Making IT Happen

I went to a Computer Weekly roundtable this week on the subject of Unified Communication. There were 20 or so CIO's there, including Ian Robinson, Group IT Director, McLaren Group, who explained how his COO had described Unified Communications as 'oxygen' for the group. Others described ideas that seemed to me to have huge potential for competitive advantage for their organisations.

The more I listened the more I was convinced that this should form a new and distinct part of our IT strategy, rather than have it rolled up in our infrastructure strategy, which is where it used to sit. I doodled a mind map as we went, which I have attached  UC.tif  - key themes included software such as Microsoft OCS, technology such as IPT, and solutions such as desk-to-desk video conferencing.

A bit like Web 2.0, UC isnt so much one particular technology as a cluster of technical and social trends.

Today's issue of the UK cyber security strategy coincides with a dinner I went to earlier in the week. At the dinner a security expert demonstrated various types of electronic surveillance, including a £50 gsm bug that can be left under a table and will call a programmed number whenever there is a conversation in the room, relaying the conversation. We also discussed the capabilities of systems like the (mythical?) Echelon system, which can filter information needles from data haystacks. Hackers are one thing, but this stuff is truly scary.

This got me thinking about my own antennae for cyber security risks, and what questions a CIO should be asking about the security of their information:

• for each of my major customers, suppliers and other organisations I do business with, how useful would it be for them to know what I know?
• would they go to the lengths of using electronic surveillance to find out what I know?
• how capable would they be of finding out? Are there people or organisations that would help them?
• if they did (or already were) would I have any means of detecting this? 

Interesting link on The Register to a report which concludes that Moore's law is losing it's practical application. Two main reasons:

• Chip speed increases are being driven my multiple cores not clock speed - and software design doesn't generally support the threading needed to exploit multi-cores.
• The econmics of sticking with Moore's law aren't working - as each new chip generation comes out chip-makers are seeing lower demand spikes - this means they are having to extend the generations to make the investment pay.

This chimes with what I'm seeing at the moment - making investments pay, rather than being at the cutting edge. Overall, probably a good thing for the corporate perception of the IT function.

Scanning through the Digital Britain report the following recommendations seemed most relevant to a corporate CIO working in B2B rather than B2C:

1 - Intellectual property protection - bad, in that if your staff use your network to abuse intellectual proeprty, the risks grow.

2 - Universal broadband - good for homeworking staff in marginal locations, bad for cost (we've got around 500 copper lines installed - £3K a year)

3 - Public service content - good to the extent that these improve government to business (G2B?) services 

4 - Wireless infrastructure - good promotion of extended 3G / next generation coverage

5 - BBC - good extension of the BBC's role as content provider - they are surely the UK's content provider of choice

CW site has a summary of the report and responses here

We've just been through a big exercise to consolidate the number of agencies we use (from around 10 to 2 preferred suppliers) and renegotiate margins.

Don't want to discuss exact margins, but we were targetting nearer to 10% than 15%, and had a successful outcome to the process.

Gmail's outage yesterday was reported by the FT as raising questions about cloud computing. We had a very frustrating issue a couple of weeks ago with our hosted e-mail filtering service.

It seems to come down to poor change management (in this case to do with active filtering but the details hardly matter). End result was that important e-mails started bouncing.

What really struck me was the helplessness. For services we run ourselves, we can quickly look at and identify issues, not go through some painful process of trying to convince someone else the fault lies with them. As usual my excellent team dropped everything as the problem manifested itself (at 7pm on a Saturday) but there was no way we could hope for that level of response from our supplier.

More fundamentally, we spend a lot of time and effort drilling into our own team that EVERY CHANGE goes through the change committee and is carefully considered, whereas a cloud supplier can do anything without you even knowing.

Main points for me? 1 - I'm becoming increasingly wary of software-as-a-service - how can you get true accountability? Do I think that the individual made this unauthorised (by us at least) change has had the error of his or her ways creafully pointed out? Have they learned from it? 2 - I want want some money back - I'll let you know how I get on.  

An article in today's FT reports the unsurprising conclusion of some recent TechMarketView research - that corporate IT spending has fallen this year.

What I found more surprising was the finding that "80-90% of annual IT expenditure is devoted to maintenance and minor upgrades of systems installed in the last four years". I'd estimate that for us about 60-70% of spend is to "keep the lights on", and 30-40% is on new projects that add new value. I'd be worried if I thought it was only 10-20% (in fact I'd sooner it was 50%).

I've been quiet on the blog since Christmas, grappling with our acquisition of Trillium.

From an IT perspective this is now leading to the integration of the two teams, resulting in a huge amount of work. I am now IS Director of the combined group and my focus is on three things - quick wins, longer term integration, and not taking our eye off the operational ball in the meantime. I'm planning to use the blog to tell the story of the integration, so watch this space.

Initial impressions? Culture - in many ways similar, but in some ways quite different - if we can get the best of both we'll be fine.

There's a story on BBC today about an Australian court granting permission to serve papers via Facebook.

Serving papers is a costly and complex process. Could we get to the point where electronic addresses have as much legal 'meaning' as physical addresses? And at what point does an electronic address become an electronic identity? For example, if you can serve papers to a 'place' in Facebook could you serve them a 'person' in Second Life?

I recently did a talk in a conference in Orlando on this subject. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine that everyone in the IT industry regards 'user requirements' as sacrosanct. In reality end users might not have the faintest idea of new technologies, and therefore tend to frame their requirements around what they know.

To prepare for the talk I googled the phrase in the title, and got thousands of responses - generally software companies claiming their software 'works the way you do'. This got me thinking about the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they want they would have asked for a faster horse". In researching this I found a modern equivalent - Steve Jobs quoted in Fortune as saying "We do no market research". And he sold 6.9M iPhones in Q3.

This got me thinking further, and I googled the phrase "Software that works the way it works". And got one response. One. And that was meant in a derogatory fashion.

What's the disconnect here - how come Apple can brag that their hardware / software product works in the new and wonderful ways it works, but corporate IT departments and suppliers are beholden to producing stuff that replicates current (often bad) practices?