How to change IT from 1.0 to 2.0

Diagram showing economics of cloud computing versus traditional IT, including capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Joe Robens recently published an article named WORKING IN AN IT 1.0 WORLD – DAY 5 #B03.

He has a list of recommendations how to change your corporate information technology from the last to the current century.

I would like to share his recommendations with you.

• Embrace BYO (Bring Your Own)
  • Get your policy in place now! You need to understand this progressive user group to service them better.
  • Your internal customers will challenge and push your applications in the right direction and in many cases will pay, in part, for it themselves!
• Migrate systems to the cloud (where possible)
  • Many vendors are moving their serves to the cloud. The age of enterprise license models and paying for people to not use your applications is over. Talk to your vendors about migration planning.
  • The sooner you understand how to operate in the SaaS (Software as a Service) space the sooner you can gain the cost of scale. SaaS is not going anywhere because “I have a device in my pocket” that demands you move your services there.
• Revisit your Data-centre needs
  • As a single entity IT operation your buying power is very limited. You are also killing your OPEX (Operating Expenses) with power experts, networks experts & configuration managers. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) gives you the cost of scale and through virtualization you no longer need all the employees to manage your infrastructure.
  • IaaS service providers have buying power. They have power experts, network techs and configuration gurus. You pay as you need it and much like SaaS are not paying for what you do not use.
• Develop applications in cloud
  • This is moderately new thinking but as the demand to have device agnostic application presses against IT, having a PaaS (Platform as a Service) to deliver from assists with control and access to your applications.
  • You can add this stack to the cloud offering and leverage cost of scale.
  • The reality of delivering applications into the hands of the end users can be realised.
• Embrace mobility
  • A mobility revolution began in 2010. With smart phones, tablets a ultra-portable laptops the idea of a physical desktop is slipping away. The hardware in these devices are more than substantial to deal with web apps and native apps.
  • Planning your IT roadmap from a mobility centric offering will help in the long-term adoption of IT as a service provider.
• Realign IT roles
  • The painful truth is that if you want to manage systems you need to change your job to a cloud based service provider.
  • People who manage these systems should now manage the vendor/service providers.

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So far Joe’s recommendations. Do you agree with him? Which recommendations would you add?

Related articles

• SaaS, PaaS and IaaS: three cloud models; three very different risks (zdnet.com)
• Specialization tests cloud computing SPI model (news.cnet.com)
• Top 5 Questions to Ask When Buying Public Cloud IaaS (bluelock.com)
• Cloud Security Monitoring for IaaS, PaaS, SaaS (blogs.gartner.com)
• Get to the cloud (and save money)! (manifestvisionsolutions.com)
• Knowledge, due diligence are the keys to using the cloud (econsultancy.com)

IT’s Seven Worst Addictions (And How To Cure Them)

Dan Tynen wrote an interesting article in InfoWorld on IT’s worst addictions. I want to share an excerpt of this article with you. Please read the full article if you can spare the time.

Devoting my business life to interpret between IT and business (and the rest of mankind) I can only agree with what he says about jargon, power, data, old methods and some of the other addictions and delusions:

IT Addictions. Image at http://www.saycampuslife.com

<begin quote>

Are you a jargon junkie? Got an insatiable appetite for information? Do you rule over your company’s systems with an iron fist, unwilling to yield control until someone pries the keyboard from your cold, dead hands?

You’re going to have to face it – you’re addicted to tech. It’s not an uncommon problem, but it can lead to bad decisions, lost productivity, wasted money, and data breaches, to name just a few downsides.

Are you clueless when it comes to integrating social into your website?

Image via Wikipedia

A recent non-scientific poll done by Jeremy Victor, which he published on SmartBlog is titled “Are you clueless when it comes to integrating social into your website?.”

He reports as results:

• 42.86%: “Our website has “Follow/Fan Us” links to our social presences but with no strategy”
• 22.08%: “There is no integration between our website and our social presence”
• 18.18%: “Our website is a fully integrated component of our social activity, with the goal being to bring users from the social site”
• 12.99%: “Our website displays activity from our social presence and has Follow/Fan Us links”
• 3.90%: “Our website has “Follow/Fan Us” links that encourage users to promote our brand after following”

He concludes that:

Gartner: Difficult Times For the CIO

Gene Hall as pictured on research-live.com

Silicon.de reported on the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011 in Orlando:

Gartners CEO Gene Hall warned the CIO’s of the four winds that blow at the CIO simultaneously. CIO’s will have to bundle up to weather the coming storm.

The four winds Hall talked about are four new disruptive technologies, which will change profoundly the IT landscape and the life of CIO’s. These are:

1. Social Media — with 1.8 bio users (20% of world population) it is out of its infancy. High time that CIO’s look into integrating this into their enterprise IT infrastructure
2. Mobility – the explosive dissemination of iPhones, iPads, Android devices sends a clear signal. “Bring your own device” is becoming rather the rule than the exception. Customers and partners will access your systems more and more on these mobile devices. The development of apps for the mobile devices will be a factor of four above the development for desktop systems
3. Cloud Computing – not yet mainstream but with the mega players starting their offerings as cloud services this technology will prevail. Cloud computing is the industrialisation of IT.
4. New Analytics – the data warehouse is dead, long live the diverse content management systems with their searchability.

Latest Game Theory: Mixing Work and Play

Will the time of "No Gaming Ay Work" be over soon? (Image via Wikipedia)

RT from Tia Carr Williams:

Companies Adopt Gaming Techniques to Motivate Employees – WSJ.com.

From the article:

“Striving to make everyday business tasks more engaging, a growing number of firms, including International Business Machines Corp. and consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., are incorporating elements of videogames into the workplace.

“They’re deploying reward and competitive tactics commonly found in the gaming world to make tasks such as management training, data entry and brainstorming seem less like work. Employees receive points or badges for completing jobs or meeting time limits for assignments, for example. Companies also may use leaderboards, which let players view one another’s scores, to encourage friendly competition and motivate performance, experts say.

“This “gamification” of the workplace, or “enterprise gamification” in tech-industry parlance, is a fast-growing business. Companies have used digital games for a number of years to help market products to consumers and build brand loyalty. What’s emerging is using games to motivate their own employees.”

Read the full article

Related articles

• Companies Adopt Gaming Techniques to Motivate Employees (bjconquest.com)
• Gaming Techniques Now Used to Motivate Workers (online.wsj.com)
• Making Work Like Angry Birds (blogs.wsj.com)
• Enterprises Adopting Gamification In Unique Ways! (trak.in)
• Gamification – The Revolution of Work Culture (tquilamockingbird.wordpress.com)
• OPINION: The joys and dangers of gamification (mobile-ent.biz)
• Motivation Techniques Used by Fortune 500 Companies (thinkup.waldenu.edu)

Will Your CEO Be The Next Mubarak?

Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution — Forbes

Very interesting article by David Kirkpatrick: Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution.

Taking things in your own hands. (Source: Forbes.com)

The social might of the uprising in the Middle East is now moving towards your company. Empowered individuals can make themselves heard. Our institutions are not prepared for this new social power.

Is your CEO the next Mubarak?

Will the corporate spring follow the Arab spring?

Related articles

• Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution – David Kirkpatrick (stoweboyd.com)
• DARPA wakes up to social media power (applewoody.wordpress.com)
• When empowerment knocks at the board room (elizabethmccaffrey.wordpress.com)
• Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution (downes.ca)
• Will Social Power Lead Us to a Coming Corporate Revolution? [Lucas Wyrsch] (ecademy.com)
• The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs

Age Discrimination in the Job Market?

Unlike the USA many countries in Europe have no regulations that forbid discrimination based on age.

Some 25 years ago people tended to work a lifetime for a company. Still today many companies here in Switzerland have extended retirees’ programs with meetings, outings and other celebrations — not to mention the retirees’ round birthdays published in the company employee paper. But since several years the market has been moving to a more “hire and fire as needed” model.

Source: inkcinct.com.au

Not that there is anything wrong with this — but from an age on, which is more and more becoming the middle of work life, job applicants are considered to be too old for any job.

I recently wanted to find out more about an interesting position where considerable experience was called for. It was about judging job applicants in the IT field and evaluating their business acumen and IT knowledge.

Infographic: The Growth of Social Media

Detail from the (large) infograph. Click to see the entire graph.

SearchEngineJournal published a nice infographic on the current growth of Social Media that I would like to share with you.

“Say what you will about the tidal wave that is social media: it’s over-hyped, a fad halfway through its 15 minutes, that <insert social network, platform, app> surely won’t be around in a few years’ time.

“But take a look below at the steep curve of the user growth rate in all age ranges and demographics, and the continuing pervasiveness of social networking into every facet of work, play and life in general. It’s hard to argue that social media hasn’t changed forever how we interact and connect online. See for yourself: (click image to enlarge)” (Quote from SearchEngineJournal)

You can find some other nice examples of infographics further down in this blog. Which is your favorite infographic out there?

Related articles

• The Growth of Social Media: An Infographic (searchenginejournal.com, article quoted above)
• 911 Social Media Stats – The ‘How Americans Use Social Tools in Emergencies’ Infographic is Shocking (TrendHunter.com) (trendhunter.com)

Social Media in the Enterprise – Blessing or Curse?

Image via Wikipedia

Soziale Medien im Unternehmen — Fluch oder Segen? – Netzwoche.

I wrote an article for Experton Group on Social Media in the enterprise. Above the link to the article in German (netzwoche.ch); the English translation of the article is below (as provided by the Experton Group).

As is often the case with the emergence of new technologies, the first thing you hear about are heated discussions about related concerns. It seems it runs in our blood to first see the risks and lose sight of related opportunities and positive developments. How do things stand with the Web 2.0-based social media that are about to enter the business arena?

 

Will SuperCooperation Beat Command-and-Control in the Network Age?

Within the last couple of days I read two articles, a book review and a printed blog. Both were published at completely different places but reading them in a timely context made me see some interesting connection between the two.

Martin Novak (Image via Wikipedia)

The book review was about  ”SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed. By Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield” (the link is to the Amazon page of the book with a content summary and reviews). The book marks a breakaway from the traditional picture of the “survival of the fittest” in today’s biology which often is wrongly interpreted to be the survival of the strongest individual (rather than species). Instead it explains the important role of cooperation in evolution. Here a quote from the book’s preface: