accessibility for business users.

4. Streamlining talent
Now is the time to identify and address talent gaps to optimise delivery capability. Where possible, consolidate and centralise teams while seeking additional ways to supplement capabilities by taking advantage of alternative delivery options. Actively managing retention will be critical to maintaining key skills within the core team.

5. Recognise your value
CIOs who have successfully reduced the cost of IT while continuing to deliver business value through these tough times will have demonstrated credibility with their business colleagues and are well-positioned to play a greater role in advising and deciding on project and programme investments. Successful portfolio management means direct engagement with senior business stakeholders to align delivery with business strategy.

6. Power in your hands
Opportunities to generate competitive advantage exist in mobile service delivery to both business customers and consumers. Applications delivered to mobile devices not only improve accessibility but also positively impact business agility and responsiveness.

7. Spring clean and benefit from green
Many organisations retain an IT legacy which is expensive to maintain and support. With out-of-support application and energy costs rising, now is the time to review, rationalise and refresh the legacy in order to reduce overhead and maximise value for money.

8. Managing change
While IT organisations have embraced methods such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for service delivery and realised improvements as a result, there is not the same level of maturity around programme and project delivery. CIOs should lead IT in delivering training on – and consistent use of – robust methodologies, enabling change delivery to meet the high standards achieved within service delivery.

9. Keep in touch
The rise of social networking has been dramatic and is now making inroads into the corporate environment. CIOs should be helping their organisations benefit from social networking’s ability to deliver direct participation through feedback and collaboration, while implementing controls to manage data security risks.

10. Be prepared
CIOs should be prepared for a broad range of business challenges, ranging from natural disasters through increased regulation and market volatility. CIOs have a responsibility to build resilience into the foundation of IT operations, and be prepared to demonstrate this resilience to the Board, shareholders and markets.

For me the most important of these challenges are

2 - Transform your costs by migrating to the cloud, there is no doubt that the cloud presents a great cost saving opportunity if appropriately exploited.

5 - Reconginise your value and more importantly make sure the business do too. There is little point delivering value if you are not being recognised for it. CIOs need to make sure that they have the proper mechanisms in place to do this in terms of benefits tracking (long past go-live) and having a forum to highlight these benefits to the business.

8 - Managing change. CIOs need to ensure that their delivery organisations are just as well organised in terms of process and governance as their operational organisations which are these days typically ITIL based. They also need to make sure that these two parts of the organisation work in unison by taking an end to end project view from the start of the project that integrates architecture, delivery and operations in one team.

eDiscovery in the Cloud - Watch Out!

2010-01-31T06:32:00.000-08:00

It is clear from many surveys and indeed from my previous posts on cloud computing that data security, accessibility and location are key concerns for companies considering cloud computing solutions. However there is yet another area of concern around data in the cloud that requires consideration and discussing with cloud vendors before embarking on a cloud computing project. This area of concern, which isn' t much talked about in cloud computing circles, relates to eDiscovery.
As with any on premises application, courts and other authorities can issue eDiscovery orders at short notice and with tight delivery timelines (in some jurisdictions this can be as little as 24 hours). The question organisations must ask themselves is will their cloud vendor be able to support them in responding to such an eDiscovery request within the required timeframes. Remember responding to such a request will often require trawling through large volumes of data. This is difficult enough when all the resources are in your control. However, in the cloud scenario where infrastructure is shared between customers this becomes more complicated - for example how will the data be searched without impacting your operational performance for you and that of other customers and will the vendor have the resources and tools at hand to do discovery at all?

None of these issues are insurmountable but it does highlight again the absolute need to think through all impacts of the cloud computing model in advance of embarking on the journey and to ensure you have a comprehensive SLA in place with your vendor.

A Brief Introduction To Cloud Computing Part III - IAAS

2010-01-28T07:26:00.001-08:00

In this post in my series on an introduction to cloud computing, I am going to look at the categories of Infrastructure As A Service in some more detail. Like SAAS there are a number of sub categories of Infrastructure As A Service offerings. Key amongst these are:

Storage
CPU / Server
Database
Integration

Storage

Storage As A Service enables organisations and individuals to store their data in the cloud at a much lower cost and with good disaster recovery and availability options. This is growing in popularity as a low cost archiving and backup option. The ability to quickly scale and up down the required storage is a key benefit of storage as a service.

Examples include Amazon Web Services and Right Scale.

CPU/Server

This is probably the most talked about category of Infrastructure As A Service and effectively involves renting processing power. I prefer to think of this as just that - processing power - as opposed to a particular type of server which somehow seems contrary to the general cloud concept. Having said this, in reality, computing power is normally purchased based on server type, operating system type etc. Again key benefits here apart from price are flexibility, ability to easily scale up and down and the outsourcing of administrative operational tasks.

Examples include Amazon, RightScale and GoGrid.

Database As A Service

Database As A Service offerings provide access to a database or database management system in the cloud. Often this is an add on to CPU as a service where an users requests a CPU with a particular database platform pre-loaded.

Examples include Amazon Web Services.

Integration As A Service

Sometimes this is classified as Software As A Service but I prefer to classify it as infrastructure as a service because of its 'plumbing' nature. Integration As A Service offerings are relatively immature but aim to make integrating cloud and on premise applications easier.

Examples include: Pervasive and CastIron.

In my next post on Cloud Computing I will look at the categories of Platform As A Service offerings.

LinkedIn as a business funding tool

2010-01-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

I found this article on how an Irish Software company raised funding using just LinkedIn. While the money raised wasn't huge, I thought it was a great example of how Social Media tools are changing how business is and can be done on the Internet. The article is available here: http://tinyurl.com/yecz8lk.

IT in 2010 - The Right Solution At The Right Time

2010-01-21T09:15:00.001-08:00

One of Deloitte's 2010 Technology predictions (www.deloitte.com/ie/tmtpredictions) is that Moore's Law is alive and well but in a different form that heretofore. In this era of mobile and handheld devices the predictions argue that rather than the focus being on faster chips it will instead be on chips that are 'good enough' for the job at hand in terms of processing power but which are cheaper and require less power.

This prediction struck a chord with me in terms of some of my recent client experiences and the pressing need to make IT cheaper and more efficient. As a general rule the IT industry (and their business customers) have often defaulted to 'gold plated' technology solutions, be it in the form of big CRM systems, high availability, disaster recovery or a myriad of other areas. In far too few cases have these decisions being challenged. Ask yourself did you really need that tier one CRM solution?, did that service really need a hot standby DR capability? why does that application need 99.9999 availability? Often, an honest assessment of the business needs and the risks can lead to a much cheaper and sometimes more effective solution that is good enough for what the business needs. This is not to say that we shouldn't design and deploy solutions that consider future business needs and which are flexible, but rather that we should deploy the right solution at the right time.

In 2010 lets try to focus on doing just that with renewed vigour.

2010 TMT Predictions - Whats the difference between T, M and T anyway?

2010-01-19T09:14:00.000-08:00

As you know I work for Deloitte. Today Deloitte published the 2010 Technology, Media and Telecommunications predictions. Personally I found them fascinating. You can find them at http://short.ie/ie377t.

The Predictions
I particularly like the Moore's Law, Net Tablet and linear TV schedule predictions.

Top Technology Predictions include:
1. IT procurement stands on its head
2. From grey to green: technology reinvents cement
3. Smaller than a netbook, bigger than a smartphone: net tablets arrive
4. Moore's Law is alive and well in 2010
5. Cloud computing: more than hype, but less than hyper
6. Thinking thin is in again: virtual desktop infrastructures challenge the PC
7. CleanTech makes a comeback. But solar stays in the shadows

Top Media Predictions include:
1. Linear's got legs: the television and radio schedule stays supreme
2. Publishing fights back: pay walls and micropayments
3. The shift to online advertising: more selective, but the trend continues
4. eReaders fill a niche, but eBooks fly off the (virtual) shelves
5. Music as a service rises up the charts
6. TV and the Web belong together, but not necessarily on the same screen
7. Video-on-demand takes off - thanks to the vending machine
8. One step back, two steps forward for 3D TV

Top Telecommunications Predictions include:
1. The smartphone becomes a search-phone
2. Mobile VoIP becomes a social network
3. Widening the bottleneck. Telecom technology helps decongest the mobile network
4. Paying for what we eat. Carriers change data pricing and make regulators happy
5. Nixing the nines
6. Contract 2.0: long-term solutions shorten and multiply
7. The line goes leaner. And greener 8. Reliability redefined and reassessed

My Thoughts

I was involved in putting together Deloitte Ireland's point of view on the results and so spent quite some time going through each prediction for each of the TMT areas. What struck me was the blurring of the lines between the predictions. Almost without exception the media and telecommunications predictions were reliant on technology. For example the telecommunications predictions talked about the SmartPhone becoming a search phone and mobile VOIP becoming a social network. While these are certainly telecommunications predictions, I don't think many of us would have been surprised to see them in the technology predictions either. Similarly on the media side there was a debate around eReaders, Music As a Service and TV v xPlayer services. Consequently, when debating which of our clients to send them to I argued that all our CIO and Senior IT contacts would be interested in all three.

I wonder next year will we have just one set of predictions?

A Brief Guide To Cloud Computing Part III - SaaS in more detail

2010-01-14T09:29:00.001-08:00

In this third post on Cloud Computing I will look at SaaS in a more detail. Software As A Service can be thought of a web based services that supports one or more business processes. The services are targeted at the business user (in general) and business super users or business oriented techies who configure the applications and how they integrate with other cloud based or in house applications.

There are many SaaS services available in the market and more are being added every day. However, most of these fit into a couple of sub segments -

Customer Relationship Management.
Enterprise Resource Planning
Supply Chain Management
Digital Content Creation
Communication Oriented Services supporting collaboration, instant messaging, video conferencing etc.
Integration services for managing messaging between systems.

CRM
The CRM sub segment consists of those services related to all aspects of customer relationship management and is one of the most mature segments. Examples include SalesForce.com (the market leader), SugarCrm, RightNow and of course Oracle and SAP's offerings. There are also a range of other offerings in particular niches.

Communication Oriented Services
This category covers a wide variety of services including e-learning, collaboration, enterprise content management, instant messaging, email and team collaborations and is probably the most widely adopted SaaS sub segment.

ERP
To date there has been relatively little adoption in this area. The most successful services are those that can be used for business processes that are relatively generic accross all industries e.g. HR, recruitment, expenses etc. Examples are SAP By Desigm, WorkDay and NetSuite.

Supply Chain Management
This segment is focused on services that enable organisation to manage and improve their supply chain and suppliers. This segment is currently growing quickly and new offerings are appearing regularly. Examples include Descartes, Ariba and Ketera.

Digital Content Creation
This SaaS segment is currently fairly underdeveloped despite a huge demand for digital content creation applications. Examples include Adobe and YouTube.

Integration Services
This part of the market is also relatively immature and is unlikely to grow very quickly due to the cost of switching. It does however have great potential. Examples include Pervasive, CastIron and BoomI.

Summary
The list above is far from exhaustive. As can be seen above there are many SaaS offerings in the market and the market is growing and changing rapidly. Predictions as to growth in the sector vary but in general there is general agreement that the CRM and Communication Oriented Services segments will continue to grow strongly over the next 18 months.

In my next blog posting I will look at Infrastructure As A Service in some more detail.

A Brief Guide To Cloud Computing Part II - Drivers & Inhibitors

2010-01-12T01:04:00.000-08:00

In my last post on Cloud Computing I provided a brief introduction to what cloud computing was and promised that in my next post I would look at the inhibitors and drivers of cloud computing in an attempt to bring greater clarity to the subject.

As we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch and like most things in life Cloud Computing is a trade off. There are clear advantages to adopting the technology but at the moment there are a number of issues which are inhibiting its adoption. For organisations considering adopting these technologies it is a case of balancing these two sides of the equation.

Drivers

Lets first look at the drivers of cloud computing - the why would you do it question. The primary drivers for cloud computing are:

Financial

Speed of Deployment

Flexibility & Scalability

Focus on core competencies

Less deployment risk

Less IT Maintenance and
upgrade activities

Easier Procurement

Financial

If you remember from previous posts one of the key characteristics of cloud computing was that it was multi-tenant and paid for on a pay as you-go basis. One of the benefits of this is that it leads to lower capital costs related to the cloud infrastructure and/or software. In fact the costs become purely operational and at pretty much any point you can withdraw or up/down scale the size of your cloud solution without any financial penalties or having to write off capital investments. A side affect of this is that the capital that is freed up can be used to accelerate other capital intensive initiatives in the wider organisation that might otherwise be possible. Clearly lower capital costs also lead to improved ROI and a shorter payback period.

Speed of Deployment

Cloud solutions can be deployed much faster than traditional IT solutions because the solutions tend to be standardised, based on pre-defined templates (that limits customisation) and make extensive use of technologies such as virtualisation.

Flexibility & Scalability

Following on from the previous point the speed of deployment benefit does not apply to just the initial deployment but also to scaling the solution up and down. Cloud based solutions are designed from the ground up to be immediately scalable in either direction, thus allowing organisations to rapidly react to daily, seasonal or yearly spikes in demand for computing power.
Focus on Core Competencies

By leveraging Cloud Computing to effectively outsource all or some IT functions organisation can focus on what they regard as the competencies that gives them competitive advantage.

Less Deployment Risk

Deploying cloud solutions is generally automated and largely taken care by the service provider thus lowering the deployment risk for IT organisations.

Less IT Maintenance and upgrade activities

As I've alluded to above by leveraging Cloud Computing organisations lessen the burden on themselves in relation to performing mundane IT maintenance activities. Upgrades are also taken care of by the service provider, for SaaS offerings often up to 4 times a year, thus freeing IT organisations from these sometimes complex tasks and avoiding the situation where an application becomes hopelessly out of date and requires a large and expensive upgrade at some point in the future.

Easier Procurement

Because Cloud Computing solutions do not require major up front capital investments the internal procurement process is made much easier as less approvals and reviews are usually required. This can be especially useful in getting pilot projects off the ground.

Inhibitors

Given the obvious benefits of Cloud Computing described above why isn't everyone vigorously adopting these new technologies. The answer to this question lies in the inhibitors I have listed below. These include:

Security & Compliance concerns

One size fits all approach

Required Mind shift in IT

Provider maturity and viability

Integration with on-premises applications

Security & Compliance concerns

This is probably the biggest inhibitor to wide scale adoption of cloud computing. Security is a particular concern for many organisations who fear that they will be exposed in a multi-tenant world with data located outside of the corporate firewall. It can be argued that these fears are overblown as the data centers operated by many of the cloud service providers have very robust security features (including SAS70, SOX, HIPPA and PCI compliance) and that the data centers offer security capabilities in excess of those in place in many using organisations.

Regulation presents another problem, particularly in the public sector. In many countries data privacy and other regulations stipulate that certain data (e.g. related to a citizen) may not reside outside the country. This can be a very real inhibitor for many organisations, though vendors are beginning to offer solutions that either guarantee data is located in a particular country or group of countries or which offer a hybrid model which combines the cloud with hosted data solutions.

One Size Fits All Approach

Cloud solutions, particularly SaaS solutions, provided facilities to enable customers to customise their solutions, however these are limited and will usually mean that organisations need to make compromises or change their business processes in order to integrate the solution into their business. While an inhibitor, this does have an upside from a maintainability and cost perspective.

Required Mind shift in IT

This inhibitor is probably the least understood as it is people related. The introduction of cloud computing into an IT organisation introduces change and requires a mind shift from those in the IT organisation. When fully implemented, Cloud Computing moves the focus away from operational activities and more towards visioning, service provisioning and relationship management. This implies changes both for how the organisations is structured and for the individuals within the organisation. Job roles will change, new skills will be required, process will need to change and quite possibly the size of the IT organisation will most likely shrink.

Provider maturity and viability

Cloud Computing is still an emerging and fast moving technology. Cloud Service providers are emerging all the time and even some of the more established vendors are no more than 10 years old. This makes provider viability a concern particularly in a market where consolidation is likely over the coming years. However many established vendors from the traditional IT arena are now entering the market and with careful vendor assessment and due diligence the risk involved can be mitigated.

Integration with on-premises applications

In many cases it will be necessary to integrate on-premises (particularly legacy) applications with applications in the cloud. This involves integrating outside the firewall and over the Internet. There are a number of challenges related to this including interfaces protocols and security particularly where an existing application or system has not been exposed externally before. Ultimately it is unlikely that this will inhibit the adoption of a cloud computing solution, however it does add a degree of complexity.

In Summary

Ultimately each organisation must weigh up the risks versus the benefits of Cloud Computing for their particular organisation. However, it seems to me that Cloud Computing is here to stay and it is more a case of when rather than if organisations adopt these technologies.

In my next blog on Cloud Computing I will look in a bit more depth at Software As A Service and look at some of the sub categories of solution offerings such as CRM, ECM and Digitial Content Creation.

A Brief Guide To Cloud Computing

2010-01-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

Cloud computing is the latest technology trend to lack an agreed definition and as usual this is causing much confusion. This is the first in a series of blogs where I explore cloud computing. This first post addresses the question of what it is.

What is the Cloud?

In my experience when people talk about cloud computing they can be talking about anything from hotmail to Microsoft Azure to storage in the cloud. In this post I attempt to bring a degree to clarity to the definition.

I think that the best way to describe a definitionless concept such as the cloud is to think of its characteristics.
With this in mind, the essential characteristics of the cloud are:

It is multi-tenant. By this I mean that multiple companies and organisations share the cloud and its capabilities. No one organisation 'owns' a piece of cloud infrastructure or software.

It is highly abstracted. Users of the cloud do not know or need to know any of the details of how (or even which and what) piece of the physical cloud (e.g. server) they are using.

You pay as you go. Access to cloud services is paid for on a pay as you go basis. Upfront capital costs do not feature.

It is flexible and immediately scalable. Cloud services can be scaled up or down at the users discretion and without the need to provide advance notice or incur penalties.

So what is Cloud Computing?

I think the best way to look at computing in cloud is based on a model that divides cloud 'services' into three categories - Infrasturcture As a Service (IAAS), Software As A Service and Platform As a Service (Saas).

Infrastructure As A Service

This category is easily understood as in essence it involves renting and accessing CPU, storage and certain infrastructure related software (e.g. databases) from and through an internet based third party rather than having them located in your data center. The advantage is that IT departments are freed from many of the basic administration functions of these components and costs are contained as in general IaaS costs become operational rather than capital based. Additionally, capacity can be easily scaled up and down as daily, year end or seasonal demands dictate while containing the costs in involved in doing so.

Examples include: RightScale, Amazon, Go Grid, SkyTap.

Software As A Service

Saas is probably the category that is best understood because of the success of salesforce.com. Nevertheless even a cursory google search reveals a broad and every growing set of cloud based offerings in a range of areas including CRM, enterprise content management, billing, business process management and security to name but a few.

One of the great advantages of SaaS is speed to deployment. SaaS solutions can be up and running very quickly at a low cost and at low risk - doing a SaaS based proof of concept is very cost effective as, depending on the project, there are no capital software or hardware costs involved.

Examples include: SalesForce.com, SugarCRM, OpenText, GoogleApps

Platform As A Service

This is probably the hardest category to understand and is probably the least developed. Platform As A Service offerings such as Microsoft Azure and GoogleApps are essentially web application software development platforms in the cloud. Rather than having the development environment and tools in house they are instead hosted in the cloud. Essentially, using these platforms, developers 'program in the cloud'. In order to do this PaaS offerings provide all the features necessary to support the complete lifecycle of building and delivering web applications and services.

I hope this provides a degree of clarity to what cloud computing is. In my next post related to cloud computing I will look at the drivers and inhibitors of cloud computing which should help in bringing more clarity to the topic.

Reflections on Deloitte 2009 CIO Survey

2010-01-11T05:51:00.001-08:00

Deloitte Ireland, for whom I work, released the 2009 CIO Survey results late last year. I was responsible for the survey from inception to completion and thought it was worth reflecting on the process.

A couple of things come to mind:

1. It was a really worth while exercise that genuinely provided an insight into the state of IT organisations in Ireland. It wasn't clear at the begining that this would be the case. The results are available here: http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_IE/ie/services/consulting/cio-survey-2009/index.htm

2. It takes a lot of work to run a survey like this, especially in the first year, but I expect that next year will be a lot easier. The biggest effort was required in formulating the survey distribution list and in following up to get responses from those invited. We built a dedicated results website which also took quite a bit of work, though mainly because it was a new concept. Processing the survey results, spotting the trends and creating the summary report was more straightforward than expected.

3. Social media proved a fantastic tool in building momentum around the results and driving traffic to our results website. We used three tools: a. LinkedIn - we used the 'what are you doing' portion of my own and a couple of others in my group profiles' to publicise the fact that the results were coming and when they were released. We also started discussions in relevant LinkedIn discussion groups around the survey results. b. Twitter - we tweeted about the results and their release. c. We submitted a post to the Irish Internet Association's guest blog. This also went out in their weekly email newsletter. These first and last of these items drove large amounts of traffic to our website, with LinkedIn coming first (by a big margin) followed by the IIA blog. Twitter came in 7th and our own direct marketing emails 5th. We also appeared very high up google searches around CIO Surveys. These results created quite a buzz around social media tools in Deloitte Ireland and is a very valuable lesson to all regarding the power of social media tools.

4. We invited people to comment on the results on the website, but few did. Perhaps this is because of the nature of some of the results (budgets etc.) and a certain 'shyness' in the targetted population to publically contribute. I still think that providing this facility was the right thing to do and think we will continue to do so in the years ahead. An interesting thing that I am finding is that people seem more interested in contributing comments to linkedin discussion groups - Deloitte are releasing the 2010 Technology Media and Telecomms predictions soon and I started a discussion inviting people to submit their predictions. This has generated a very good response and we haven't issued the predictions yet!

Though involving hard work, running the survey was a lot of fun and proved rewarding. We will be running the survey again this year. The 2009 results can be found at: http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_IE/ie/services/consulting/cio-survey-2009/index.htm

Green IT savings not so easy to obtain

2009-06-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

My monthly copy of ComputerScope arrived in the post today (on writing this I am reflecting on how funny it is to still receive such things in printed form - but I like it). There were a number of articles on Green IT and how it can save money. There is no doubt that Green IT can reduce costs but given that for most organisations in Ireland power and cooling is only a small part of their IT budget (if any - often it is not charged to IT but to some more generic facilities budget) you have to ask the question is this where IT should start to look to reduce costs. Of course it should do the easy things like turning off equipment, reducing the number of printers etc. and build green considerations into future upgrade plans, but you have to ask the question - are there not bigger fish to fry first in reducing the IT budget?

Before you say - I know I am ignoring the whole green agenda!

Long Live Social Media

2009-06-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

We had a workshop today of the senior management team in our technology practice. During our meeting we discussed social media and how we could help clients with their social media initiatives. The conversation quickly turned to how we could use social media to do a myriad of things from our own web preference, to public sector and private sector clients etc. It was refreshing to see everyone at the meeting really engaged and excited the possibilities social media could offer us and our clients.

Long live social media.

The importance of a taxonomy

2009-06-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

Today I attended a meeting at which IBM described their Infosphere product suite for information management. During the presentation we discussed their Business Glossary tool which led to an interesting discussion around the importance of having an agreed business glossary (taxonomy). The discussion centered around the fact that business and IT people don't speak the same language and in many cases even business people don't share the same language. A couple of examples were used to illustrate the problem. One example involved six directors in a telecommunications company who thought they understood what an active subscriber was but when they got together to agree the definition ended up having a big row. The other example involved a Bancassurer where the meaning of an active customer in the banking part of the business meant that they were alive whereas in the life assurance business it meant that they had died.

I think these are fantastic examples of why we should all be careful in any discussions we have regarding any topic in assuming we are using the same language - I know this has gotten me into trouble to me a few times at home as well! :)

Social Media campaign update

2009-06-09T00:57:00.000-07:00

I promised to add updates regarding how the planning for the social media campaign was going. At this stage I have considered who the target audience is and am currently thinking about the following being the key elements of our campaign:

1. Traditional email survey
2. Traditional on street survey
3. Engage with Irish bloggers to build awareness and drive traffic to the email survey
4. Provide twitter updates for feedback and regular updates
5. Create a specific website with relevant content and blogs to drive traffic and get qualitative feedback.
6. Create a facebook page with links to survey and twitter updates etc.
7. Do press releases with traditional media

Next step is to meet our PR agency to review.

What is a CIO ?

2009-06-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

I was recvently reviewing some research undertaken by Deloitte and Cranfield University regarding the role of the CIO in business today. The research identifies five different kinds of IT leadership and argues that organisations require these different leadership styles as their use of technology matures.

The first style of leadership is the traditional IT manager or IT director whose primary role revolves around the provision of infrastructure, communications and systems. This style of leadership is called for where IT is seen purely as a support function for accounting, billing etc.

The second style is the Evangelist CIO whose role is to raise the profile of IT in the organisation and sell the idea that IT can deliver business value. The CIO seeks to convince his peers of the transformational power of IT through vision and delivery of capabilities that improve operational performance.

As the power of IT becomes more recognised within the organisation a CIO who is able to lead by example is required. This is what is called the Innovator CIO. This CIO should propose how IT can support the delivery of new products or services and deliver competitive advantage to the organisation. He should also try to encourage the use of technology in this way throughout the organisation and not build his own empire around it.

The facilitator CIO is required to support the next stage in the evolution of the organisation. The role of the facilitator CIO is to ensure that technology pervades every part of the organisation and is used on a horizontal rather than on a departmental or divisional basis.

In the final stage the organisation is sufficiently mature and the use of IT sufficiently embedded in the organisation that an IT manager or IT director is what is really required and not a CIO, thereby bringing things full circle. At this stage the facilitator CIO should look to move themselves into a different CxO role.

While these CIO role definitions are somewhat utopian I nevertheless find them insightful and think that they may prove useful to anyone who is seeking to expand their role beyond that of an IT manager of IT director or indeed a CIO.

More detail on these roles and further research on the role of the CIO can be found in the research report at http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/article/0,1002,cid%253D237072,00.html.

Launching a Social media campaign & survey

2009-06-06T01:08:00.000-07:00

At the firm at which I work we are about to launch a survey and social media campaign in order to understand public opinion around a particular issue. It will be the first full social media campaign that the firm I work for has launched and to be honest I am pretty excited by the idea. Being technologists we have a pretty clear idea of what we want to do but, having contacted our marketing department, the next step is to meet our PR agency to understand their perspective. This meeting is a week or so away but in the meantime I will work on building out the approach.

I will provide updates as to how things are progressing. Keep reading!

Opinions on Oracle's Acquisition of Sun

2009-06-05T00:25:00.000-07:00

Much has been written about the impact that Oracle's acquisition of Sun will have. Ultimately I think time will tell whether the benefits outway the downsides for organisations which 2 years ago had BEA, Oracle and SUN as independent vendors. There is no doubt that Oracle's ability to put together an entire software stack from application to disk is a compelling one, but I know customers I am talking to see potential downsides especially on the commercial side as they effectively become locked in to Oracle. Customers are also concerned about what this means for Java and MySQL.

But there are many views out there in the Industry, I thought it would be worth summarising a few.

Forrester Research. Forrester believes it introduces uncertainity for customers, but that it may be a defining moment in the IT industry as it will trigger a new IT model as it integrates application technologies with virtualisation, cloud computing and automation to reduce costs associated with IT.

Gartner believes that deal opens up more options for existing Sun and Oracle customers but recommends that customers lock Sun in to long term hardware contracts and proceed with caution around middleware products until Oracle releases a detailed roadmap. It also suggests that any customers thinking of migrating away from Sun hardware delay this until it is clear what Oracle's strategy and roadmap will be.

The Oracle user group is more positive seeing it as an exciting development mainly because it is a technology acquisition and that Java will now be under Oracle's guardianship.

The following link http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid41_gci1354198,00.html provides a more detailed overview of what is being said on the web.

Social Media expectations of service providers

2009-06-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

I am talking to a service provider about assisting them with making the case for an enterprise social media strategy. They have done some preliminary work with social media tools in a particular area of their business which has been reasonably successful but now wish to think about rolling it out across their business.
This led me to think about how a service provider would use social media tools. Of course the first question has to be how would their customer base like to and even expect to interact with them. Traditional web presences for service providers have been around view and paying bills on line, getting static information about products and services and sometimes some limited customer service. I wonder what people want today - would I join a facebook or myspace community around a particular service provider (I don't think I would myself), would regular updates around products, services and service outage issues be useful (I think so), would I like to interact online for customer service queries (yes), would I like information or instructional videos or podcasts (yes), would I read a company blog (probably).

I would be interested in others thoughts or experiences. Let me know.

The Printer Saga: To replace or not to replace

2009-06-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

Our colour laser printer is broken. The current printer is a lexmark laser printer, but the firm also has a range of Nicoh printers which are outsourced and whose cost is based on a one off up front cost and a price per page printed.

The current LexMark is terminally ill and needs replacing. The question now is what to replace it with - another lexmark or a Ricoh. Today I assisted the IT department in developing a three year TCO model for each printer. It was surprisingly complex and involved taken into account all sorts of costs such as the initial purchase or upgrade cost of the printers, what kinds of documents are printed on the printer (different types of document have different coverages and therfore ink usage), cost per page (quite difficult to determine for the lexmark) etc. I produced a pretty simple model to compare the TCOs but had to make all sorts of assumptions and exclusions which may ultimately be wrong and mean we could make the wrong decision.

IT Cost Reduction Lessons Learned

2009-06-02T06:44:00.001-07:00

I recently assisted a medium size organisation in identifying opportunities for reducing their IT cost base. I learned a lot in the process.

Background.
The organisation had a federated business and IT model with only a limited of number of functions operating on a shared basis. Each business unit had its own IT function who was funded by the business unit and operated primarily with its goals in mind. Each business unit and IT unit had its own business and IT head. Given that there were a half a dozen or so business units this made for a lot of stakeholders when you add in the central stakeholders such as the CIO and his team.

The project was ultimately successful but was very challenging. Below are my key lessons learned from the project:

1. Stakeholder management is key. Everyone knows this is the case in any big project, but every so often we need to be reminded of it. Take the time to identify and understand the objectives of each of the stakeholders right at the start of the program. Knowing where they are coming from will give you at least some chance of managing them during the program.
2. Understand that people are threatened by the program. Everyone knows that headcount reduction is a possible outcome of any sort of cost review. It's important to remember this in all your dealings with people.
3. Be able to provide evidence to back up your assertions. If your are proposing that a particular path will save money be prepared to back it up with evidence. You will loose credibility if when challenged you are unable to support your hypothesis. This will also give ammunition to those who wish the program to fail.
4. Set expectations early. Be clear upfront about how you will assess the cost and benefits of any cost reduction initiatives identified. It is important that everyone understands that figures will be derived on a top down or bottom up basis and that further work may be require to fully qualify individual initiatives.
5. Understand the company culture. Be sure you understand the company's culture and work within or around it. Failure to do so can result in unnecessary resistance to your work.
6. Get your financial baseline right up front. Having discussions around today's costs at the end of the engagement is counter productive.
7. Involve finance in the program right the way through. They not only have to sign off on your proposal but they also can be a vital source of information.
8. Perhaps most importantly if you are from outside the organisation, find some within the organisation that is committed to the exercise, understands the organisation's politics and can help you navigate around the inevitable landmines.
9. Use someone external to assist in the program- it is a good source of external ideas, avoids group think and focuses the mind of those involved.
10. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. Enough said.

The value and cost of information

2009-06-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

In the past year I have noticed an increasing awareness and need within organisations of all types for accurately and up to date information. In meeting after meeting with clients information has been discussed as a major issue for their organisation. These conversations are fascinating but what characterises most of them is a lack of knowledge as to where to start or the inability to build a business case. The business case for improved information management capabilities in an organisation is really easy to see but difficult to quantify in many cases. I advise clients to think of two things: 1) How much is the information in their organisation worth - most organisations haven't considered this but when they do usually agree that it is a very large number. I personally like the approach that asks executives to consider how much their organisation would be worth if it were sold without any information. Most agree that this would only be a fraction of the price of the organisation with information. 2) Consider how much it is costing them to maintain their data today. Again most organisations don't have a good handle on this but know it is a lot. When all costs are considered, both in IT and the business the number becomes very big. Building a business case around these two concepts is sure to grab executive attention.

Why IT budgets need to be unfrozen

2009-05-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

It seems from my work as an IT consultant in Ireland that Irish IT Budgets are, with few exceptions, pretty much completely frozen at this time. IT managers don't seem to have the budget or confidence to make investments, even if they will ultimately lead to cost savings.

IT budgets need to be unfrozen so that IT departments can reduce their own internal costs as well as those in the business and begin to make the investments necessary for the upturn which may be coming next year.

The time for action is now, not when the upturn is here.

GoogleWave revolution

2009-05-30T03:17:00.000-07:00

I've just watched the video of the demo of GoogleWave at the recent GoogleIO conference. It looks really cool and I think will change the way we all collaborate - emails as we know them will be dead. Some of the really cool features include the ability to reply a conversation inline without resending messages, replaying conversations, combining traditional email and IM and true real-time instant messaging - no need to wait for the done button to be pressed anymore.

Its all done from a web browser and I think it will change email forever. It will be interesting to see how the big vendors respond in their commercial products.

You can see the video at http://wave.google.com/

Would be interested in what you think..