OCDQ Blog

Books,

Big Data,

HP,

Saturday, December 29, 2012 at 3:00PM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Since just before Christmas I posted An Enterprise Carol, I decided just before New Year’s to post An Enterprise Resolution.

In her article The Irrational Allure of the Next Big Thing, Karla Starr examined why people value potential over achievement in books, sports, and politics. However, her findings apply equally well to technology and the enterprise’s relationship with IT.

“Subjectivity and hype,” Starr explained, “make people particularly prone to falling for Next Best Thing-ism.”

“Our collective willingness to jump on the bandwagon,” Starr continued, “seems at odds with one of psychology’s most robust findings: We are averse to uncertainty. But as it turns out, our reaction to incomplete information depends on our interpretation of the scant data we do have. Uncertainty is a sort of amplifier, intensifying our response whether it’s positive or negative. As long as we react positively to the little information shown, we’re actually attracted to uncertainty. It’s curiosity rather than knowledge that leads to increased cognitive engagement. If the only information at hand is positive, your mind is going to fill in the gaps with other positive details. A whiff of positive information is all we need to set our minds aflutter.”

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explained “when people are favorably disposed toward a technology, they rate it as offering large benefits and imposing little risk; when they dislike a technology, they can think only of its disadvantages, and few advantages come to mind. People who receive a message extolling the benefits of a technology also change their beliefs about its risks. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, bad technologies have no benefits, and all decisions are easy. In the real world of course, we often face painful tradeoffs between benefits and costs.”

In his book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly explained that technology has a social dimension beyond the mere functionality it provides. “We adopt new technologies largely because of what they do for us, but also in part because of what they mean to us. Often we refuse to adopt technology for the same reason: because of how the avoidance reinforces or shapes our identity.”

So, in 2013, as the big data hype cycle comes down from the peak of inflated expectations, as the painful tradeoffs between the benefits and costs of cloud computing are faced, and as IT consumerization continues to reshape the identity of the IT function, let’s make an enterprise resolution to deal with these realities before we go off chasing the next best thing. Happy New Year!

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

An Enterprise Carol

The Diffusion of the Consumerization of IT

Serving IT with a Side of Hash Browns

The Cloud is shifting our Center of Gravity

Sometimes all you Need is a Hammer

More Tethered by the Untethered Enterprise?

The Return of the Dumb Terminal

Magic Elephants, Data Psychics, and Invisible Gorillas

Big Data el Memorioso

Information Overload Revisited

The Limitations of Historical Analysis

OCDQ Radio - The Evolution of Enterprise Security

Enterprise Security and Social Engineering

Can the Enterprise really be Secured?

Thursday

Dec202012

Big Data is not just for Big Businesses

Books,

Social Media,

Big Data,

IBM for Midsize Business,

IT,

Mobile

Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 1:00PM

“It is widely assumed that big data, which imbues a sense of grandiosity, is only for those large enterprises with enormous amounts of data and the dedicated IT staff to tackle it,” opens the recent article Big data: Why it matters to the midmarket.

Much of the noise generated these days about the big business potential of big data certainly seems to contain very little signal directed at small and midsize businesses. Although it’s true that big businesses generate more data, faster, and in more varieties, a considerable amount of big data is externally generated, much of which is freely available for use by businesses of all sizes.

The easiest example is the poster child for leveraging big data — Google Search. But there’s also a growing number of open data sources (e.g., weather data) and social data sources (e.g., Twitter), and, since more of the world is becoming directly digitized, more businesses are now using more data no matter how big they are. Additionally, as Phil Simon wrote about in The New Small, the free and open source software, as-a-service, cloud, mobile, and social technology trends driving the consumerization of IT are enabling small and midsize businesses to, among other things, use more data and be more competitive with big businesses.

“Each minute of every day, information is produced about the activities of your business, your customers, and your industry,” explained Sarita Harbour in her recent blog post Harnessing Big Data: Giving Midsize Business a Competitive Edge. “Hidden within this enormous amount of data are trends, patterns, and indicators that, if extracted and identified, can yield important information to make your business more efficient and more competitive, and ultimately, it can make you more money.”

However, the biggest driver of the misperception about big data is its over-identification with data volume. Which is why earlier this year in his blog post It’s time for a new definition of big data, Robert Hillard used several examples to explain that big data refers more to big complexity than big volume. While acknowledging that complex datasets tend to grow rapidly, thus making big data voluminous, his wonderfully pithy conclusion was that “big data can be very small and not all large datasets are big.”

Therefore, by extension we could say that the businesses using big data can be small, or mid-sized, and not all the businesses using big data are big. But, of course, that’s not quite pithy enough. So let’s simply say that big data is not just for big businesses.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Will Big Data be Blinded by Data Science?

Big Data Lessons from Orbitz

The Graystone Effects of Big Data

Word of Mouth has become Word of Data

Information Asymmetry versus Empowered Customers

Talking Business about the Weather

Magic Elephants, Data Psychics, and Invisible Gorillas

Open MIKE Podcast — Episode 05: Defining Big Data

Open MIKE Podcast — Episode 06: Getting to Know NoSQL

OCDQ Radio - Data Quality and Big Data

HoardaBytes and the Big Data Lebowski

Sometimes it’s Okay to be Shallow

How Predictable Are You?

The Wisdom of Crowds, Friends, and Experts

Exercise Better Data Management

A Tale of Two Datas

Darth Vader, Big Data, and Predictive Analytics

The Big Data Theory

Data Management: The Next Generation

Big Data: Structure and Quality

Tuesday

Dec182012

An Enterprise Carol

Data Quality,

Big Data,

Data Governance,

Data Security,

HP,

IT,

Mobile

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Since ‘tis the season for reflecting on the past year and predicting the year ahead, while pondering this post my mind wandered to the reflections and predictions provided by the ghosts of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. So, I decided to let the spirit of Jacob Marley revisit my previous Enterprise CIO Forum posts to bring you the Ghosts of Enterprise Past, Present, and Future.

The Ghost of Enterprise Past

Legacy applications have a way of haunting the enterprise long after they should have been sunset. The reason that most of them do not go gentle into that good night, but instead rage against the dying of their light, is some users continue using some of the functionality they provide, as well as the data trapped in those applications, to support the enterprise’s daily business activities.

This freaky feature fracture (i.e., technology supporting business needs being splintered across new and legacy applications) leaves many IT departments overburdened with maintaining a lot of technology and data that’s not being used all that much.

The Ghost of Enterprise Past warns us that IT can’t enable the enterprise’s future if it’s stuck still supporting its past.

The Ghost of Enterprise Present

While IT was busy battling the Ghost of Enterprise Past, a familiar, but fainter, specter suddenly became empowered by the diffusion of the consumerization of IT. The rapid ascent of the cloud and mobility, spirited by service-oriented solutions that were more focused on the user experience, promised to quickly deliver only the functionality required right now to support the speed and agility requirements driving the enterprise’s business needs in the present moment.

Gifted by this New Prometheus, Shadow IT emerged from the shadows as the Ghost of Enterprise Present, with business-driven and decentralized IT solutions becoming more commonplace, as well as begrudgingly accepted by IT leaders.

All of which creates quite the IT Conundrum, forming yet another front in the war against Business-IT collaboration. Although, in the short-term, the consumerization of IT usually better services the technology needs of the enterprise, in the long-term, if it’s not integrated into a cohesive strategy, it creates a complex web of IT that entangles the enterprise much more than it enables it.

And with the enterprise becoming much more of a conceptual, rather than a physical, entity due to the cloud and mobile devices enabling us to take the enterprise with us wherever we go, the evolution of enterprise security is now facing far more daunting challenges than the external security threats we focused on in the past. This more open business environment is here to stay, and it requires a modern data security model, despite the fact that such a model could become the weakest link in enterprise security.

The Ghost of Enterprise Present asks many questions, but none more frightening than: Can the enterprise really be secured?

The Ghost of Enterprise Future

Of course, the T in IT wasn’t the only apparition previously invisible outside of the IT department to recently break through the veil in a big way. The I in IT had its own coming-out party this year also since, as many predicted, 2012 was the year of Big Data.

Although neither the I nor the T is magic, instead of sugar plums, Data Psychics and Magic Elephants appear to be dancing in everyone’s heads this holiday season. In other words, the predictive power of big data and the technological wizardry of Hadoop (as well as other NoSQL techniques) seem to be on the wish list of every enterprise for the foreseeable future.

However, despite its unquestionable potential, as its hype starts to settle down, the sobering realities of big data analytics will begin to sink in. Data’s value comes from data’s usefulness. If all we do is hoard data, then we’ll become so lost in the details that we’ll be unable to connect enough of the dots to discover meaningful patterns and convert big data into useful information that enables the enterprise to take action, make better decisions, or otherwise support its business activities.

Big data will force us to revisit information overload as we are occasionally confronted with the limitations of historical analysis, and blindsided by how our biases and preconceptions could silence the signal and amplify the noise, which will also force us to realize that data quality still matters in big data and that bigger data needs better data management.

As the Ghost of Enterprise Future, big data may haunt us with more questions than the many answers it will no doubt provide.

“Bah, Humbug!”

I realize that this post lacks the happy ending of A Christmas Carol. To paraphrase Dickens, I endeavored in this ghostly little post to raise the ghosts of a few ideas, not to put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, or with the season, but simply to give them thoughts to consider about how to keep the Enterprise well in the new year. Happy Holidays Everyone!

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

The Diffusion of the Consumerization of IT

The Cloud is shifting our Center of Gravity

More Tethered by the Untethered Enterprise?

Sometimes all you Need is a Hammer

OCDQ Radio - The Evolution of Enterprise Security

The Cloud Security Paradox

The Good, the Bad, and the Secure

The Weakest Link in Enterprise Security

Can the Enterprise really be Secured?

Magic Elephants, Data Psychics, and Invisible Gorillas

Big Data el Memorioso

Information Overload Revisited

The Limitations of Historical Analysis

Thursday

Aug092012

Balancing the IT Budget

HP,

Thursday, August 9, 2012 at 9:00PM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

While checking out the new Knowledge Vaults on the Enterprise CIO Forum, I came across the Genefa Murphy blog post How IT Debt is Crippling the Enterprise, which included three recommendations for alleviating some of that crippling IT debt.

The first recommendation was application retirement. As I have previously blogged, applications become retirement-resistant because applications and data have historically been so tightly coupled, making most of what are referred to as data silos actually application silos. Therefore, in order to help de-cripple IT debt, organizations need to de-couple applications and data, not only by allowing more data to float up into the cloud, but also, as Murphy noted, instituting better procedures for data archival, which helps more easily identify applications for retirement that have become merely containers for unused data.

The second recommendation was cutting the IT backlog. “One of the main reasons for IT debt,” Murphy explained, “is the fact that the enterprise is always trying to keep up with the latest and greatest trends, technologies and changes.” I have previously blogged about this as The Diderot Effect of New Technology. By better identifying how up-to-date the IT backlog is, and how well — if at all — it still reflects current business needs, an organization can skip needless upgrades and enhancement requests, and not only eliminate some of the IT debt, but also better prioritize efforts so that IT functions as a business enabler.

The third recommendation was performing more architectural reviews, which, Murphy explained, “is less about getting rid of old debt and more about making sure new debt does not accumulate. Since IT teams don’t often have the time to do this (as they are concerned with getting a working solution to the customer ASAP), it is a good idea to have this as a parallel effort led by a technology or architectural review group outside of the project teams but still closely linked.”

Although it’s impossible to completely balance the IT budget, and IT debt doesn’t cause an overall budget deficit, reducing costs associated with business-enabling technology does increase the potential for a surplus of financial success for the enterprise.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

The Diffusion of the Consumerization of IT

Sometimes all you Need is a Hammer

The Return of the Dumb Terminal

The Cloud is shifting our Center of Gravity

Lightning Strikes the Cloud

The Cloud Security Paradox

The Good, the Bad, and the Secure

Thursday

May102012

The Diffusion of the Consumerization of IT

Serving IT with a Side of Hash Browns

HP,

Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 3:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

On a previous post about the consumerization of IT, Paul Calento commented: “Clearly, it’s time to move IT out of a discrete, defined department and out into the field, even more than already. Likewise, solutions used to power an organization need to do the same thing. Problem is, though, that it’s easy to say that embedding IT makes sense (it does), but there’s little experience with managing it (like reporting and measurement). Services integration is a goal, but cross-department, cross-business-unit integration remains a thorn in the side of many attempts.”

Embedding IT does make sense, and not only is it easier said than done, let alone done well, but part of the problem within many organizations is that IT became partially self-embedded within some business units while the IT department was resisting the consumerization of IT because they treated it like a fad and not an innovation. And now those business units are resisting the efforts of the redefined IT department because they fear losing the IT capabilities that consumerization has already given them.

This growing IT challenge brings to mind the Diffusion of Innovations theory developed by Everett Rogers for describing the five stages for the rate at which innovations (e.g., new ideas or technology trends) spread within cultures, such as organizations, starting with the Innovators and Early Adopters, progressing through the Early and Late Majority, and trailed by the Laggards.

A related concept called Crossing the Chasm was developed by Geoffrey Moore to describe the critical phenomenon occurring when enough of the Early Adopters have embraced the innovation so that the beginning of the Early Majority becomes an almost certainty even though mainstream adoption of the innovation is still far from guaranteed.

From my perspective, traditional IT departments are just now crossing the chasm of the diffusion of the consumerization of IT, and are conflicting with the business units that crossed the chasm long ago with their direct adoption of cloud computing, SaaS, and mobility solutions not provided by the IT department. This divergence caused by the IT department and some business units being on different sides of the chasm has damaged, and potentially irreparably, some aspects of the IT-Business partnership.

The longer the duration of this divergence, the more difficult it will be for an IT department, that has finally crossed the chasm, to redefine their role and remain relevant partners with those business units that, perhaps for the first time in the organization’s history, were ahead of the information technology adoption curve. Additionally, even the communication and collaboration across business units is negatively affected by different business units crossing the IT consumerization chasm at different times, which often, as Paul Calento noted, complicates the organization’s attempts to integrate cross-business-unit IT services.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Monday

Mar262012

Serving IT with a Side of Hash Browns

HP,

Monday, March 26, 2012 at 5:00PM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Since it’s where I started my career, I often ponder what it would be like to work in the IT department today. This morning, instead of sitting in a cubicle with no window view other than the one Bill Gates gave us, I’m sitting in a booth by a real window, albeit one with a partially obstructed view of the parking lot, at a diner eating a two-egg omelette with a side of hash browns.

But nowadays, it’s possible that I’m still sitting amongst my fellow IT workers. Perhaps the older gentleman to my left is verifying last night’s database load using his laptop. Maybe the younger woman to my right is talking into her Bluetooth earpiece with a business analyst working on an ad hoc report. And the couple in the corner could be struggling to understand the technology requirements of the C-level executive they’re meeting with, who’s now vocalizing his displeasure about sitting in the high chair.

It’s possible that everyone thinks I am updating the status of an IT support ticket on my tablet based on the mobile text alert I just received. Of course, it’s also possible that all of us are just eating breakfast while I’m also writing this blog post about IT.

However, as Joel Dobbs recently blogged, the IT times are a-changin’ — and faster than ever before since, thanks to the two-egg IT omelette of mobile technologies and cloud providers, IT no longer only happens in the IT department. IT is everywhere now.

“There is a tendency to compartmentalize various types of IT,” Bruce Guptill recently blogged, “in order to make them more understandable and conform to budgeting practices. But the core concept/theme/result of mobility really is ubiquity of IT — the same technology, services, and capabilities regardless of user and asset location.”

Regardless of how much you have embraced the consumerization of IT, some of your IT happens outside of your IT department, and some IT tasks are performed by people who not only don’t work in IT, but possibly don’t even work for your organization.

“While systems integration was once the big concern,” Judy Redman recently blogged, “today’s CIOs need to look to services integration. Companies today need to obtain services from multiple vendors so that they can get best-of-breed solutions, cost efficiencies, and the flexibility needed to meet ever-changing and ever-more-demanding business needs.”

With its increasingly service-oriented and ubiquitous nature, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that in the near future of IT, the patrons of a Wi-Fi-enabled diner could be your organization’s new IT department, serving your IT with a side of hash browns.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

The Cloud Security Paradox

Tuesday

Oct112011

Shadow IT and the New Prometheus

The Good, the Bad, and the Secure

HP,

Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Over twenty-five years ago, business-enabling information technology was still in its nascent phase. The Internet was still coming of age and the World Wide Web didn’t exist yet. The personal computer revolution had only recently started and it was still far from going mainstream. And the few mobile phones that existed back then were simply phones—not mini-supercomputers.

Back in those dark ages, most organizations had a centralized IT department, which selected, implemented, and controlled the technology used to support business activities. Since information technology was a brave new world and the organization was so dependent on its magic (Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”), the IT department was allowed to dictate that everyone used the same type of computer, loaded with the same standard applications, which provided, for the most part, the same general information technology solution for a myriad of business problems.

Shadow IT was the term used to describe business-driven information technology solutions not under the jurisdiction of IT, and thus operated in the shadows by business users who had to carefully conceal their use of non-IT-sanctioned technology.

Returning to the light of the present day, it’s difficult to imagine life—both personal and professional—without the Internet and the World Wide Web, personal computers, and the growing prevalence of smart phones, tablet PCs, and other mobile devices.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to us mere mortals. And once humans could command fire, we combined it with our use of other enabling tools, thus learning that we were capable of taking control of our own destiny.

The consumer-driven trends of cloud computing, SaaS, and mobility are the New Prometheus stealing the fire of technology from the IT department and giving it directly to business users, thus enabling them to take control of their own IT destiny.

The consumerization of IT has demystified business-enabling information technology. The fire stolen by the New Prometheus is allowing business-driven, business-function-specific, and decentralized IT solutions to finally step out of the shadows.

Although IT Delivery remains a strategic discipline for the organization, the tactical and operational execution of that strategy needs to be decentralized and embedded within the business functions of the organization. Communication and collaboration are more important than ever, but the centralization and generalization of information technology is a thing of the past.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Securing your Digital Fortress

Tuesday

Aug092011

The Diderot Effect of New Technology

Best of 2011,

HP,

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

In his essay Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown, the 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot described what is now referred to as the Diderot Effect.

After Diderot was given the gift of an elegant scarlet robe, he not only parted with his old dressing gown, but he also realized that his new robe clashed with his scruffy old study. Therefore, he started replacing more and more of his study. First, he replaced his old desk, then he replaced the tapestry, and eventually he replaced all of the furniture until the elegance of his study matched the elegance of his new robe.

I have recently fallen prey to what I refer to as the Diderot Effect of New Technology.

Regrets on Parting with My Old Laptop Computer

A few months ago, after finally succumbing to the not-so-subtle pressure from my friend, fellow technology writer, and Mac guy, Phil Simon, I purchased a MacBook Air.

Now, of course, there was absolutely nothing wrong with my three-year-old Dell Latitude laptop computer. It provided a sufficient amount of memory, speed, and storage. Its applications for writing and blogging, web browsing and social networking, as well as audio and video editing were productively supporting my daily business activities. Additionally, all of my peripherals (printer/scanner, flat screen monitor, microphone, speakers) were also getting their jobs done quite nicely, thank you very much.

However, as soon as the elegant, but not scarlet, MacBook Air was introduced into my scruffy old home office, the Diderot Effect began, well, affecting my perception of the technology that I was using on a daily basis.

Initially, I continued to use my Dell for my daily business activities, and dedicated only a small amount of work time to becoming accustomed to using my new MacBook. (I had once been an Apple affectionado, but it had been 10 years since I owned a Mac).

But it didn’t take long before I would have to describe myself as, to paraphrase the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, inebriate of MacBook Air am I.

(For the less poetically-minded reader, that’s just a fancy way of saying that I became addicted to using my new MacBook Air.)

So, much like Diderot before me, I have begun replacing more and more of my home office. The only difference being that I am trying to match the elegance (and, yes, of course, also the powerful and easy-to-use functionality) of my new technology.

The Diderot Effect of New Technology

The consumerization of IT has become a significant contributing factor to the increasingly rapid pace at which new technology is introduced into the enterprise. These elegant modern applications seemingly clash with our scruffy old legacy applications, and can evoke a desire to start replacing more and more of the organization’s technology.

However, donning the scarlet robes of new technology can become an expensive endeavor. (The subtitle of Diderot’s essay was “a warning to those who have more taste than fortune.”) Genefa Murphy has blogged that “one of the main reasons for IT debt is the fact that the enterprise is always trying to keep up with the latest and greatest trends, technologies, and changes.”

“In our race to remain competitive,” Murphy concluded, “we have in essence become addicted to the latest and greatest technologies. We need to acknowledge we have a problem before we can take action to rectify it.”

Diderot was able to both acknowledge and take action to rectify his addiction. “Don’t fear that the mad desire to stock up on beautiful things has taken control of me,” he reassures us at the conclusion of his essay.

Hopefully, the mad desire to stock up on new technological things hasn’t taken control of either you or your organization.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Thursday

Jul282011

The IT Consumerization Conundrum

HP,

Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

The consumerization of IT is a disruptive force that many organizations are struggling to come to terms with, especially their IT departments. As R "Ray" Wang recently blogged about this challenge, “technologies available to consumers at low cost, or even for free, are increasingly pushing aside enterprise applications. For IT leaders accustomed to having control over corporate technology, this represents a huge challenge — and it’s one they’re not meeting very well.”

Speed and agility are the most common business drivers for implementing new technology. The consumer technology trifecta of cloud computing, SaaS, and mobility has enabled business users to directly purchase off-premises applications that quickly provide only the features they currently need. Meanwhile, on-premises applications, although feature-rich, become user-poor because of their slower time to implement, and less-than-agile reputation for dealing with change requests and customizations.

However, the organization still relies on some of the functionality, and especially the data, provided by legacy applications, which IT is required to continue to support. IT is also responsible for assisting the organization with any technology challenges encountered when using modern applications. This feature fracture (i.e., the technology supporting business needs being splintered across legacy and modern applications) often leaves IT departments overburdened, and causes them to battle against the disruptive force of business-driven consumer technology.

“IT and business leaders need to work together and operate in parallel,” Wang concludes. “If IT slows down the business capability to innovate, then the company will suffer as new business models emerge and infrastructure will fail to keep up. If business moves ahead of IT in technology, then the company fails because IT will spend years cleaning up technology messes.”

This is the IT Consumerization Conundrum. Although, in the short-term, it usually better services the technology needs of the organization, in the long-term, if it’s not properly managed and integrated into the IT Delivery strategy of the organization, then it can create a complex web of technology that entangles the organization much more than it enables it.

Or to borrow the words of Ralph Loura, it can “cause technology to become a business disabler instead of a business enabler.”

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Tuesday

Jun072011

The IT Prime Directive of Business First Contact

HP,

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Every enterprise requires, as Ralph Loura explains, “end to end business insight to generate competitive advantage, and it’s hard to gain insight if the business is arms length away from the data and the systems and the processes that support business insight.”

Loura explains that one of the historical challenges with technology has been that most IT systems have traditionally taken years to deploy and are supported on timelines and lifecycles that are inconsistent with the dynamic business needs of the organization, which has, in some cases, caused technology to become a business disabler instead of a business enabler.

The change-averse nature of most legacy applications is the antithesis of the agile nature of most modern applications.

“It wasn’t too long ago,” explains John Dodge, “when speed didn’t matter, or was considered an enemy of a carefully laid out IT strategy based largely on lowest cost.” However, speed and agility are now “a competitive imperative. You have to be fast in today’s marketplace and no department feels the heat more than IT, according to the Enterprise CIO Forum Council members.”

“If you think in terms of speed and the dynamic nature of business,” explains Joseph Spagnoletti, “clearly the organization couldn’t operate at that pace or make the necessary changes without IT woven very deeply into the work that the business does.”

Spagnoletti believes that cloud computing, mobility, and analytics are the three technology enablers for the timely delivery of the information that the organization requires to support its constantly evolving business needs.

“Embedding IT into an organization optimizes a business’s competitive edge,” explains Bill Laberis, “because it empowers the people right at the front lines of the enterprise to make better, faster and more informed decisions — right at the point of contact with customers, partners and clients.”

Historically, IT had a technology-first mindset. However, the new IT prime directive must become business first contact, embedding advanced technology right at the point of contact with the organization’s business needs, enabling the enterprise to continue its mission to explore new business opportunities with the agility to boldly go where no competitor has gone before.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Thursday

May262011

A Sadie Hawkins Dance of Business Transformation

HP,

Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

In the United States, a Sadie Hawkins Dance is a school-sponsored semi-formal dance, in which, contrary to the usual custom, female students invite male students. In the world of information technology (IT), a Sadie Hawkins Dance is an enterprise-wide initiative, in which, contrary to the usual custom, a strategic business transformation is driven by IT.

Although IT-driven business transformation might seem like an oxymoron, the reality is a centralized IT department is one of the few organizational functions that regularly interacts with the entire enterprise. Therefore, IT is strategically positioned to influence enterprise-wide business transformation—and CIOs might be able to take a business leadership role in those activities.

Wayne Shurts, the CIO of Supervalu, recently discussed how CIOs can make the transition to business leader by “approaching things from a business point of view, as opposed to a technology point of view. IT must become intensely business driven.”

One thing Shurts emphasized is necessary for this shift in the perception of the CIO is that other C-level executives must realize “technology can be transformative for the organization, especially since it is transforming the consumer behavior of customers.”

Business Transformation through IT

David Steiner and Puneet Bhasin, the CEO and CIO of Waste Management, recently recorded a great two-part video interview called Business Transformation through IT, which you can check out using the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Transcript

“From day one,” explained Steiner, “I knew that the one way we could transform our company was through technology.” Steiner then set out to find a CIO that could help him realize this vision of technology being transformative for the organization.

“If you’re going to be a true business partner,” explained Steiner, “which is what every CEO is looking for from their CIO, you have to go understand the business.” Steiner explained that one of the first things that Bhasin did after he was hired as CIO was go out into the field and live the life of a customer service rep, a driver, a dispatcher, and a route manager—so that before Bhasin tried to do anything with technology, he first sought to understand the business so that he could become a true business partner.

“So the best advice I could give to any CIO would be,” concluded Steiner, “be a business partner, not a technologist. Know the technology. You’ve got to know how to apply the technology. But be a business partner.”

“My advice to CEOs,” explained Bhasin, “would be look for a business person first and a technologist second. And make sure that your CIO is a part of the decision-making strategic body within the organization. If you are looking at IT purely as an area to reduce cost, that’s probably the wrong thing. To me the value of IT is certainly in the area of efficiencies and cost reduction. I think it has a huge role to play in that. But I think it has an even greater role to play in product design, and growing customers, and expanding segments, and driving profitability.”

John Dodge recently blogged that business transformation is the CIO’s responsibility and opportunity. Even though CIOs will eventually need their business partners to take the lead once they get out on the dance floor, CIOs may need to initiate things by inviting their business partners to A Sadie Hawkins Dance of Business Transformation.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Thursday

May122011

Are Applications the La Brea Tar Pits for Data?

HP,

Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

In a previous post, I explained application modernization must become the information technology (IT) prime directive in order for IT departments to satisfy the speed and agility business requirements of their organizations. An excellent point raised in the comments of that post was that continued access to legacy data is often a business driver for not sunsetting legacy applications.

“I find many legacy applications are kept alive in read-only mode, i.e., purely for occasional query/reporting purposes,” explained Beth Breidenbach. “Stated differently, the end users often just want to be able to look at the legacy data from time to time.”

Gordon Hamilton commented that data is often stuck in the “La Brea Tar Pits of legacy” applications. Even when the data is migrated during the implementation of a new application (its new tar pit, so to speak), the legacy data, as Breidenbach said, is often still accessed via the legacy application, which could be dangerous, as Hamilton noted, because the legacy data is diverging from the version migrated to the new application (i.e., after migration, the legacy data could be updated, or possibly deleted).

The actual La Brea Tar Pits were often covered with water, causing animals that came to drink to fall in and get stuck in the tar, thus preserving their fossils for centuries—much to the delight of future paleontologists and natural history museum enthusiasts.

Although they are often cited as the bane of data management, most data silos are actually application silos because historically data and applications have been so tightly coupled. Data is often covered with an application layer, causing users that enter, access, and use the data to get stuck with the functionality provided by its application, thus preserving their use of the application even after it has become outdated (i.e., legacy)—much to the dismay of IT departments and emerging technology enthusiasts.

When so tightly coupled with data, applications—not just legacy applications—truly can be the La Brea Tar Pits for data, since once data needed to support business activities gets stuck in an application, that application will stick around for a very long time.

If applications and data were not so tightly coupled, we could both modernize our applications and optimize our data usage in order to better satisfy the speed and agility business requirements of our organizations. Therefore, not only should we sunset our legacy applications, we should also approach data management with the mindset of decoupling our data from its applications.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Thursday

Apr282011

Why does the sun never set on legacy applications?

HP,

Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Most information technology (IT) departments split their time between implementing new and maintaining existing technology. On the software side, most of the focus is on applications supporting business processes. A new application is usually intended to replace an outdated (i.e., legacy) application. However, both will typically run in production until the new application is proven, after which the legacy application is obsolesced (i.e., no longer used) and sunset (i.e., no longer maintained, usually removed).

At least, in theory, that is how it is all supposed to work. However, in practice, legacy applications are rarely sunset. Why?

The simple reason most legacy applications do not go gentle into that good night, but instead rage against the dying of their light, is that some users continue using some of the functionality provided by the legacy application to support daily business activities.

Two of the biggest contributors to this IT conundrum are speed and agility—the most common business drivers for implementing new technology. Historically, IT has spent a significant part of their implementation time setting up application environments (i.e., development, test, and parallel production). For traditional enterprise solutions, this meant on-site hardware configuration, followed by software acquisition, installation, configuration, and customization. Therefore, a significant amount of time, effort, and money had to be expended before the development of the new application could even begin.

Legacy applications are typically the antithesis of agility, but they are typically good at doing what they have always done. Although this doesn’t satisfy all of the constantly evolving business needs of the organization, it is often easier to use the legacy application to support the less dynamic business needs, and try to focus new application development on new requirements.

Additionally, the consumerization of IT and the technology trifecta of Cloud, SaaS, and Mobility has both helped and hindered the legacy logjam, since a common characteristic of this new breed of off-premise applications is quickly providing only the features that users currently need, which is often in stark contrast to new on-premise applications that although feature-rich, often remain user-poor because of the slower time to implement—again failing the business requirements of speed and agility.

Therefore, although legacy applications are used less and less, since they continue to support some business needs, they are never sunset. This feature fracture (i.e., technology supporting business needs being splintered across new and legacy applications) often leaves IT departments overburdened with maintaining a lot of technology that is not being used all that much.

The white paper The Mandate to Modernize Aging Applications is a good resource for information about this complex challenge and explains why application modernization must become the enterprise’s information technology prime directive.

IT can not enable the enterprise’s future if they are stuck still supporting its past. If the sun never sets on legacy applications, then a foreboding darkness may fall and the number of successful new days dawning for the organization may quickly dwindle.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

Thursday

Apr142011

The Partly Cloudy CIO

HP,

Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 11:00AM

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.

The increasing frequency with which the word cloud is mentioned during information technology (IT) discussions has some people believing that CIO now officially stands for Cloud Information Officer. At the very least, CIOs are being frequently asked about their organization’s cloud strategy. However, as John Dodge has blogged, when it comes to the cloud, many organizations and industries still appear to be somewhere between FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) and HEF (hype, enthusiasm, and fright).

Information Technology’s Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Information Technology’s Hierarchy of Needs

Joel Dobbs describes IT’s hierarchy of needs (conceptually similar to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) as a pyramid with basic operational needs at the bottom, short-term tactical needs in the middle, and long-term strategic needs at the top.

Dobbs explains that cloud computing (and outsourcing) is an option that organizations should consider for some of their basic operational and short-term tactical needs in order to free up internal IT resources to support the strategic goals of the enterprise.

Since cost, simplicity, speed, and agility are common business drivers for cloud-based solutions, this approach alleviates some of the bottlenecks caused by rigid, centralized IT departments, allowing them to cede control over less business-critical applications, and focuses them on servicing the unique needs of the organization that require their internal expertise and in-house oversight.

The Partly Cloudy CIO

The white paper Get Your Head in the Cloud is a good resource for information about the various cloud options facing CIOs and distinguishes among the choices based on specific business requirements. The emphasis should always be on technology-aware, business-driven IT solutions, which means selecting the technology option that best satisfies a particular business need — and data security is one obvious example of the technology awareness needed during the evaluation of cloud-based solutions.

Although no one is advising an all-or-nothing cloud strategy, cloud computing is becoming a critical component of IT Delivery. With hybrid solutions becoming more common, the forecast for the foreseeable future is calling for the Partly Cloudy CIO.

This blog post is sponsored by the Enterprise CIO Forum and HP.