Times within the world of technology have never been more interesting. Over the last few years, those who like to think about the human element of different functions or departments within any organisation will have noticed that the IT team have a tendency towards finding the perfect solution. IT people often very strong on creating a vision of where they want to be, and driving towards this vision with real determination.

This has been defended as a stance by demonstrating how it minimises risk to the business, but can be a slow and expensive approach, albeit one with definite downstream benefits. The mindset is often ‘we are guarding the long term interests’. It can be a very risk averse function, despite its daily involvement with what many would consider a high risk activity.

However, over the last 6 months, this attitude has been dealt a killer blow. As most organisations reign in their capital spending and pay ever closer attending to operational expenditure. It isn’t uncommon for IT people to hear the words “quick and dirty”. There is a problem that needs solving, and the business can’t wait for the perfect solution.

In a blog just a few days ago, Russell Plummer mulled over the death of SOA, as it hasn’t been implemented in one large exciting explosion of technology replacement wholesale across organisations, and there is no doubt in my mind that his and my points are closely related.

Instead, the pragmatic IT department have created their vision, and are gently moving towards it, slowly step by step. They are gently ensuring that the projects, big and small, are taking us on a journey towards this utopia of an SOA infrastructure, where all things can be known about all things, changes happen at lightning pace, and changing market conditions are nothing to be concerned about. Only, the projects are small and fast, not big and slow. Sometimes there will be a need to take a step in the ‘wrong direction’ as it solves a short term business need, so really it isn’t the ‘wrong direction’.

In fact we have reached is a time where ‘quick and dirty’ isn’t good enough, but then neither is ‘slow and clean’. We need to continue down the path, so long trodden by IT, of getting ever closer to the rest of the business, and understanding its requirements, but also educating them on the impact of their decisions on the IT infrastructure. Our challenge for the next couple of years is to find ‘quick and clean’.

For a ’summer period’, it seems to be a busy time with lots of chatter and a lot of “hot topics” keeping my in-box warm. The problem is that looking so far ahead takes our focus off what we’re actually doing.

Cloud computing seems to be everywhere but what is it? I suspect it’s another one of those terms that start as a throw-away comment to be followed by the vendors telling us why they are the natural choice in that sphere.

David Chappell has entered the melee with a white paper on the subject. For those not familiar with him, David is a freelance consultant who tends towards Microsoft & a very charismatic speaker. Having said that he is also quite pragmatic, and my precis of the paper is “When we talk about Cloud Computing we could mean one of three things…”. With that I’ll leave you to follow this link & get the paper.

One view is that the cloud can be a group of server resources which can be provisioned with a suitable operating system (usually one of the Linux family a la Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2″). The only bit of that model that could be considered a “Cloud” is that you are never really sure where it is running & frankly there isn’t a huge amount that you can commerically gain from running Linux instances somewhere.

Adding to the chatter is the emerging web application platforms, programming languages that are hosted out there so that you can write code & have it run on your behalf somewhere. Google Apps is one of the leaders here.

Mircrosoft joined the fray recently with the SSDS offering, SQL Server Data Services – a hosted 500MB of SQL Server space.

When all of the hype dies down, I suspect that we will start to see more useful functionality coming out that will allow us to benefit from cloud computing.

How about a small business owner who puts in a broadband line with a router & a thin-client terminal for the three people in his company. He then goes to his ISP’s web site and logs into the Cloud Manager and contracts for:
• Windows desktops with office applications
• Email
• CRM
• Web presence
• Document storage & search

As the business grows, the cost of acquisition of new services scales easily and can be disposed of as easily as it can be acquired. No need for administration of the software, it’s all patched by the hosting operation & backed up daily. Similarly with applications, accounting systems can be run in this cloud.

Now I can start to see some business benefits, but nothing wholly new.

Hmm…it’s the web applications that I have difficulty with. What would be useful in our scenario above is giving people information – how about a customised desktop & simple task monitoring. How about simple data query from my CRM system.

I come back to the start of this entry; are we too busy looking far into the future to see that we could do some marvelous things right now that help our customers. We’ll keep watching the developments to see what else is useful – watch this space

A visit by a Microsoft guy to talk about development tools got me thinking about this, really as an adjunct to the previous post about Web 2.0.

We do need to think about what we are going to do in future. It’s easy to say that we will rely on 3rd party delivered applications, and there is no doubt that we will do this as it is the fastest way to getting core functionality..

However, our value to customers comes through what we deliver & how we deliver it. That means that we will still be hooking applications together and making them deliver that value to our users & customer…and that needs coding of some sort..

Don’t forget that modern applications come as a bunch of services – look at Remedy as a good example, and Epicor’s plans look very similar. We’re looking at Workflow tools to tie this all together, and we’re going to be increasing involved in this..

We need to be thinking about how we code & deliver. And more importantly the tools we’re going to use. Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley looks at some of the tools coming out of Microsoft which will help us with putting value out to the world. Not mentioned is some of their more formal coding tools, building test into coding for example via Spec# for example..

We need to think about what we want to deliver – are we going to prototype & do we need RAD tools for this? Can we deliver richer information? Can we deliver robust web services? Lets get thinking & talking here.

Cloud Computing, Software as a Service, Application Service Providers, Virtual Desktops and Live Workspaces. Just some of the terms which have been bandied about over the past few years. With Windows Live Mesh, now available as a Public Beta as part of the ‘Wave 3′ release of Windows Live I sense these technologies coming of age and are ready to hit the mainstream. Big time.

So what’s it all about and why does it matter?

Live Mesh allows users to access and share their files seamlessly across the web and across multiple devices. So nothing really new there. It also allows users to share applications – again cool perhaps, but not altogether groundbreaking. Live Desktop looks and works in much the same way as your computer desktop (if you use Vista, that is) making it instantly familiar, intuitive and a breeze to use. Nice, fast and funky; but again we’ve seen most of this before.

Scratch a little deeper and some of the real potential of this new platform reveals itself. Live Mesh allows synchronisation between multiple devices (including mobile and macs), and people, providing an open, shared workspace in which diverse and distributed teams can collaborate. A ‘feed’ provides up to the minute information on users activity in relation to the workspace.

The world is changing fast and with the increasing pressures on business to improve efficiencies, ‘green-up’ and adopt flexible mobile working, the reality is that todays combination of email, shared folders and local applications is creaking at the seams. To date, the Achilles heel of the cloud computing paradigm has been its dependence upon ‘always on’ connectivity. So when the WiFi on the train decides to have a rest or my spangly new 3G data card hits its download limit I am, to put it politely, stuffed. However, when you are offline (intentionally or otherwise), Mesh provides a client which allows you to continue work without the connection. Then, when you are back online everything you have been working on can be neatly synchronised.

As it is closely integrated with the rest of Windows, Live Mesh is a logical step towards the ‘hyperconnected’ environment which has been looming for some time. It will allow us to step meekly into this world from our familiar PC-centric environment without the quantum leap of betting our entire working lives on being always connected. I think we will like what we see.

Mesh can be previewed at www.mesh.com

Andrew will shortly be living and working for a week using only his mobile broadband connection and sharing his experience in a diary. Watch this space and wish him luck.

I thought that company directors spent some of their time playing golf with their peers as part of “networking”. However it turns out that the modern IT director, such as ours, seems to think that a good time spent networking with his peers involves discussions around relevant topics like “Strategic Resourcing”. It was no surprise when he returned from a recent event and started asking me about using free open source software.

They had been discussing the effect of collaboration tools, especially instant messaging, on company culture. The CIO of a local utility company had mentioned that they were rolling out messaging using open source products which had saved capital expenditure compared to the commercial offerings. Without morning coffee I couldn’t really think of any cogent arguments either way and by the time I had he was away discussing something else of importance like the role of IT in business transformation.

The question of whether to use Open Source software or pay for commercial products keeps coming up and my answer is still the same as it has always been: It depends!

I’m not an automotive engineer, and when I sit in my car I’m not overly concerned about how it does what it does. I just want it to work. Frankly for most businesses I expect IT to be treated in the same way; concentrate on the business itself and how IT helps to make it work, not on how IT works. If that fits with how you want to do business, then you’ll want IT products to work without deviating your time away from the core activities.  Despite the occasional report to the contrary, software businesses put a lot of effort into testing their products to work well.

Larger companies like Microsoft or Symantec develop & test the processes around installation as well as ongoing use. They also publish specifications for how their software looks when you use it so that if you are familiar with one product, then another should be easier to find your way around as well. Of course this costs money & you pay for that.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some really good software packages in the open source world. OpenOffice comes to mind as a good alternative to Microsoft Office and it is free to use. It looks different to Microsoft Office and some of the features work in a different way. My family experiences with OpenOffice are probably typical of using open source & other free software:
My eldest son got to grips with OpenOffice almost immediately. He found his way around it quickly and used it to produce a lot of documents including some high quality camera-ready brochures ready for professional printing. But then he did study Computer Science for a year at university as part of his course so I’d expect him to be pretty savvy at this stuff.
His younger brother could use OpenOffice but found that the differences to Microsoft office were enough to put him off. He just wanted to get on with working, not with trying to find out how to do something when he’d already learnt once elsewhere. He gave up and bought Microsoft Office as he felt he was faster working with it.
My father-in-law took one look at OpenOffice and declared it so different to Microsoft Office that he gave up in confusion.

I try to think of who is using the software and what they want to spend their time doing. Microsoft Office skills are widely taught now so getting staff going with them is easy. A major organisation, like the one that the CIO above represents, may well have in-house training and support teams that are able to get staff up to speed with other products cost-effectively. For them open source software could offer significant savings, that’s why we see some local authorities taking this route. However for a smaller business without access to that sort of infrastructure then the cost of mainstream products may well be balanced against the ease of using them.

That for me sums up the whole open software product portfolio. If you are prepared to spend the time (and indirectly your money) then you can get some very good products cost-effectively. Most come with no guarantee, and you don’t get a telephone number to call if you have a problem. If that is for you then go for it, just be prepared and recognise that the up-front saving may be eroded by the in-life costs.

As I said, “It depends”

PS. I use open source software at home

Like me you may see many articles in press and trade magazines, telling of the demise of the IT department. “Change now or be dead in 5 years time”,” Be more aligned to the business to survive”, ” Talk business not technology if you want to keep your job”. I find these of interest but also amusing. On the one hand there is much truth in what they say, on the other I find the forcefully articulated points often void of context. It is this context e.g. what size are you? what does your business demand from you? and what are your priorities?, that defines to what extent an IT department needs to change. These articles are regularly written from the context of a large IT department in a blue chip corporate, commenting on how IT can appear to have broken away from the business and how they are following their own agenda (not always the case I have to say). This is a very different context to a SME car dealership with an IT department of 2 people who can not survive without being totally integrated within the business. Such IT teams often do not have the luxury of creating grand plans and strategies, rather the priorities are keeping the business moving effectively and efficiently, whether it be through supporting the IT infrastructure or making rapid changes to key business applications. In many ways smaller units have to exhibit the characteristics that their bigger cousins desire, just to stay in a job.

Does this mean that small is beautiful? In some ways yes, but just as small IT departments can be close to the business decision making and respond with agility, there are limitation beyond simple scale, which can inhibit small units. A small IT department will often have a very short planning time frame, with many considerations being about the here and now. This means that they may miss out on new technology advances and the benefits of real step changes that the capabilities of things like Unified Communications can bring an organisation. This is a real dilemma. It all comes back to the role of IT department.

In the past keeping the lights on was enough, not anymore. All businesses are looking for greater business value from their IT and their IT departments. For some organisations it is about being closer to the business, for others it about being able to deliver new innovative technology on a shoestring budget. So does your IT department need to change, well yes, it has too just as our businesses change at an ever increasing pace. But of course what change that is, all depends on your context!

Compared to my youthful colleagues elsewhere in this blog, I’m old enough to remember the first “Killer App”: that is the application that made us all sit up and say “You know, these computer things actually are pretty useful”. It also made the computer manufacturers say “People will have a reason to buy computers to do this”.

That application that changed the world, from spotty geeks talking computing to accountants actually using computers, was the spreadsheet. Originally it was a program called VisiCalc running on the Apple II that got us using the technology. Not long afterwards we had SuperCalc that ran on other computers. That in turn morphed into Lotus 1-2-3, which in turn morphed into Microsoft Excel and the rest, as they say, is history.

The key here was the change was from thinking about the technology for it’s own sake over to thinking about what it could do for you. We actually had compelling reasons to buy the technology.

I frequently hear the lament “If only we had a killer app for {insert suitable technology here}”, but I have to ask now if we really need one?

Cloud computing is getting a lot of press at the moment, but it’s all about the technology of cloud computing, not what it will do for you. I hear comments about needing a compelling reason to use the cloud, a new killer application that we will be unable to resist.

In truth I think our social needs will drive our use of the cloud combined with the delivery of services through the internet. Increasingly I find it is getting harder to be away from the internet and thus my PC. I want to know what time my son is arriving at the railway station? In the days when accountants used Visicalc I had a railway timetable of many hundreds of pages & I looked up the times myself; now I look at the various internet sites to get real-time status of his train journey. Someone mentions a film which I cannot fully recall so I get the details from IMDB.com to fulfil my curiosity. Where is my new GPS for my airplane? I can track it online and get a delivery time down to within an hour so I can plan the rest of my day. And how many times have you been away from your computer & thought “If only I could look that up on Wikipedia?”.

The cloud computing initiative is bringing us sites like Zoho.com, if you haven’t seen it then I recommend you to take a look. It is an office suite on-line with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, document storage, calendar, email and more. Every time I log in there seems to be something new. I can use it anywhere I can access the internet and I haven’t installed any application on my PC. Google is promising similar services, as is Microsoft. It’s applications like these that are the emerging fruits of cloud computing.

So back to my question, do we need a new killer application? I think not, like Rob Rich in the TMForum newsletter I suspect that our increasing use of the wide range of on-line services will become our compelling event. However Rob Rich sees widening the range of on-line services as the compelling event. I would suggest that it is our need to have access to them with us at all times, and to do what we take for granted with our PC but using the new mini-devices, is already showing the signs of becoming the next major technology initiative. Not so much a killer app, more a killer socio-technological need.

Please note that no accountants were harmed in the writing of this blog entry

DiData recently announced it is looking to recruit a CIO, not to replace it’s existing CIO but rather to act as a temporary CIO for it’s clients to guide them through the change process as part of their outsourcing deals.

My first reaction – is this akin to Mike Ashley employing Denise Wise without Kevin Keegan knowing anything about it! On reflection the idea is an interesting one, even if it is a twist on an established model (the interim management). So what value can such roles bring to SME organisations? If used appropriately potentially quite a lot. They not best deployed to fire fight, unless your incumbent head of IT has simply up’d sticks and walked out. There are better ways to cover fire-fighting needs from the contract market or by employing IT services companies. However if there is no time in the day job to take a step back and assess whether you are really getting value from your IT, or whether there is something out there (may be some new technology) that you are really missing out on in terms transforming your business, then such “appointments” can be useful. You can get access to experienced individuals who are well practiced at weighing up a situation, verifying the validity of a business case and pulling together propositions for change that you (as the business leaders) can understand. A short sharp strategic injection.

Of course, all the better if you get somebody who has relevant business or industry experience. So will we see a flurry of such announcements from companies offering such services, I suspect not, but remember the interim market has been a useful source to tap into for many years.

Your business ISP ain’t what it used to be. The days when the ISPs job was simply to connect you to the internet and provide some webspace are long behind us. Most business ISPs are now able to offer expert IT management, hosted applications and Software as a Service (SaaS) in addition to the more traditional ‘connectivity’. So what is this all about and what opportunities does it provide for businesses in these difficult times?

SaaS can be attractive to a wide range of businesses from the SoHo (Small office, Home office) startups and SMEs through to larger corporates and public sector organisations. In fact any organisation that seeks to outsource some of its hardware/server requirements, software management and maintenance can now benefit. This can serve to make the bean-counters happy; one of the key advantages of SaaS is that it reduces the need to recruit and retain expensive in-house skills. SaaS allows businesses to outsource the management of key IT infrastructure, concentrating on its core competencies and keeping costs manageable and predictable in times when cost reduction is the norm and restricted borrowing facilities are constraining capital expenditure.

Most of these services are made available on a pay-as-you-go basis. So for instance an employees Microsoft Exchange mail facility can be ‘rented’ for as little as £5 per month per user. What is more as the business grows and reorganises the additional requirements can be accommodated with ease. As most SaaS services are delivered securely over the internet they are ideal for the ever-growing army of road-warriors and home workers who have no permanent office base.

The range of SaaS services is mushrooming. Hosted email services are growing in popularity, following the trajectory of the US where over 40% of email and messaging services are now delivered using an outsourced model. Add to this hosted services for CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Document Management, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and IP telephony and it is clear why many IT departments are redefining themselves with a focus on the delivery of strategic projects whilst the ‘nuts and bolts’ software is handled by specialist service providers. Certain sectors are seeing rapid uptake, salesforce.com for instance is building on its early success in CRM by redefining a new range of ‘Platform-as-a-service’ solutions. No wonder then that this burgeoning sectors is expected to be worth over $10bn by 2009.

The great news for customers is that many of these services are available on a trial basis, many free. So with little or no commitment it is possible to try SaaS for size and see how it fits your business needs.

Things that might be of interest to you: Web Hosting and Email, Microsoft Exchange, Home Office, Large Networks, Business Broadband