BankerVision

The last Windows ever

As many of you know, we've recently done a deal with Fujitstu to refresh our desktop estate. We're going to have the latest Office, the latest Windows, and all of it will be delivered via the network to clever thin client terminals or thin spec notebooks. Considering we're presently struggling along with XP, this will be a bit of a leap from where we are presently. 

I 'd imagine we'll have this new environment - or an incremental iteration of it - for maybe a decade. Perhaps a bit more. It takes that long for a desktop operating environment to get so long in the tooth that no matter what you do you can't keep it going any longer. And we'll keep it that long because the costs of getting a working desktop in the first place are so absurdly high that doing anything else is completely irresponsible.

Personally, I think it likely this is  the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys, though. 

The reason? I think they'll be fewer workloads that actually require a heavy deskop stack. Today, of course, we have all this legacy that's coupled to the desktop, but in a decade, I really doubt that will be the case. Most stuff will arrive via the browser.

Furthermore, its not impossible to imagine that they'll be ubiquitous wirless networking everywhere, even those difficult places outreach workers sometimes have to go. So we won't need a heavy desktop stack in order to make sure offline works.

And, in a decade, our security colleagues will no doubt have found clever ways to let us do all this without the fortress stuff they presently require of us.

Can you really imagine we'd need much more than a tablet-like device in such an enviornment? I can't.

Oh, I know there'll still be some occasions you'll need everything local, maybe developing apps for example, but by far the greatest marjority of our workers won't need that stuff.

The real question, I think, is what Microsoft will do to restore the value of Windows. In the past, their strategy has been to shift the operating system up the value chain, taking more specialised functionality from apps and embedding it in the base platform. They did that with Internet Explorer, for example. With messaging queueing and transaction services, and a whole pile of other things that were once separate apps.

That's obviously over because most of the action is now happening in the datacentre (or the cloud). 

From a strategic point of view, if you're designing the future technology estate of a large organisation, that last thing it makes sense to do in this kind of context is build stuff that depends on a desktop stack. Furthermore, decoupling legacy from the desktop stack also has to be on the agenda, because you just can't count on that stack being relevent in 10 years time.  

It feels funny, doesn't it, thinking about Windows in the context of it being irrelevent, after all these years we've relied on it. I guess it proves, again, that change is the only constant.

Using people as glue

Sometimes, you're in a meeting, and the technical people will say that they have to do huge amounts of integration to get X old system to work with Y new one. The integration, because it involves your old stuff, will be expensive and time consuming. You sigh and wonder how you are ever going to get out of the legacy trap.

You know that, even if you mandate a new systems approach, you're always going to have to spend piles of money doing legacy integration, because that's where the data is. It is data on which the business relies, so it has to be available, and, obviously, the job of moving it all, and the business rules and all the rest, to a new system in one go is far to large and politcally charged.

And then, you wake up one morning and realise on top of everything, you have the "die or retire problem". Everyone who knows the guts of legacy is either dead or about to retire.

You have to do something about legacy, so you sigh, and sign up for truck loads of integration anyway.

it occurs to me, though, that there are solutions to this problem which don't involve piles of expensive technology work. What about, for example, using people as glue? Why can't they look up data in both systems and perform appropriate updates?

The thing is, technologists have spent decades trying to systematise and automate everything. The idea that you'd de-automate is an anathema. "What about error!" they cry whenever you suggest it. "What about security!, How about our data quality, how about... how about... and how about...!".

There are obviously lots of objections to putting people back into a system but they all miss the major point: if you are time constrained, and you need to get something out the door right now you can get almost any system up and running instantaneously with paper and people.

That is certainly true when you have the die-or-retire thing to deal with.

As far as I can see, the only time this absolutely won't work is in those circumstances when a process is entirely automated from end to end with no people in it at all. Like, for example, an ATM transaction or a web purchase online. But whenever you have people intermediating the machine for other people, you can use people as glue.

Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone put people back into systems permanently. But as temporary, good enough, solution while something better is worked out, surely it makes sense to at least consider the option.

Does the computer experience have to be awful in the workplace?

Its been a few years now that people have been talking about “consumerisation”, which is the idea that you can want and expect the same kind of computing experiences at work as you get at home.

But, as everyone who works in a large company knows, you never get such an experience at work. Everything is a few versions behind, and even when it’s up to date, it all works so slowly. This, in part, is because of all the management, and security, and monitoring, and stuff that IT people feel they have to do to protect their assets.

What are the key changes IT organisations would have to make if they really wanted to deliver a decent consumer computing experience?

1. They’d need to stop imagining that their staff are stupid. I’m always so surprised when I go into meetings and discover the IT people somehow believe that staff forget how to use the web, Google, and standard productivity tools the moment they walk in the door. Is there an idiot-line drawn on the floor by the entrance, and your IQ drops as you cross it? I don’t think so.

2. IT organisations need to stop thinking that the lowest common denominator is the place to aim their technological aspirations. It may be the case that a small minority of staff can’t progress beyond the green-screen, but frankly that’s not a good enough reason to lose the benefits of the modern stuff.

3. IT managers need to accept they don’t have to control everything. It isn’t, for example, necessary to lock down computers to the degree where you can’t even access the screensaver. Why do we do that stuff anyway? Because we think it reduces our support costs and increases reliability. All it does really is make sure that you have to call the helpdesk for everything, even if you know how to fix a problem yourself.

4. IT can’t only be about cost. I am so exhausted by the amount of effort we go to reduce cost. I mean, I’m not advocating that everyone should just go and spend anything they like on shiny gadgets, but really, this laser sharp focus on cost containment prevents you from moving things forward at a decent pace. IT is an asset, a strategic enabler. Do you ask a starving athlete to run faster and longer with less food? Not really.

5. Standardisation may make things easier to manage, but it is also a way to shackle your best people to the lowest common denominator. I suppose that’s OK if you work in an organisation where keeping talent isn’t a key differentiator.  But I don’t know many organisations that have that view and keep on living long.

6. IT needs to give up on the idea that the most important thing is reliability, scalability and security. Those are important things. But if you want a decent computing experience, they are secondary to making the job at hand as easy as possible. Secondary. Our IT experiences are terrible at work because we’ve all forgotten this.

7. People are on their computer for at least a third of their day. I, personally, am on mine for 12 hours a day. I therefore cannot tolerate shoddy equipment that doesn’t do exactly what I need perfectly all the time. When you have to deal with little frustrations 100 times a day, they’re not little any more. They become big and central parts of your life. Personally, I don’t need technological niggles to be the thing I talk about when I finally get off the computer. Dinner conversation: “yes, I made two cups of tea whilst waiting to boot this morning. Then I made two more at lunchtime when the net was slow. And then I had another one waiting to log out. So don’t bother to offer me more tea with desert”.

8. Internet access is not a privilege. Social network access is not something that will suck up otherwise productive work time. Doing social media is not only a home-time activity. Wake up.

Actually, I could keep on going here for ages, but I think you get the point. Those of us who are IT leaders really need to move where the rest of the world is already, and create great computing experiences for staff. The time is coming where they’ll demand great experiences or they’ll leave. I know lots of traditionalists don’t believe that, but have a chat with the fresh talent and see what they think.

Frankly, things have moved. It isn’t about the IT folk and what makes it easy and cheap for us to manage the IT asset any more.

Fake Experts

It is possible that the most frustrating thing ever is to have to sit through meetings with people who have declared that they’re experts, and then discover that they aren’t.

Here are the top five categories of people I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks who fit this category:

1. Innovation experts who say they know lots about the subject, but then dish out standard stuff that wasn’t current a few years ago. They toss out key buzzwords like “open innovation” and “radical Innovation” and “stage gates” because they’re the words that come up when you Google innovation. I reserve a special level of irritation for those who quote the major thinkers like Clayton Christensen, and then misrepresent his theories as something else entirely.

2. Social media experts who say they know everything about online but don’t do online themselves. Double demerit points awarded those inside large organisations who are responsible for intranets and therefore think they know anything about how social media really works. Their own intranets should tell them they don’t.

3. Analyst gurus who have gone into management, and then are trotted out by account managers because they are “senior”. As you know, my view of analysts is pretty dismal most of the time, because you so rarely see anything original from them. Managers of analysts almost never have an original thought left in them, and they always refer to their past research as if it was what made them qualify as management.

4. Architecture thought leaders. Please do not trot out one more model, or one more rendition of TOGAF with a new colouring scheme. Or, worst of all, a “disruptive” new approach to architecture. It is all so, so tired.

5. Almost all vendor CTOs (thankfully, we have a good one or two at the Department, who at least try).  They are there to flog product. Period. Any thought leadership you get is driven entirely from the perspective of convincing you to make a purchase of some kind. Of course, vendor thought leadership is somewhat an oxymoron anyway. They are always about responding to what the market will buy, so they are pretty much forced into copying the thought leadership they find in the market. That’s why analysts are always reporting what decision makers think, rather than dreaming up new stuff themselves.

What could all these groups have done differently and made the meetings less annoying? To have made it a valuable discussion that created new opportunities?

They could have thought through the stuff they Googled, and used their highly paid brains to give some unique opinion or insight.

They could have said something unexpected, something we might not have dreamed up ourselves.

They could have brought their unique experiences to the table, and used them as a foil for whatever points they were making.

Or, maybe they could have used their networks to bring interesting people to the table that would have astounded us. People we have now way of accessing ourselves.

Instead, what we get is oxygen thievery of the first order. Sometimes, you open the door and the whoosh of air into the room is palpable.

Originality is a precious commodity. Its such a pity that you so rarely see it.

Five IT-Shop Sacred Cows

1. Myth: If you get more “efficient” at IT, you will get a more “efficient” organisation. Reality: The more cost you take out of IT, the worse it is for users and customers. Optimising your cost  base to the point, for example, where users have a PC that is orders of magnitude less capable than their delightful home consumer experience will just cause them to bring their own laptops to work. Then they’ll break all your security rules in order to use them. And what are you going to do about it? Fire them?

2. Myth: You must have IT security people who must approve everything you do in order to secure the organisation and manage your risk. Reality: Most Some IT security people don’t have much understanding of the new stuff they’re asked to adjudicate on. They just make it up as they go along. The worst ones can’t be bothered to keep up because it involves too much work, and anyway,  they always have the ability to just say “no”. This doesn’t manage your risk, all it does is slow you down.On the other hand, count your blessings if you have been lucky enough to get a security group that know how to show you what you can do to do new things safely and efficiently.

3. Myth: High quality on-time and on-budget delivery are the development objectives and this will make you an IT leader. Reality: Who cares about whether you’re an IT leader or not from a development perspective? Superb delivery is a waste of time if what you’re delivering is crap in the first place. Forgive me the arrogance, but my observation is that many traditionalists don’t get the way the new world is changing as a result of technology, so what makes you an IT leader is if you can help them understand that, actually, what they’re trying to build is rubbish.

4. Myth: Most IT projects fail or are late, so we have to improve our failure rate to be successful. Reality: Causing any change whatsoever to happen is a success, since everything is optimised around stopping change in an IT organisation. If improving the “success rate” means doing less new stuff, then you’ve got a big fail coming up when your organisation fails to adapt because IT stopped it doing so. All in the name of improvement.

5. Myth: Governance is the key to discipline and control in an IT organisation. Reality: Governance is like a virus. It grows as swiftly as possible to consume all available resources, and then declares success when there are no project failures. Usually, this will be because there are no projects, or at least, none that have much way of progressing. Why does this happen? Because Governance is a licence for people without much capability to drive change themselves to get in the way of those who can and declare that they’re “part of the journey”.  ‘Tis a rare Governance person who knows when not to govern.

What other sacred cows do you have in your IT-Shop?

How to Manage the Technologists - Little Innovation Book

The latest chapter is now available at the Little Innovation Book. The latest material covers the priorities of CIOs, and why IT organisations are so resistant to change. It also explains a few strategies innovators can use to help get things started when technology organisations are involved.

iPad isn’t a thrill yet, but will be.

Like so many other people I know, I spent some time last night watching the live blogging from the Apple iPad launch event. Also, like so many other people I know, I was somewhat disappointed with what I saw.

The device itself, of course, is magnificent. It looks beautiful, it obviously feels beautiful, and the price, well it is a amazing. At that price - $500 USD - I’d say everyone who makes netbooks is in trouble. That, in fact, is the place Apple are pitching the device anyway. As a middle-man thing between your mobile and your laptop experience.

However, the fact of the matter is that Apple’s big product thrills only start to show up when they do their innovating in spaces aligned to the device they are trying to sell. I mean, iPad is magnificent from an engineering perspective of course it is, but that doesn’t make it thrilling.

We were thrilled with iPod because of iTunes and the seamless way it moves music from artist to the ears.

We were thrilled with iPhone because Apple made the shift from putting everything they could dream up onto amdevice to making it simple to put functions everyone else could dream up on the device.

I was hoping to be thrilled with iPad because Apple would make another play to move the stuff everyone else does  onto a screen in another unique way. They didn’t, and even iBooks is just a rehash of what Amazon is already doing.

Ultimately, the iPad is beautiful, but it doesn’t enable anything new.

I knew I’d be disappointed because the fact of the matter is Apple almost never get around to thrilling us with new in a first release.

iPod was released first in 2001, but Apple didn’t add the iTunes store to sell music until two years later.

And the first version of the iPhone had no AppStore at all. It was in late 2008 that Apple added that, almost two years after the first iPhone came out. Now “there’s an app for that” for everything.

So its reasonable to conclude that Apple (who lets face it are masterful manipulators of all of us), have left their powder dry on the iPad. There will be thrilling new ways to get stuff others do on screens. They’re coming, but we won’t have them for, probably, two years.

Everyone who is disappointed because the iPad lacks some gizmo – like a camera or multitasking – is looking for engineering thrills that change the game. But engineering so rarely does. Its always adjustment of business models around the engineering that does that.

And Apple aren’t stupid. They know how to play us. The probably engineered the whole hype thing just to disappoint us. They know their big, game changing play will turn all this discussion around overnight.

Its not like Apple are hiding anything here, either, since they practically told us what they’re going to do during the announcement: “We want to be at the crossroads between technology and the liberal arts”, says Jobs. In other words, wherever talent lives, and whenever it can be rendered on a 10” screen, Apple is going to be your distribution partner and manage your relationship with your customer.

It is a very grand play. And its one that Apple have had some experience in: they did it already for musicians and programmers and studios.

So, in 12 to 18 months or so, when they announce (probably as a sidelight to something else) their game-changer, I am very confident we will all be thrilled.

Enterprise Architecture – the big catch up

Here is the problem with EA – it is never complete at the point instant when a project asks some question of it. I think that is true no matter how many architects you have or how good they are.

This is the third time I’ve been responsible for “Architecture”, and – no disrespect intended to architects, who aren’t the problem – it never seems to be in complete enough a state that it can answer the specific question a project needs answering at a specific time.

In an organisation that respects its architects – and I think that DWP is one – that means the projects ring up the architects to get advice. Which is all very well, of course, but since the architects are spending all their time trying to build their architecture out to the point  where projects need it to be going, they don’t have time to write all their advice down and add it to the architecture.

Of course, you could have an architecture team that builds things at such a high level that you get completeness simply because you’ve abstracted away all the detail altogether.

But I think that kind of defeats the purpose of having decent architects. You’re then into the realms of strategy, and lets face it, architects are supposed to be working out how to get to the endpoint that the strategy defines, not defining the end point itself.

Now I know that this set of statements will be like waving a red flag at a bull for some people. I don’t mean to cause offence, really I don’t.

But I have come to the conclusion that demand for architecture – at whatever level of detail – will always outstrip the supply of architects available. No matter how much money you spend.

Now, this presents a quandary, I think. On the one hand, if projects can’t get what they need from the architecture, I wonder what the point of having an architecture is at all. But on the other hand, the chaos that results from not having one at all seems pretty likely to have awful repercussions. I’m not certain anyone wants to go back to the days where people did exactly what they pleased, and dang the consequences.

Anyway, it would be impossible now that we have to do “service orientation” and “reuse” and “integration”.

But I can’t help but wonder if the real answer is to decentralise architecture in some way  - make it a more collaborative and participatory activity, one in which projects do a degree of self serving. Where, maybe, the architects are curators of the content, rather than the creators themselves.

I’m going to be talking to my teams about an interesting experiment I have in my mind along these lines over the next week or so. If we go ahead and try something new, I’ll write about it here.

In the meantime, does anyone else have experiences that are relevant? How did you get your architecture ahead of project’s demands for it?

The innovation economy

You should read this article that argues another phase change is occurring: from a knowledge economy to an Innovation economy. It’s suggesting that even when you have great structural capital (factories, assets, and all that stuff), great financial capital (money!) and great intellectual capital (knowledge and know-how) you will still not be a successful organisation.

Nothing really happens unless you also have innovation capital,  which are the assets you build up that let you do value creation.

Now, of course, since the discipline of corporate innovation is still so young, we’re as far away from a decent system of valuation of Innovation Capital as we are from manned starhips that cross the void. At least with intellectual captial you can compare the difference between the book value of all the assets on the balance sheet and the market valuation of a firm and say “yep, that’s how much our know-how is worth!”.

This is a concept that resonates strongly with me. I’ve worked in banks and technology companies – both Lloyds and Microsoft for example – where all of the traditional assets were available in spades. How come, then, neither of these companies has truly produced anything that was game changingly value creating in the last decade?

Organic growth is not the same thing, even though its highly desirable, obviously.

I’m of the view that both lack Innovation Capital, and furthermore, that almost all organisations do. Lloyds has spent the last couple of years building its Innovation Capital up, and it may be we’ll start seeing some interesting new stuff eventually.

I’ve been away from Microsoft too long to have any insight about its capabilities in this area, but no-one is stupid there, so I’d not be surprised to discover they get this also.

Anyway, the point of al this, if its true, is that the role of innovation groups suddenly fits neatly into the value hierarchy of an organisation in the same way that accountants and marketers do.

But I’m also thinking that without a reasonable system for the valuation of Innovation capital, we’re going to be nowhere for a while yet.

Academics and other big-brained people… do you care to take on the challenge?

Future leaders, and IT contradicts

Interrupting my series of Terrible Innovators for a moment, you may be interested in these recent things:

Over at Computing magazine, I write about the future of IT leadership, specifically, that in an era where the ownership of IT systems is becoming unclear, the role of technologies leaders is also becoming blurred. Do they have a role in the future? I don’t know, but what I do know is that our new managers, the ones coming up IT now, are way better rounded than their siloed predecessors. Anyway, read the article, and especially the rebuttal from one of the current generation IT leaders who says I’m wrong.

Then, over at Finextra, they are running a feature (pulled from the book, actually) on the prioritisation that CIOs have, compared with what innovators need to make change. My point, there, is that CIOs have such vastly different priorities to innovators that they are fundamentally unable to embrace innovation and keep on keeping on.

Hope you find these interesting , and I’ll be back with Terrible Innovator No. 4 – the Lone Ranger – tomorrow.