On GPTs, organisational complements - management's role in effective IT adoption

In a recent post Nicholas Carr calls out a recent Harvard Business Review article (currently freely accessible) by Andrew McAfee, whose work I highlighted in August. In the article, McAfee sets out to help managers grapple with the challenges of technology adoption in the face of an abundance of technologies, a chequered history of IT project success, a more general questioning (thanks to Carr) as to whether IT really matters and whether organisations should actually be doing IT themselves. I certainly found myself agreeing with a lot of the context setting from McAfee.

McAfee goes on to explain that:

technology projects are increasingly becoming managerial challenges rather than technical ones. What’s more, a well-run IT department isn’t enough; line managers have important responsibilities in implementing these projects

Again, difficult to refute. IT and business are so intimately intertwined these days and the focus of IT investment is shifting away from the automation of non-differentiating business processes in the back office and towards those processes which do differentiate: the ones which are often ad-hoc, dynamic and collaborative in nature. Unless the business is involved in identifying the right technology and then facilitating its adoption, the chances of success are limited. Whilst the business knows this, the problem is

they’re not clear where, when, and how they should get involved

Why? According to McAfee it's because managers lack a model for the role of IT, its organisational implications and what they should do to help it succeed. Our research here at MWD is certainly consistent with this. So, where does this model come from?

That's where GPTs - General Purpose Technologies - and organisational complements come into play. GPTs are

innovations so important that they cause jumps in an economy’s normal march of progress

with IT following on from earlier examples such as electric power, the transistor, and the laser. Organisational complements are changes in the ways that organisations do things which multiply the effects of GPTs. In the case of IT, these complements are better-skilled workers, improved teamwork, redesigned processes and new decision rights. McAfee believes that IT is different from other GPTs in terms of the relationships to these different complements. He believes there are three categories of IT which vary in terms of the importance of the different organisational complements:

• Function IT - assists with the execution of discrete tasks and doesn't bring complements with it e.g. spreadsheets, CAD
• Network IT - facilitates communication and collaboration between individuals and lets complements emerge e.g. email, blogs, wikis
• Enterprise IT - specifies and implements business processes and imposes complements e.g. ERP, CRM, SCM

One could certainly argue with the classification since different technologies may fall into different categories dependent on the business process but overall it makes a lot of sense to me - it's recognised, for example, that big enterprise applications often require changes to business processes and governance approaches.

This classification forms the basis of the missing model, since it provides managers with a way of thinking about the capabilities they need - task execution, communication etc - during technology selection; the complements they need to put in place to facilitate adoption; and the optimisation of complements they need to perform to maximise the return from technology. The article provides some useful case study-based examples of the model in use.

I think McAfee has done a great job of simplying things or, as Carr puts it:

in adding precision to the language we use to discuss complex subjects. It helps us get beyond big, ill-defined generalizations.

I, like Carr, think the classification of IT is too simplistic (but then it is a model!):

It can prevent us from seeing how categories blend together. By drawing bright lines between things, it can give the illusion that those things are more distinct than they really are. I sense that problem here (even while granting the usefulness of McAfee's categorization). Take the identification of CRM as an enterprise information technology. Isn't that assumption exactly what doomed so many big CRM projects? The projects lost sight of the fact that CRM is as much a functional tool, a tool that helps individual employees, like salespeople, do their work better, as an enterprise system. CRM, in other words, is as much FIT as EIT. And, in fact, there's a lot of NIT in it as well.

However, I disagree with Carr's conclusion:

McAfee's article may not be quite as clarifying as it is intended to be.

Had McAfee had stopped at the classification then I would have agreed. It's the marrying of the technology classification to the organisational implications where McAfee clarifies things, since it helps to facilitate a dialogue between business and IT in a language which both sides understand. Equally importantly, it moves beyond the technology selection phase to outline the role of the business during adoption and subsequent exploitation. posted by Neil Macehiter @ 10:05 AM 1 comments permalink

Yet more SOA podcasting

We must be doing something right as we seem to be getting invited to participate in a whole bunch of podcasts at the moment. The vast majority seem to be on SOA, which is fine - it's something we know something about.... ;-)

Here's another one, done as part of our role as ebizq contributors. This was quite fun - it was a debate on the possibilities of reuse in SOA initiatives, and why the promise might not be straightforward to fulfil. The podcast was chaired by ebizq's Elizabeth Book, and I shared the virtual podium with Ronan Bradley, David Linthicum and Joe McKendrick.

It clocks in at 26 minutes, and although there's quite a lot of agreement between us (so no entertaining mud-slinging), I think it draws out a lot of the key issues around the value of architecture, balancing supply and demand in service networks, where reuse fits in the overall value proposition for SOA, and so on. posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 9:59 PM 0 comments permalink

Microsoft's dangerous game

Following a series of announcements and counter-announcements over the past year, I confess to being left a little flummoxed at Microsoft's attitude to its partners and customers.

First it says it is going to charge for every virtualised server instance as part of the virtualisation capabilities planned for Longhorn, then it changes its mind - perhaps it backs down - and says that there will be a single license cost for however many virtualised instances, for users of the Datacenter edition.

Then it launches Windows Genuine Advantage having convinced the pundits that its going to be non-intrusive, then it incorporates non-removable code to check in with Microsoft every time a computer connected to the internet; it also limits Microsoft Updates to people that run the WGA tool. Then it backs down, admits mistakes and apologises. By the way, I now understand the name - I thought it meant that there was a genuine advantage to Windows, now I understand it refers to the advantage of Windows genuine...

Then Microsoft prevents its security ecosystem partners (so they claim) from having direct access into the Vista kernel, claiming it would destabilise the operating system. It then changes its mind - backs down under pressure from the EU - and re-instates such hooks. Either the first premise was false (if it was the case, is Microsoft going to ban Intel from writing display drivers now?) or Vista will now be less stable than before.

Now, and back to WGA, we understand that Microsoft somehow roped in its volume customers - first by accident but with future plans to test validity of Vista and Longhorn whether they like it or not - no doubt Microsoft retains the right to "change its mind" should sufficient customers kick up a fuss. Plus there will now be limitations on how many times a Vista license can be moved from one machine to another. Plus, and back to virtualisation, Microsoft is going to limit the older versions of Windows that can run on top of Microsoft's virtualised platform.

Now call me an cynical old buff, but I'd say Microsoft is trying to put restrictive limitations on its products in order to maximise its revenues, adversely impact the competition and resctrict the flexibility it offers its customers. Or perhaps, Microsoft is just pushing the cart as close to the edge of the cliff as it can, being very careful to pull it back just a bit every time it looks like it is going to fall off.

Maybe I'm wrong but its a dangerous game nonetheless. The company is perhaps quick to forget that it was ease of distribution (among other things - its a good product) that helped Microsoft Office win over Lotus and WordPerfect. From the operating system side, Microsoft relied heavily on the open-ness of Windows to build an ecosystem of developers and partners, without which the success of Windows was less than guaranteed. Today, it might have the desktop monopoly but only a minority of companies is planning to migrate to Vista. Some pundits are suggesting there may be a mass conversion to other platforms - I think organisations tend to be more conservative than that, and they will hang onto their existing choices right up to the point where they realise its best to just walk away.

Where is that point? Frankly, I have absolutely no idea. Equally however, nor does Microsoft. posted by Anonymous @ 2:32 PM 0 comments permalink

More SOA insights

I've just had my first cross-atlantic Podcasting experience, with Dana Gardner and Steve Garone in Dana's BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition. That was a lot of fun - we covered virtualisation and ERP, Oracle and EMC's stealthy plans, and plenty of things to do with SOA of course! Do tune in - or download the transcript.

P.S. for more SOA goodness, I also wrote the following article - Services, not software - for IT-analysis.com. Feel free to check it out. posted by Anonymous @ 1:36 PM 0 comments permalink

Our alma mater goes to Datamonitor

It ain't over, so they say, until the oversized dame trills, but it looks rather like my and Neil Macehiter's alma mater, Ovum, is very soon going to be part of Datamonitor.

I'm not really an analyst of analyst firms (I'll leave that to people like Duncan) but of course I have an interest in this as Ovum has been a kind-of-competitor, as well as our former employer. It's interesting to me that while Ovum has been busy doing some acquiring of its own, helped along by the cash pile generated from its recent IPO (in the period since we left Ovum, it's bought telecoms infrastructure specialist RHK, IT infrastructure specialist Summit Strategies and outsourcing specialist Orbys Consulting), it's also been in discussions with Datamonitor. I guess the acquisitions made Ovum a pretty attractive target.

It'll also be interesting to see if the acquisition, assuming it gets the go-ahead from Datamonitor's and Ovum's shareholders, has any effect on the demand for services from "independents" like us...it certainly continues the consolidation at the "upper levels" of the ICT analyst market (although strictly speaking Datamonitor is a cross-industry market intelligence provider). Until now, though, we've not seen any noticeable negative effects from analyst firm consolidation. The opposite, if anything.

Disclaimer: I was an Ovum shareholder until fairly recently, but I sold... too early, it seems! posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 12:49 PM 0 comments permalink

Nice container, where's the manual

What a cracking idea this is - a preconfigured data centre from Sun in the shape of a container (well, it is a container), that doesn't even need to be forklifted into the building. While it is targeted at data centre expansion projects, it brings commoditisation to a new level. Sun, perhaps with a hat-tip to Google, should be applauded for its innovation.

There is an opportunity here that I hope will not be overlooked. What of the user manuals? We can bang on about IT service management, IT governance, COBIT and ITIL being places for operational management to get to, but here we really do have an integrated set of systems that can benefit from best practice management out of the - ahem - box. By treating the data centre as a black box, we can also apply a black box approach to management. Fault management? Here's the integrated console. Backup and restore? All taken care of, swap the tapes once a week. Disaster recovery? Here's a second crate. If Sun is seeing this just as a hardware deployment mechanism, they are missing a trick; its actually a way to get IT done the way it should be done. posted by Anonymous @ 7:44 PM 0 comments permalink

Insights on SOA

I recently participated in the inaugural session of BriefingsDirect SOA Insights, a weekly SOA-related discussion featuring a panel of independent IT industry analysts and guests. I was joined on the panel by Dana Gardner, founder and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions who put it all together (thanks Dana) and Steve Garone, a reseach partner at Ideas International. We discussed a variety of things: BEA's SOA 360, the raft of recent IBM announcements and Borland's Lifecycle Quality Management offering. You can listen to the podcast here or, if you can't put up with my dulcet tones, read the full transcript here.

Expect more appearances from Neil, Jon and I in the future. posted by Neil Macehiter @ 7:52 AM 0 comments permalink

Liberty Alliance releases ID-WSF 2.0: more scenarios required

Last week, the Liberty Alliance announced the final version of its Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) - I briefly touched on ID-WSF back in April when discussing Liberty's approach to user-centric identity. I have to admit, I have always struggled to get my head around ID-WSF, which Liberty defines as providing:

the framework for building interoperable identity services, permission based attribute sharing, identity service description and discovery and the associated security profiles

Liberty has used a variety of resources, from marketing requirements documents to webinars, to help others facing a similar predicament. I put these resources to good use and finally got to the bottom of identity services, permission based attribute sharing and what these might mean in business terms. For all the details take a look here. posted by Neil Macehiter @ 7:06 AM 0 comments permalink

Don't throw the SOA baby out with the marchitecture

Marketing departments love jumping on 'new' ideas and adopting them as their own, which can muddy the waters for those who have been using the concepts for years. Cf SOA, which is becoming an increasingly chaotic area - ironic really, given that it is rooted in some really quite simple concepts. Our pals over at Redmonk have been debating how SOA has been hijacked by the marchitects: "it's largely failed in that Holy Grail task of bringing the propeller heads and the suits together," says Cote.

This is partially, but not entirely true. The good news comes from the organisations that are looking at using SOA, in that they view it not as some massively complex change to their existing ways of working, more as an incremental, evolutionary approach that enables it to think about its capabilities in business-meaningful terms, and the adoption of base principles such as contractural relationships between service suppliers and consumers. To quote my esteemed colleague Neil Ward-Dutton, "None of the companies I've talked to are dumb enough to try and re-engineer their entire organisations' IT infrastructures top-down in some kind of elephantine SOA engineering folly." In marked contrast to the goings-on in vendor-land, the approach is far more pragmatic.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, given that SOA doesn't actually exist, not as a product in any case. Perhaps the hand-flappings of the marketeers suggests as much about their inability to turn a concept into a product, as anything about gung-ho repurposing of the concept itself. Let us not spend too much time worrying about this: while the vendors try to out-market each other, organisations are quietly getting on with the job. The worst thing we could do would be to dismiss SOA as marchitecture, just because it has been hijacked; this would also dismiss the real value that SOA can bring. posted by Anonymous @ 3:31 PM 2 comments permalink

I feel another petition coming on

Will they never learn! News.com reports on Symantec's vision for

a new generation of security products and services for the connected world

and, yes, you've guessed it: it's Security 2.0. And what makes it 2.0? Well, according to Symantec's CEO John Thompson:

It's about integrating software, services and partnerships to protect customers' most important assets: their information and their interactions

So what was Security 1.0 about? It seems to that Thompson is highlighting the failings of existing approaches, rather than some radical shift in capabilities.

Don't get me wrong. The advent of the Internet (with its lack of inherent security); increased inter-organisation connectivity and collaboration; remote working etc etc all pose significant security challenges and solutions have not kept pace. It's going to take more than a version upgrade to change that. posted by Neil Macehiter @ 1:19 PM 0 comments permalink

A shameless plug

When we started this blog we were adamant that it would be relentlessly on-topic. But as it's become more popular, it's become one of the best ways for us to get information out there widely.

So with that in mind, we hope you don't mind this a shameless plug for MWD's shiny new Supplier Advisory Service (or SAS, if you like)...

The service is designed for strategic planning, marketing and product management personnel at enterprise software and services suppliers. If you're an IT supplier and think you might value the assistance of our analysts, please take a look at the brochure (PDF), and if you're interested, give us a call. posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 9:47 PM 0 comments permalink

Little acorns of open source IT management

I've been looking into open source IT management offerings recently (though not in as much detail as Cote), for a number of reasons. No, I don't believe we should paint the whole world with open source, particularly as it appears more and more to be a business-driven alternative to traditional sourcing, rather than any "power to the people" software strategy. Instead, I look to open source as a way of thrashing out the commodity layer of software, as the community at large takes it upon itself to build something everyone can use. Linux, Apache, MySQL are all good examples of this.

And so it is with management software. One would hope that event management is a solved problem by now, as is asset management; until quite recently however, the only open source offerings have been at quite a low level, for log management for example. I was therefore interested to read about OneCMDB, an open source Configuration Management Database implementation written in Java. Interested because, what could be more of a commodity for systems management than the repository for managing IT assets? Just as with the relationship between MySQL and its data, the value of the repository comes from the information it contains.

OneCMDB has only just been released; it is not currently designed for enterprise use; documentation is currently sparse; and the chances are it will hit scalability problems if it is used in too hefty an environment. The point is, to me at least, that open source attention is turning to what was previously an area of little interest. There are few comments on Sourceforge, but one is from another developer that is already looking at integrating OneCMDB with his own, in-house service desk application. From such little acorns, we might at least expect to see a sapling or two in the future.

One of the really great things about open source is that sometimes, it ups the ante: Linux did it with the once-complacent Windows, for example. The IT management software bandwagon has traditionally lumbered along, lets hope that a few more initiatives like this one might help crack the whip a little. There have been some good signs of progress in the enterprise management software community, particularly around standardisation but a little more impetus wouldn't hurt a bit.

posted by Anonymous @ 6:21 PM 2 comments permalink

Microsoft slouches towards SOA

So Microsoft is finally out of the closet. After years of shrugging off any enquiries about SOA and preferring instead to talk exclusively about something called "service orientation", the company has put its name to a SOA conference which ran last week in Redmond. It's really a BizTalk and Office conference, actually, but SOA (and BPM) are big themes.

It's a big moment for SOA. Microsoft traditionally eschews the big software platform buzz-phrases - it never talked about having an application server, for example, or an Application Platform Suite - preferring to leave the mouth-frothing and feverish-attention-grabbing to the Java crowd - but it seems that SOA's momentum has finally made it explicitly hitch itself to the SOA wagon.

Not without a bit of a side-swipe at the current SOA tooling players, though. The news release that accompanied the staging of the conference made reference to Microsoft's "real world" approach to SOA - in contrast to other vendors' approaches which "major on the need for large scale enterprise infrastructures". I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with the fact that Microsoft's real strengths lie in its relationships with developers, in contrast with the "enterprise infrastructure" strengths of competitors like BEA, IBM, TIBCO et al...

John deVadoss, Microsoft's director of architecture strategy, talked about an "industry dialogue around large-scale SOA implementations not delivering the promised return" and positioned Microsoft's strategy as being much more about helping customers take incremental steps towards SOA.

I think this is a case of Microsoft attempting to invent an industry narrative that doesn't exist, in an attempt to convince its "public" that a developer-focused approach is the best way to go. But none of the companies I've talked to are dumb enough to try and re-engineer their entire organisations' IT infrastructures top-down in some kind of elephantine SOA engineering folly. Hell, *any* big-bang infrastructure reengineering project generally falls on its backside: unless you're in a privileged position and are able to build a new company from the ground up you have to take a stepwise approach, justifying the business value of incremental investments as you go. That's the same for SOA as anything else. But the truth is, you need an approach that puts the right tools into the hands of developers as well as the right infrastructure (among many other things) - SOA success can't be reduced to a question of "developers first" or "infrastructure first". posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 5:31 PM 0 comments permalink

Why feeds and speeds matter

I confess to being a bit turned off by functional discussions about the latest and greatest storage, server and networking technologies. It doesn’t help that they all look the same. No amount of chrome can disguise the fact that most rack-mounted equipment is about as interesting to look at as a row of shoeboxes: unfortunately, no vendor has yet taken me up on the idea of having the front panel LED’s performing a Mexican wave effect, up and down the data centre. Things don’t get much better inside the box: what used to be two ‘whatevers’ became four, then eight… thanks to Mr Moore no doubt, we can only think in doubles.

While it is important to vendors to keep up appearances and leap frog the competition, there are very few applications that can take full advantage of such jumps. In some environments, every CPU cycle matters and latency is the enemy of business value – highly transactional applications which don’t involve a high degree of human touch such as trading and payment processing systems (indeed, anything to do with money) for example, or scientific apps for manufacturing, automated testing and so on. In more mundane areas, such as inventory and line of business automation applications, the need for speed tends to be tempered by user interaction – we talk about negotiating response times in seconds, rather than sub-seconds.

All the same, it would be a mistake to think that hardware performance improvements are solely to the benefit of highly transactional areas of the business, nor should we think solely in terms of making or saving money. As the industry continues to focus on the joint booms of compliance and IT security, attention is turning to the underlying theme of both: that of managing risk. I was recently speaking to the CIO of a payment processing company, who told me that his organisation placed as much store on offering a guaranteed service to its customers, as it did on ensuring that the service was cost-effective. Not only did this mean that the company had redundancy built into every layer of its infrastructure; also, when it processed a batch of payments or transmitted them to its banking partner, it wanted to be sure that the process took the minimal time possible. The faster the processing, the less likely it was to fail.

More recently still, I was chatting to Craig Stouffer who is VP of worldwide marketing at Silver Peak, a vendor of wide-area network (WAN) optimisation appliances. In layman’s terms, these boxes sit at either end of a communications link, looking for opportunities to speed up the traffic through a combination of compression and packet-level caching of repeated data streams. One of the most interesting customer examples he gave, I thought, was how one customer had reduced its backup window from tens of hours to a matter of minutes.

I’m not interested in promoting the Silver Peak technology, particularly as I haven’t tried it (nor am I likely to, unless I set up a WAN test bed in my garage) and they are not the only vendor in this space, competing with companies such as Juniper (their throughput may be smaller, says Mike Banic, director of product management at Juniper, but they can offer global support, often important in a WAN situation). However, I do know that many organisations are still struggling with backups, with the resulting increase in business risk – not IT risk – caused by the potential for data loss. One of the causes is that the backup window issue is still an unsolved problem for many. As new technologies such as these come on stream, they offer opportunities to solve such problems and reduce the level of risk faced by the business.

The caveat of course, is that such technologies cannot be considered in isolation but as part of the overall IT architecture (for example, how well do Silver Peak or Juniper cope with the recovery window, post data loss?); equally, risk cannot be managed successfully in any term without best practice processes for risk management. All the same, if better, faster technologies enable the mitigation of risks that would previously have been impractical to mitigate, that is reason in itself to look at them. posted by Anonymous @ 6:04 PM 0 comments permalink

The OASIS SOA Reference Model: not just for propeller-heads

posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 9:15 PM 0 comments permalink

New podcast episode: On SOA Governance

We recorded this material at the tail end of our previous discussion on Web 2.0 and the "uncompany", but given the length of the conversation we felt it would be kinder to listeners if we split it into two pieces!

So here's the second piece of Neil M and Neil WD's discussion, focusing on some thoughts we've had on SOA Governance following conversations we've had with both vendors and enterprises on the issue. We also talk about some of the SOA Governance-related M&A that's been going on recently and what it means.

This episode is 30'47" long. At 6'50" you'll also be treated to the sound of building work in the background!

As usual, go straight to the audio - or subscribe... posted by Neil Ward-Dutton @ 12:23 PM 0 comments permalink