And, onto the sold-out
Gartner 2014 Symposium. Customary introduction
by Gene Hall, Gartner CEO. Last year we
had the ‘Nexus of Forces’. This year
what will the theme? There is already a
bit of a clue. The ‘Digital Industrial Economy’ is a session
theme as is ‘Bimodal’ IT. Balancing
agile, reactive against the operation and steady-state operation. Various sessions dedicated to this topic
throughout the next week.
Session begins with a warning that there will be a drone
flying about the auditorium. A few
worried looks. Hopefully, not armed.
Theme is that ‘Digital business' is upon us ’combination of ‘social,
mobile, cloud, information’ and the ‘internet of things’ are transforming every company into a technology company. The digital industrial economy is here. Gene reckons he has seen more change in the last three years
than the last 20 years. Digital payments
look like they will be another on the list of technical innovations that will
disrupt existing business. The Internet
of things is expanding exponentially. More smart machines but more ways to hack and so we must be risk aware –
fraud, misuse of data and perhaps even paramilitary attacks. Leaders who
do not keep up with the pace of change will fail. The clock is ticking. Finally, the savvy CEO boss is listening and motivated. Gartner predicts the Internet of Things will contribute
$1.9 trillion dollars of value-add by 2020.
So, the good news is that 47% of CIOs thought they were in the van-guard of the new digitial economy. Leading from the front. The not so good news is that CEOs thought 15% of their CIOs were in the lead, driving them forward. Still, 15% is pretty good - higher than any other role in an organisation.
What CIOs thought:
What CEOs thought:
So, what about the internet of things?
Anything of any value will have sensors. Is it too late to invest in ARM shares? The new digital economy is a disrupter. Gartner say that some organisations will be reluctant. These new digital business models may be
leaner with lower margins with high start-up costs. Existing higher profit businesses will be
radically challenged and find it organisationally difficult to commit to a lower revenue deriving business model. We are becoming,
as a Society, digital first. Digital
competes with, blends and complements the analogue world.So, the good news is that 47% of CIOs thought they were in the van-guard of the new digitial economy. Leading from the front. The not so good news is that CEOs thought 15% of their CIOs were in the lead, driving them forward. Still, 15% is pretty good - higher than any other role in an organisation.
What CIOs thought:
What CEOs thought:
So, what about the internet of things?
We need to plan for a world that is digital first. Digital first humans will not look to
analogue styles of interaction and seek out companies, products that provide this model of interaction.
IT spend outside of central IT will increase
from 38% to 50% by 2020.
This outside IT spend is being driven by the increasing shift to digital –
with more and more spend gravitating to business units who are using technology
to drive business unit profits. By 2018,
business will own only half of their own server capacity – the other half will
go to cloud providers. Cloud service
costs will reduce by 40% by 2017. Now is a good time to look at cloud providers. Gartner predict 50% of CRM in cloud by 2016.
Enterprise IT needs to learn from the start-up IT spend model.
The digital
‘start-up’ model for IT costs is very different from the enterprise IT model – choosing to
rent services that do not provide competitive advantage. People are a focus and where spend it concentrated.
Talent is the key to digital leadership and in 2015 the key
skills will be mobile, user experience and data sciences. In 2017 robotics, smart machines, internet of
things, automated judgements and ethics. I'm not sure what automated judgments are?
Internet of things and cognitive machines. Smart machines are now being used to grade
exam papers – with grading becoming more consistent and accurate. Turns out the company is Exl - interesting for us. They're using the IDM Watson cognitive machine platform apparently.
Big and scary prediction. Gartner predicts that 1 in 3 jobs will be converted to smart
machines, robots and cognitive machines by 2025. The societal impact of this, if true, is bound to be profound. Will job losses be big? Up until now, Globalisation has been the driver for first world job loss and the transfer of lower value jobs to lower cost economies. Peter Thiel (starter of Paypal, first external investor Facebook) and others are skeptical and suggest that the impact of smart machines will be lmuch ower. Globalisation has and will continue to be a far more important driver for job loss / movement. The Economist noted last week that US median wages, despite recent pretty good job growth, is dire. In the last 5 years, US GDP is up 8% but median income is actually down 4% (according to Census Bureau and Sentier Research). This means that the median wage - the thing that really measures the wealth of the majority of workers - hasn't improved since the late eighties. What's the link? Well, if Gartner are right (compounded by more globalisation), the median wages are probably going to fall further and perhaps at a greater rate (by the way, the figures in the UK are similar). But, Gartner are hopeful and say they expect that new higher value jobs will be created to compensate - non routine work that is difficult to automate (US census suggests total routine work has dropped from 60-40%; non routine work risen from 40-60%).
Roger Marti suggested in the Oct 2014 Business Harvard Review that there is another couple of contributing factors. A major factor, he reckons, is the way company execs are rewarded based on share price. There has been a two decade long increase in companies chosing to buy their own stock. Why, Roger Marti asks? He suggests that this is a good way to to prop up their company share price and ensure execs are rewarded suitably. Another factor is that a share price driven motive is inherently short-term.
On to bimodal IT. Jack Welsh said ‘If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the
rate of change in the inside then the end is near’
Bimodal IT will drive our ability to innovate and react responsively
to change. Gartner predicts in 2015 45% of
organisations will have a have fast mode.
This will increase to 75% by 2017.
Safe and secure operational systems have been the bedrock of IT but CIOs
need to develop a split personality – fast and slow.
Experiment faster and fail faster. Start a DevOps initiative – combination of continuous
development and operation.
Gartner predict by 2018 embedded devices will begin to be
hacked.
New risks must be managed – but risk is a leadership and
managerial judgement. Accepting risk
positively with awareness is smart leadership, ignoring risk is not.
So what are the main risks to this brave new world?
So what are the main risks to this brave new world?
The risk that particuarly resonates with us is probably 2. Information Integration. We can improve our approach to data exchange with our systems of record - like SITS - and our large number of other dependant systems. And, I think this means getting serious about SOA and some kind of Enterprise Service Bus. Obviously quality and security are important but I think we already have good plans to better address these.
Gartner introduce new technical term - Creepyness. Creepy is attractive and repulsive at the same time. European country passed legislation to collect all data in all parking meters to catch tax dogers using company cars for personal use. perhaps fair enough but what about to catch employees in places they shouldn't be? or to monitor more personal activity? Gartner contends that there must be a balance.
In the future, put people in the centre - all design must be human centric – do not ask people for requrements. Watch what they do instead. Example quoted of hospital emergency unit where requirements seemed clear – improve efficiency and effectiveness of existing systems. Independent ‘ethical’ company investigate. Turned out emergency unit and individual nurses had already bought tablets and a patchwork of technology sidelining the Enterprise IT. Focusing on the existing unused system would have improved a failed system.
One other interesting trend that Gartner think they've spotted is the move, as they call it, to the 'sharing economy'. Businesses such as AirBNB, Lyft, Uber, Zip car have tapped into this. Young people are no longer as interested in, say, owning a car. They're more interested in getting a 'ride' (or a 'lift' in the UK). So, things like cars are no longer the status symbol or passage to adulthood that they once were, argue Gartner and others. This embryonic 'sharing' economy seems to be keyed into economic challenges; young people are more skint (cash poor) than perhaps their parents but also motivated by a sympathetic understanding of wider social issues such as global warming. Founder of Lyft, John Zimmer, and his car sharing outfit now have around 80,000 drivers - successfully offering to share their cars. A US business predicated on voluntary car sharing with a total stranger would probably not have been predicted a decade ago.
What does this all mean for us? (working notes)
Well, lots of what we have on our existing IT strategy is great and fits pretty well with the content from the Gartner and Educause conferences. So, that's good.
But, there are a few areas that need perhaps a bit more attention or at least re-enforcement.
Agile, Bimodel and DevOps. We're right to champion the agile agenda - perseverance ought to pay off. We need to continue with the push, supported by training, practice by example and any help we can get. Bimodal IT is smething we need to practice - agility, taking a calculated risk but also having the skills to provide solid, steady state IT. An aspect of this is not to sweat the small stuff too much. Yes, we need to think hard about security and, in particular, data security but it's a balance. In the end, our customers will go straight to cloud / SaaS providers to get what they want if we are too much of an inhibiter. The is true in the Higher Education space but, actually, it's true in pretty much every other area too.
Analytics and Business Intellegence. Analytics is at the top of the corporate agenda; tied, as it is, to big data. While it's high on our priority list, we could be more aspirational - the potential for e.g. predictive analysis of student behavour, engagement and outcomes, is big. Other places are using this data for, they say, effective outcome predictions - with the opportunity to intervene early to improve retention and lots more. This is also top of the Educause list or Higher Education priorities. A positive step would be to review and adjust our target outcomes for our BI work, with perhaps extra effort added to help.
Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud. The evidence shows we're heading to an inflection point. There is an argument that from now on, rather than just another option for us, we ought to move to a SaaS / Cloud first approach (Yes, Cloud and SaaS are different - but part of the same picture). Our new(ish) data centre is about 4 years old. Still absolutely essential but... we might not fill it. Some applications aren't there yet for the Cloud - VDI, not convinced on latency and bandwidth quite yet but it will be at some point. The argument from Paul Strong (CTO VMWare), which I agree with, is that we need to simplify and standardise to get economies of scale and allow our energies to go to higher value, business focused activity - like analytics / business intellegence. By standardising, we can automate our infrastructure and move towards increased efficiency. This means specifically for us that we need a hybrid cloud strategy. I think this means implementing VMWare Director - meaning we can burst / move / manage virtual servers across from our data centre to, say, Amazon Web Services. As a counterbalance, Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal, first external investor Facebook) argues that many of the SaaS and cloud hosting claims are somewhat 'fraudulant' - and organisations ought to be cautious. He suggests, as many do, that a lot of cloud and SaaS claims are simply rebundled existing products and a route for suppliers to extract more revenue from customers wthout necessarily adding value. Talking about SaaS, a big question for us is what we do about our on premise Sharepoint 2007/10 Learning management platform (VLE). I spent a couple of workshop hours with Gartner's Mark Gilbert and about 25 Sharepoint end users. What became clear, was that an on premise to cloud O365 migration is going to be tricky and time consuming. Those customisations we've made need careful scutiny and might need to be completely re-written. The O365 API doesn't offer like for like functionality. Of course, that's apart from the security and other stuff that will be important. Generally, the room was less enthusiastic about cloud adoption apart from Education users who get cheap O365 hosting - of course, general pessimism somtimes decends when you ask IT people about what might go wrong. And, drum roll, Sharepoint 2016 will ship in the summer of 2015 and be on as well as cloud based.
To support the SaaS and cloud future, Gartner Server hosting (cloud) prediction below. Hyperscale are the likes of Amazon, Microsoft:
Mobility. Mobility is the next area that we need to continue to focus on and Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, has the right definition of mobility. It's all about allowing people to be mobile with their data and applications moving with them. It's not about targeting a mobile device form factor so much. For us, VDI is central to how we achieve this and we need to continue to focus on pushing the use case further. Gartner have published some research that suggests we're on the right track. Adding shared graphics cards and the like to increase the number of applciations that are sensibly supported. e.g. we need to provide the Adobe suite across all of our student devices. It means we provide mobility to our students - they can be anywhere they like and still get access to the applications and data they need. Saving them time and also providing convenience. So, responsive design for our web should also be a continued focus - but remembering that it's about mobility of applications and data as well as targeting specific device form factors. A chief principle for us ought to be the avoidance of 'physical silos' - physical locations students and staff need to go to get access to their software and data.
Building the core. This was also a bit of a theme and relevant to us. The key thing here is that those wishing to get ahead with SaaS and Bimodal IT need to have a solid core. This, for us, means a solid and reliable and predictable way of exchanging data from our systems of record (our student information system - SITS, Finance and HR). So, SOA and some kind of enterprise service bus. We're behind the curve on this by some way - as mentioned above under risks.
Design - A number of sessions and theme running through the Gartner conference is the emphasis on proper attention and effort invested in interface design; what Gartner call human based design. We've seen that developers are often not the right people to make interface design decisions. From our Student Information System (application form) to our VDI desktop and everything in between, we need to take this more seriously. At the moment, we have no one charged with an overall responsibility for human interface design although, of course, some of us provide guidance.
Customer focus. Another theme through the conference. For us it's, of course, about our students and potential students. We are delivering a range of additional benefits for our students. However, it's definately worth reviewing and focusing what we're doing here. Across the range of project and activities we're delivering - GetITSorted, more software to students from our Virtual Desktop, on-line submission of course work, extra wireless etc. We're delivering a range of benefits - but perhaps we need more focus and make sure we're concentrating on the most impactful work.
Wireless and number of devices (coupled with Mobility). The number of devices we support on our campuses is going to grow. It's gowing to grow a lot. Driven by wearable technology and just more and more devices being brought to campus by our students and staff. Some interesting predictions below. We have already made significant investment - but, and we have provision in our strategy, we need to continue the momentum. A good first start is to re-do our capacity planning for wireless - using a higher device count per individual.
Sensible Risk Management. Take security seriously - but it must be balanced. Active and positive assessment and acceptance of reasonable risk is part of managing sensibly. Ignoring risk is something different. This does mean providing access to things like GoogleDocs. In the audience, roughly about 50% were using GoogleDocs - sample of around 150 people in risk management workshop.
Gartner and Educause Technology Trends.
So how does this list compare against the Gartner and EduCause 2015 technology trends? Gartner's is below - with the EduCause trends second. Analytics and BI feature highly in the Educause list (1,4) and Gartners (4, 5) and fits with the discussions at the Higher Education CIO workshop held at Gartner. This is a priority for CIOs in Higher Education and many see the potential for improving student outcomes. Educause still have Identity management as a major technology focus in 2015 - which echoes our own experience. Computing everywhere and the internet of things - we need to build foundations and that, for us, means ubiquitous, fast and reliable wireless everywhere for more end devices (discussed above).
Educause:
Interesting technologies to keep an eye on. Look at those technologies that could 'flip' our IT offering - Microsoft Delve sounds interesting as a new UX approach. The IBM Watson intelligent machine platform looks interesting. Lots of demos at Gartner were using the underlying Watson technology to analyse and summarise data trends e.g. Looking at an individual's social network presence and predicting possible behavour. Apparently, (and this sounds crazy) Google looked at the calorific value of food on plates in their canteen and adjusted plate size based on employee success (Nikos Drakos, Gartner). Gartner would probably recommend looking at some of this emerging technology in a small pilot or proof of concept. Some of these initiatives might pay off.
---
Peter Theil keynote interview:Gartner introduce new technical term - Creepyness. Creepy is attractive and repulsive at the same time. European country passed legislation to collect all data in all parking meters to catch tax dogers using company cars for personal use. perhaps fair enough but what about to catch employees in places they shouldn't be? or to monitor more personal activity? Gartner contends that there must be a balance.
In the future, put people in the centre - all design must be human centric – do not ask people for requrements. Watch what they do instead. Example quoted of hospital emergency unit where requirements seemed clear – improve efficiency and effectiveness of existing systems. Independent ‘ethical’ company investigate. Turned out emergency unit and individual nurses had already bought tablets and a patchwork of technology sidelining the Enterprise IT. Focusing on the existing unused system would have improved a failed system.
One other interesting trend that Gartner think they've spotted is the move, as they call it, to the 'sharing economy'. Businesses such as AirBNB, Lyft, Uber, Zip car have tapped into this. Young people are no longer as interested in, say, owning a car. They're more interested in getting a 'ride' (or a 'lift' in the UK). So, things like cars are no longer the status symbol or passage to adulthood that they once were, argue Gartner and others. This embryonic 'sharing' economy seems to be keyed into economic challenges; young people are more skint (cash poor) than perhaps their parents but also motivated by a sympathetic understanding of wider social issues such as global warming. Founder of Lyft, John Zimmer, and his car sharing outfit now have around 80,000 drivers - successfully offering to share their cars. A US business predicated on voluntary car sharing with a total stranger would probably not have been predicted a decade ago.
What does this all mean for us? (working notes)
Well, lots of what we have on our existing IT strategy is great and fits pretty well with the content from the Gartner and Educause conferences. So, that's good.
But, there are a few areas that need perhaps a bit more attention or at least re-enforcement.
Agile, Bimodel and DevOps. We're right to champion the agile agenda - perseverance ought to pay off. We need to continue with the push, supported by training, practice by example and any help we can get. Bimodal IT is smething we need to practice - agility, taking a calculated risk but also having the skills to provide solid, steady state IT. An aspect of this is not to sweat the small stuff too much. Yes, we need to think hard about security and, in particular, data security but it's a balance. In the end, our customers will go straight to cloud / SaaS providers to get what they want if we are too much of an inhibiter. The is true in the Higher Education space but, actually, it's true in pretty much every other area too.
Analytics and Business Intellegence. Analytics is at the top of the corporate agenda; tied, as it is, to big data. While it's high on our priority list, we could be more aspirational - the potential for e.g. predictive analysis of student behavour, engagement and outcomes, is big. Other places are using this data for, they say, effective outcome predictions - with the opportunity to intervene early to improve retention and lots more. This is also top of the Educause list or Higher Education priorities. A positive step would be to review and adjust our target outcomes for our BI work, with perhaps extra effort added to help.
Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud. The evidence shows we're heading to an inflection point. There is an argument that from now on, rather than just another option for us, we ought to move to a SaaS / Cloud first approach (Yes, Cloud and SaaS are different - but part of the same picture). Our new(ish) data centre is about 4 years old. Still absolutely essential but... we might not fill it. Some applications aren't there yet for the Cloud - VDI, not convinced on latency and bandwidth quite yet but it will be at some point. The argument from Paul Strong (CTO VMWare), which I agree with, is that we need to simplify and standardise to get economies of scale and allow our energies to go to higher value, business focused activity - like analytics / business intellegence. By standardising, we can automate our infrastructure and move towards increased efficiency. This means specifically for us that we need a hybrid cloud strategy. I think this means implementing VMWare Director - meaning we can burst / move / manage virtual servers across from our data centre to, say, Amazon Web Services. As a counterbalance, Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal, first external investor Facebook) argues that many of the SaaS and cloud hosting claims are somewhat 'fraudulant' - and organisations ought to be cautious. He suggests, as many do, that a lot of cloud and SaaS claims are simply rebundled existing products and a route for suppliers to extract more revenue from customers wthout necessarily adding value. Talking about SaaS, a big question for us is what we do about our on premise Sharepoint 2007/10 Learning management platform (VLE). I spent a couple of workshop hours with Gartner's Mark Gilbert and about 25 Sharepoint end users. What became clear, was that an on premise to cloud O365 migration is going to be tricky and time consuming. Those customisations we've made need careful scutiny and might need to be completely re-written. The O365 API doesn't offer like for like functionality. Of course, that's apart from the security and other stuff that will be important. Generally, the room was less enthusiastic about cloud adoption apart from Education users who get cheap O365 hosting - of course, general pessimism somtimes decends when you ask IT people about what might go wrong. And, drum roll, Sharepoint 2016 will ship in the summer of 2015 and be on as well as cloud based.
To support the SaaS and cloud future, Gartner Server hosting (cloud) prediction below. Hyperscale are the likes of Amazon, Microsoft:
Mobility. Mobility is the next area that we need to continue to focus on and Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, has the right definition of mobility. It's all about allowing people to be mobile with their data and applications moving with them. It's not about targeting a mobile device form factor so much. For us, VDI is central to how we achieve this and we need to continue to focus on pushing the use case further. Gartner have published some research that suggests we're on the right track. Adding shared graphics cards and the like to increase the number of applciations that are sensibly supported. e.g. we need to provide the Adobe suite across all of our student devices. It means we provide mobility to our students - they can be anywhere they like and still get access to the applications and data they need. Saving them time and also providing convenience. So, responsive design for our web should also be a continued focus - but remembering that it's about mobility of applications and data as well as targeting specific device form factors. A chief principle for us ought to be the avoidance of 'physical silos' - physical locations students and staff need to go to get access to their software and data.
Building the core. This was also a bit of a theme and relevant to us. The key thing here is that those wishing to get ahead with SaaS and Bimodal IT need to have a solid core. This, for us, means a solid and reliable and predictable way of exchanging data from our systems of record (our student information system - SITS, Finance and HR). So, SOA and some kind of enterprise service bus. We're behind the curve on this by some way - as mentioned above under risks.
Design - A number of sessions and theme running through the Gartner conference is the emphasis on proper attention and effort invested in interface design; what Gartner call human based design. We've seen that developers are often not the right people to make interface design decisions. From our Student Information System (application form) to our VDI desktop and everything in between, we need to take this more seriously. At the moment, we have no one charged with an overall responsibility for human interface design although, of course, some of us provide guidance.
Customer focus. Another theme through the conference. For us it's, of course, about our students and potential students. We are delivering a range of additional benefits for our students. However, it's definately worth reviewing and focusing what we're doing here. Across the range of project and activities we're delivering - GetITSorted, more software to students from our Virtual Desktop, on-line submission of course work, extra wireless etc. We're delivering a range of benefits - but perhaps we need more focus and make sure we're concentrating on the most impactful work.
Wireless and number of devices (coupled with Mobility). The number of devices we support on our campuses is going to grow. It's gowing to grow a lot. Driven by wearable technology and just more and more devices being brought to campus by our students and staff. Some interesting predictions below. We have already made significant investment - but, and we have provision in our strategy, we need to continue the momentum. A good first start is to re-do our capacity planning for wireless - using a higher device count per individual.
Sensible Risk Management. Take security seriously - but it must be balanced. Active and positive assessment and acceptance of reasonable risk is part of managing sensibly. Ignoring risk is something different. This does mean providing access to things like GoogleDocs. In the audience, roughly about 50% were using GoogleDocs - sample of around 150 people in risk management workshop.
Gartner and Educause Technology Trends.
So how does this list compare against the Gartner and EduCause 2015 technology trends? Gartner's is below - with the EduCause trends second. Analytics and BI feature highly in the Educause list (1,4) and Gartners (4, 5) and fits with the discussions at the Higher Education CIO workshop held at Gartner. This is a priority for CIOs in Higher Education and many see the potential for improving student outcomes. Educause still have Identity management as a major technology focus in 2015 - which echoes our own experience. Computing everywhere and the internet of things - we need to build foundations and that, for us, means ubiquitous, fast and reliable wireless everywhere for more end devices (discussed above).
Educause:
Interesting technologies to keep an eye on. Look at those technologies that could 'flip' our IT offering - Microsoft Delve sounds interesting as a new UX approach. The IBM Watson intelligent machine platform looks interesting. Lots of demos at Gartner were using the underlying Watson technology to analyse and summarise data trends e.g. Looking at an individual's social network presence and predicting possible behavour. Apparently, (and this sounds crazy) Google looked at the calorific value of food on plates in their canteen and adjusted plate size based on employee success (Nikos Drakos, Gartner). Gartner would probably recommend looking at some of this emerging technology in a small pilot or proof of concept. Some of these initiatives might pay off.
---
http://events.gartner.com/#/en/navigator/sym24/agenda/25731/sessiondetail/speakers-tab
A bit more on the sharing economy from the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/28/sharing-economy-internet-hype-benefits-overstated-evgeny-morozov
Really interesting thanks. Provides a good core of topics to keep a watching brief on as well as some specific direction we can follow up now,
ReplyDeleteThanks Mandy, I wonder what the best way forward is to look at this stuff. A challenge is how completely occupied we are with ongoing projects - and one in particular
ReplyDelete