How the cloud give the consumerisation of IT a whole new meaning

This blog originally was published at ITSMportal.com on May 31st , 2010

The cloud essentially "consumerizes" all of IT, not just relatively unimportant bits like procuring personal hard- and software. This requires a whole rethinking of corporate IT, as the idea of any master design becomes unattainable. How can IT as a species survive this trend as it may render the education of a whole generation of IT-ers irrelevant? On the brighter side - it really caters for the talents of today's teenagers: consumption as a lifestyle.


The idea of consumerisation - users being allowed to freely procure their own personal hard- and software - has been around for a while. But few CIO's and even less heads of IT Operations have embraced it. Other than some token adoption, where users could choose between an iPhone or a Blackberry or where users got a personal budget to order from the company supplied catalog of pre-approved hardware, we see little adoption of the concept. The idea is that users can go to any consumer store or webshop and order any gadget they like, be it an iPad, laptops, printer or smart phone and configure these basically while still in the store to access their corporate mail, intranet and company applications. The idea originated when people wanted to use their 24 inch HD pc with 4 processors and mega memory - all essential to enjoy modern home entertainment and video and far superior to company standard issue equipment- to also do some work.

Cloud computing now makes such a consumer approach also possible at the departmental level. Department selecting and using non corporate approved or endorsed SaaS based CRM applications are the most commonly used example. But more interesting are the cases where departments - tired of waiting for their turn in the never reducing application backlog of corporate IT - turned to a system integrator to build a custom cloud application to meet their immediate needs. Several system integrators indicate that they have more and more projects where no longer IT, but the business department, is their prime customer. Contracts, SLA's and even integrations are negotiated directly between the SI and the business department, in some cases IT is not even involved or aware.

Now this is not a new phenomenon. We saw the exact same thing when PCs and departmental servers were introduced. Departments went off on their own and bought "solutions" from vendors popping up like the proverbial poppy seeds and often disappearing just a quickly after (remember Datapoint, Wang, Digital? And those were the ones that lasted). Guess who the business expected to clean up (integrate) the mess they left behind? Yes, the same IT departments they bypassed in the first place. One may even argue that: if IT had not been so busy cleaning up this mess over the last 15 years, they would have had a much better chance at building an integrated solution that actually did meet business's need. I am not of that opinion. With ERP we got this chance (and the associated billions) and still did not manage to keep up with the requirements, some things are just too vast, complex or simply change to fast to be captured in any master design.

So back to consumerisation. Although the trend has been far from whole heartily embraced by most corporate IT, it is continuing. In my direct environment I see several people who, instead of plugging their laptop into the corporate network at the office, take a 3G network stick to work. For around 20 Euros a month this gives them better performance accessing the applications they care about, not to mention it gives them access to applications most corporate IT department do not care for, like facebook, twitter, etc. Question is off course, can they do their work like that? Don't they need all day, full time access to the aforementioned fully vertically integrated ERP system? The answer is No. First of all, the vertically integrated type of enterprise that ERP was intended for, no longer exist. Most corporations have taken to outsourcing distribution to DHL or TNT, employee travel to the likes of American Express, HR payroll and expenses to XYZ, etc. etc. The list goes on and on.

All these external service providers support these services with web based systems that can be accessed from anywhere, inside and outside the company firewall. At the same time, the remaining processes that occur in the corporate ERP system are so integrated that they hardly require any manual intervention from employees. Consequently employees don't need to spend their time doing data entry or even data updates or analysis on that system. Any remaining required interaction is facilitated by directly interfacing with the customer via the web shop or via other web based systems. One could say that the world moved from vertically integrated manufacturing corporations to supply chain connected extended enterprises.

The question I will address in my next post is how does the cloud enabling consumerisation for enterprise applications play a role in this and what this means for IT moving forward.

On the supply side of IT, it means applications are best delivered as easily consumerable services to employees and others (partners, customers, suppliers). One large European multinational is already delivering all their new applications as internet (so not intranet) applications. Meaning any application can be accessed from anywhere by simply entering a URL and doing proper authentication. Choosing which applications to provide internally is based on whether there are outside parties willing and capable to provide these services or whether the company can gain a distinct advantage by providing the service themselves.

When speaking about consuming services, one should try and think broader than just IT services. The head of distribution may be looking for a parcel tracking system, but when asking the CEO or the COO they are more likely to think of a service in terms of something a DHL or TNT delivers. Services such as warehousing, distribution, but also complaint tracking, returns and repairs, or even accounting, marketing and reselling, all including the associate IT parts of those services. It is the idea of everything as a services, but on steroids (XaaSoS). Please note that even when an organization decides to provide one of these services internally, they can still source the underlying infrastructure and even applications "as a service" externally (this last scenario strangely enough is what many an IT person seems to think of exclusively when discussing cloud computing).

On the demand side of IT the issue is an altogether other one. How do we warrant continuity, efficiency and compliance, in such a consumption oriented IT World. If it is every man (or department) for themself, how do we prevent suboptimisation, In fact , how do we even know what is going on in the first place. How do we know what services are being consumed. This is the new challenge, and it is very similar to what companies faced when they decided to not manufacture everything themselves anymore, abandoning vertical integration where it made sense and taking a "supply chain" approach. Cloud computing is in many aspects a similar movement, and also here a supply chain approach looks like the way to go.

Such a supply chain approach means thoroughly understanding both demand and supply, matching the two and making sure that the goods - or in this case services - reach the right audience at the right time (on demand). IT has invested a fair amount of time and effort in better ways and methodologies to understand demand. On the supply side, IT till now assumed they were the supplier. In that role they used industry analysts to classify the components required, such as hardware and software. In this new world they need to start thoroughly understanding the full services that are available on the market. An interesting effort worth mentioning here is the SMI (Service Measurement Index) an approach to classify cloud services co-initiated by my employer, CA technologies and lead by Carnegie Mellon University.

After having gained an understanding of both demand and supply, the remaining task is "connecting the dots". This sounds trivial but is an activity that analysts estimate becoming a multi-billion industry within just a few years. It includes non-trivial tasks like identifying which users are allowed to do which tasks in this now open environment and optimizing the processes by picking resources that have the lowest utilization and thus cost. Because going forward scarcity will determine price especially in the new cloud world (which resembles Adam Smith's idea of a perfect open market a lot closer than any internal IT department ever did or will do).

Now off course all of the above won't happen overnight. Many a reader (and with a little luck the author) will have retired by the time today's vertically integrated systems - many of which are several decades old and based on solid, reliable mainframes - will have become services that are brokered in an open cloud market. A couple of high profile outages may even prolong this a generation or two more. But long term I see no other way. Other markets (electricity, electronics, publishing and even healthcare) have taken or are taking the same path. It is the era of consumption.

PS Short term, however, the thing we (IT) probably need most is a new diagraming technique. Why? From the above it will be clear that - in such a consumerised world - architecture diagrams are a thing of the past. And an IT person without a diagram is like a fish without water . We need something that allows us to evolve our IT fins into feet and our IT chews into lungs, so we can transition from water to land and not become extinct in the process. One essential aspect will be that unlike pictures of clouds and very much like real clouds, the diagrams will need to be able to change dynamically, much like pictures in a Harry Potter movie (it's magic). Who has a suggestion for such a technique ?

Why Cloud spells C.o.m.p.e.t.i.t.i.o.n. for the average IT department

This blog was originally posted at ITSMportal by columnist Gregor Petri on April 19th, 2010

Competition seems to be a controversial topic for many in IT. We rather see ourselves as service providers, but typically as the only - or at least the preferred - service provider. The reason to start this new column series on 'The impact of cloud computing on IT service management' with this controversial topic is that there seem to be two independent train of thoughts around cloud computing. On the one hand cloud computing is seen as a way to make traditional IT more efficient, on the other it is seen as a way for users to source IT solutions directly. The first group talks about Infrastructure as a Service and private clouds, while the second talks less but rapidly implements Software as a Service solutions, often bypassing the IT department in the process. Both groups are implementing cloud computing, but from very different starting points. Somehow they need to start talking again; otherwise we either get ‘strangers passing in the night’ or ‘a train wreck waiting to happen’.

For the first time in its history IT is facing outside competition. Sure, outsourcing was no picnic, but outsourcing was more like subcontracting to a ‘friendly’ supplier than real competition. With cloud computing users can simply go outside to procure the services they need. I am currently watching an interesting example close by. While the internal IT department is scrambling to offer an in-house social media type collaboration environment, one user department already went outside. To protect the innocent we won’t mention whether this was a production, sales, marketing, R&D or other department, but you get the idea. Starting in Australia, furthest away from corporate headquarters - both in distance and time-zones - they set up a collaboration environment with an outside cloud provider. In just a few weeks every member of this global department started sharing their activities, thoughts, projects and enjoying the typical communication that people enjoy on social networks.

As this cloud service is low cost (even starting with free), easy to use and it offers anywhere, anytime access also from non HQ supported devices such as iPhones and home PCs, the chances of IT winning this department back for their corporate service are dim at best. One good soul tried to help IT by requesting a similar online watering hole from corporate IT. As instructed he filled out a service request form at the central service desk , but to date he is still awaiting the first response from IT (a first response likely to be questions about priorities, about what executive will sign this off and what cost center it needs to be charged to). Now this may not be a mission critical enterprise system, but similarly we see user departments contracting directly with system integrators to build new enterprise solutions on a PaaS platform. My point is that many IT departments still seem to be in denial on the realities of this new competitive world called cloud. Time for a wake-up call.

Now IT is not the first department in corporate history to face some serious competition. Here is a wake-up analogy from the consumer electronics industry (if you’re not big on analogies, just substitute 'application' for 'TV and 'IT' for 'factory' and 'cloud' for Japan). About two decades ago a company from my country was global market leader in color TVs. Back then the average life cycle of a TV, before a new model would arrive, was 3.5 years. The average price was fairly stable at around 800 Euro’s and basically all components were custom designed and produced in house. Becoming the head of a TV factory was the ultimate career dream for many in my home town. Just a few years later, after Japan and Korea entered the global market, prices had dropped by 40% (and continued halving every two years), new models replaced old ones every 6 months and innovations such as remote controls, stereo, PiP and c-text determined market leadership. Our local multinational nearly did not make it through this transition. To cope they introduced 'just in time”, 'total quality' and started 'design for manufacturing', heavily utilizing standard off the shelf components to accommodate the much shorter life cycles. And to top things off they stopped producing the main component (CRT’s) in house, instead they created a production joint venture (a.k.a. a 'cloud') with their biggest competitor.

Overnight the head of manufacturing had to change from being ‘the king of low cost production’ to ‘the fastest orchestrator of the supply chain’. Agility became the word. But agility did not replace the need for low cost, high quality or advanced innovation. It was about delivering all of those at the same time and at neck break speed. Some industries decided this was just too hard and stopped in-house manufacturing all together, others saw it as an opportunity for differentiation. In my view the above analogy graphically illustrates the roller coaster ride IT is about to get on.

Many of the needed skills and tools, such as smarter sourcing, resource pooling, and service oriented architectures; we have already been trialing in the past few years. Under the banner of agile development we even have had a first go at coping with rapid change, despite the overwhelming complexity of enterprise IT. In addition there are many manufacturing best practices, Lean being the obvious one, that IT can benefit from (see also 'How lean is your cloud').

The question in my view is: is IT ready and willing to give up their manufacturing role (provider of services) and transition into an orchestration/supply chain role. Essentially engaging in both mentioned conversations: making enterprise IT more efficient, while at the same time enabling the enterprise to leverage readymade market/cloud services. Interested in your thoughts and comments.

The Cloud leans back – an iPad epiphany

Given the giant cloud of volcanic dust currently passing over Europe I could have also titled this blog "The cloud strikes back", but that is not the topic of this "the cloud changes everything" blog.  It also has nothing to do with my earlier topics on Lean IT and Lean manufacturing. Lean Back and Lean Forward were the guiding principles for developers of Interactive Television.

The idea being that TV is typically enjoyed leaning back, while computers are typically used leaning forward. Of course we all know that interactive television so far has been as successful as the NEXT computer (not). In fact, in the last 5 years we moved to a situation where more and more entertainment content is consumed leaning forward . If you visit our home on a typical Friday night the big ass TV may be on, but meanwhile all family members are hammering away on computers. Mom on the desktop, the kids fighting over who gets the macbook versus the laptop and Dad on his company supplied artifact.

Now only a few years ago, you assumed that any person using a computer was probably working. (back then only dad would be using his computer on a Friday night). One of the first I saw point out this blurring of work, home and play - as illustrated below -  was IT visionair Peter Hinssen (t) , in one of his hilarious but at the same time highly educational sessions on IT strategy.

However, something felt wrong about this. Maybe it is a generation thing, but if the above is your life, then how much of a life is it?

Luckily help has arrived, but not from interactive TVs.  If a family of 4 can barely agree what TV channel is to provide the background noise to their computing activities, how would they agree on one joint interactive activity. This new reality was vividly described by Robin Bloor , one of the first industry analyst and author of havemacwillblog.com.  In how  "The iPad Will Replace The Laptop" he describes numerous use cases of how "lean forward" is no longer needed to have a good and/or productive time online. If you're a person dying to get an iPad (like most of us in Europe) but also if you interested in the future of TV or indeed ... in the future of the cloud ... then this is a must read story.

Important to realize is that this is NOT about switching devices, but about a  fundamentally different way to interact with content and functionality (a.k.a. with the cloud).  People are interested in taking a ride, not in the art of motor cycle management or ownership. And that is exactly what the cloud brings. In fact, Google referenced the same phenomena when launching their latest incarnation of Google Docs. They stated that about as many people should need an office suite as need photoshop, autocad or similar. Most people read or at best annotate, only very few create. 

In this light, the decision of the Library of Congress to preserve the first billion tweets for prosperity (including interesting twitbits "like what did Dave or Joe or Bob  have for Lunch on Monday Aprill 11^th" may not be so stupid after all. The "we are all authors" movement may turn out to have been an one-time phenomena caused by temporary ubiquity of keyboards. Let's face it, writing 2500 tweets for 7 followers is not a fulfilling, economic or even sensible activity, let alone reading them (if you don't believe me have a try). Similarly we may realize that the volume of email we all complain about , is because we all spend too much time typing and not enough time reading. 

I think we can all agree Apple already changed the computer industry several times and is revolutionizing the music industry. With the iPad they will now be changing the TV industry (Apple TV was not a failure, it is just infrastructure for the iPad)  and by leaving out a keyboard they now also created the ultimate work, home and play "cloud consumption experience".  

This may mean that we are going back to an time where people using PCs are not just the ones working .  They are likely to be the ones creating cloud stuff: content creators and functionality developers (a.k.a . IT folks).  All other people - working, relaxing  and playing - will be doing so on cloud consumption devices.

Case in point, from a tweet by Cap Gemini's CTO Ron Tolido: "Need to run a country? We have an app for that" that points to Norway's prime minister running the country from his iPad while stranded due to the aforementioned volcanic cloud.  So lean back (or lean forward - depending on your job area) and enjoy the ride.

PS Some of you may point out that for that for the above to work, it would be a good idea if Google Docs actually worked on the ipod . In typically IT fashion we would call this an "implementation detail", but feel free to point it out to Google, preferably before I get a chance to pick up my iPad from Europe.

Note: I could not find the original author or copyright holder of the Modern Life cartoon, any pointers appreciated.

A cloud experiment @ ComputerTotaal!

ENGLISH: Started my one-time guest editorship of ComputerTotaal!, by far Holland’s largest monthly IT magazine. Goal is to make the summer edition (#8) one of the world’s first and largest experiments in cloud collaboration.

Lead by 5 guest editors, reviewed by an editorial board of several hundred and with potential contributions from the 100K+ readership, the content of this edition is to be created and reviewed in, on and through the cloud.

One of the aspects to be evaluated are the collaboration possibilities that Office 2010 and Microsoft’s consumer cloud platform such as SkyDrive are to deliver. But also alternatives like Google Apps and other SaaS options will be reviewed. Social cloud aspects reviewed include the blurring of work, play and home activities.

Interesting is that although this is clearly an experiment, which even uses a beta (office2010) to create the content, the over hundred thousand strong paying readership and the numerous advertisers of the magazine http://idg.nl/producten/1/computer-totaal/ do rightfully expect the quality to be at least on par with traditional methods. Very much like we see in today's “enterprise cloud experiments".

DUTCH: Vandaag begonnen als gast redacteur voor de zomer editie van ComputerTotaal!, Nederlands grootste IT en PC magazine.

De creatie van deze zomer editie (# 8) is volgens mij een van de eerste en grootste cloud samenwerkings experimenten in de wereld. Aangevoerd door een team van 5 gastredacteuren, bewaakt door een redactieraad van meer dan honderd en met potentiële bijdragen van de honderd duizend lezers, wordt de inhoud van deze uitgave in, op en door de cloud gecreëerd. Idee is om the beoordelen of een dergelijke samenwerking mogelijk gemaakt kan worden door nieuwe platformen zoals Office 2010 in samenwerking met Microsoft consument cloud platform: Skydrive. Maar ook alternatieven, zoals Google Apps en andere SaaS-opties worden bekeken. Daarnaast word aandacht besteed aan mede door de cloud veroorzakkte of ten minste mogelijk gemaakte vervaging tussen traditionele werk, spel en thuis activiteiten.

Interessant is dat hoewel dit duidelijk een experiment is, dat zelfs gebruik maakt van een beta release (office2010) voor het creëren van de inhoud, de meer dan honderdduizend betalende lezers en de vele adverteerders terecht verwachten dat de kwaliteit van dit nummer beter of tenminste gelijk moet zijn aan de traditionele nummers. Ook daar lijkt het dus erg op de "enterprise cloud experimenten" die hier vaak beschreven worden.

Wilt u de voortgang volgen op Twitter, zoek dan op hastags #computertotaal AND #office2010 http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23computertotaal%20%23office2010  

Notes from the Cloud Academy: RAIC - Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Cloud services

We have been running the Cloud Academy roundtables in several European countries. I’d like to share some of the more interesting questions, debates and insights around a number of topics, starting today with RAIC—Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Cloud Services. Other topics will include:

• A TV industry analogy: Competition for the IT department
• Cloud Shortcuts: Can the Cloud make( internal) IT more agile
• Service Level Management and the Cloud
• Cloud R&R - Retained responsibilities for IT
• Elastic Services: Everybody wants to be a manager  

Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Cloud services
Today’s post discusses whether we can ensure performance and availability of public cloud services. I’m not sure we can. Public cloud services are a bit like the weather: we are lucky if we can predict what it is going to be like, but cannot manage or change it as we don’t control the underlying elements. The same holds true trying to “manage” public cloud services.

So what do we do? Give up on public cloud services altogether? No, that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, we can follow a method we have been using in IT for a long time. If we cannot count on a certain item to be always available, we make sure we have a fail over option.

The best example comes from storage. At a certain moment, people realized that even the most expensive disks encountered failures now and then. So they developed a strategy where failure of an individual disk is not so important. The result was RAID, a redundant array of inexpensive disks that, transparently tot the user, served the requested data from other disks in the array when one of the disks failed. In typical IT fashion, we used the name RAID 0 for a configuration where we had no raid at all, RAID 2 for 2 disks etc. The benefit of higher raid numbers is is that the predicted availability increases significantly by adding marginally more redundant capacity.

How do we apply a similar “redundant array” approach to cloud services? The idea of contracting for two email services or two CRM systems is counter-intuitive for most IT folks, since for years we strived to standardize on one of each . And the reality is that if half the company uses one email system and the other half another, 50% of the people are still down if one fails. So instead of looking at email in isolation, we should look at all the employee communication options. These may include email, instant messaging , VOIP, even a social media functions similar to Facebook or Twitter. If based on different technologies and sourced from different vendors, the chances of them all being down at the same time is extremely unlikely.

Using chat or instant messaging as a backup for email is not how we traditionally think in IT---- and challenging such traditional thinking is exactly the idea of the Cloud Academy - but it aligns with the next generation of IT users. An example: Teenagers (like the two living in my home) instantly switch from MSN to Google chat or to Hyves or Facebook or even to hotmail or text messaging, if the service they are using is behaving strangely. They are not particularly interested in whether a particular service is down; their only interest is whether they can continue to communicate with their friends.

Of course, since today’s IT departments proactively monitor the infrastructure and know the status of systems, they rarely get a call saying “all systems are down.. But that’s not true with external cloud services. We need to find an alternative early- warning system, something like a weather report on the status of the external cloud services our user depend upon. An interesting site in this context is http://www.unifiedmonitoring.com/.

So what conclusions did we reach in our (sometime heated) Cloud Academy debate?

Using public cloud services is another step in giving up control of the underlying components. Years ago, when companies bought the first computers , they were expected to program these themselves in Assembler. Later, they bought higher- level language compilers, followed by complete off the shelf software packages followed now by infrastructure and software as a service. Along each step, IT has lost some control, but in exchange we are no longer required to do all the work.

We do, however ,have to make conscious decisions when to cede control. This differs by industry, type of application and possible risk. Using public cloud services in many cases already makes sense today. But when using them, we need to have some way to monitor availability and outcome so that we can make smart or pragmatic tradeoffs and precautions when the services are not available.

How Lean is your Cloud? Part 2

In the first part we discussed lessons that IT can learn from a hundred years of manufacturing best practices and the possible role of cloud computing in that endeavor. We now continue with what may very well be the area that IT can learn most from manufacturing: Costing.

Costing. Many feel that the billions that the industry invested in ERP systems can be justified by the improved planning capabilities that such a global perspective gives. Reality however is that the benefits of ERP – if any – come more from improved financial visibility. By being able to compare costs, prices and efficiencies per country, the overall portfolio could be optimized. And although most ERP systems have added a supply chain planning solution over the past years, their cost analysis and financial functionality is often both more advanced and more widely implemented.

Full, loaded, integral products cost. In manufacturing understanding the cost of a product is both an art and a science. Using a variety of tools and methods direct and indirect cost elements are allocated to cost carriers (products). In fact, most manufacturing innovations are first screened against their impact on product cost, before their implementation is even considered. The two main allocation methods are a roll up based on the Bill of Materials (BOM) and an activity based allocation using intermediate pools of costs. IT cost and especially infrastructure cost traditionally were fixed and allocated in an overhead way. With CMDB’s (configuration management databases) becoming more widely implemented , organizations can start to allocate specific technical cost directly to the business service they support. And also the pay as you go model of cloud computing makes that easier. As a result many an IT department is starting their own financial and cost analysis function or department. Something which is also required as cloud computing renders make or buy decisions more granular and more frequent.

Global sourcing and spot markets. It will be clear that under the above market conditions, smart sourcing becomes a key competitive differentiator. Static long term contracts and multi-year commitments are replaced by spot markets, hedging and pricing based on average daily price. Also in Cloud computing we already see the first examples of this, again with Amazon leading the pack by introducing spot pricing for its EC2 elastic cloud offering.

Just in Time. At first sight Just in Time manufacturing seems to be at odds with a focus on product cost. Making large quantities to stock (just in case) seems more efficient than producing each item when and only when required (just in time). The revolutionary idea of lean manufacturing was that if it is more efficient to make hundred of the same in a row, the conclusion should not be to make batches of a hundred, but to change and tweak the system until a batch size of one could be produced as efficient as a batch of hundred.

Single Minute Exchange of Die. SMED, sometimes jokingly referred to as “single minute exchange or die”, is the practice where the whole factory team works together to change over the manufacturing process from one type of product to another, within a minute. Imagine a formula one team getting ready to exchange tires, including a guy with a whistle and endless rehearsals and you get an idea how serious this practice is taken in lean factories. To most of us this may feel outrages and expensive. But in fact this singular focus on achieving together what everyone agreed is important (in this case make to order and meeting real and not forecasted customer demand) and makes SMED relevant in a cloud context. In the past, each IT department or discipline (network, databases, applications, development, etc.) - could focus on meeting their own SLA’s, but all together they often were delivering an overall customer experience that was less than desirable. Case in point, also with cloud computing is that improvements cannot come from only technology (cloud in this case), it has to be grounded in mentality and processes.

Total Quality. Before lean manufacturing introduced the concept of zero defects, the consensus of the industry was that there was something like “optimal quality”. The idea behind that was that if one in X-thousand products failed, it was cheaper to repair those few then to improve manufacturing quality even further. It will be clear that Just in Time and zero inventories had no tolerance for that idea. If even a single component fails, the whole delivery to the end customer will get delayed severely. As a result manufacturing started measuring defects in PPM (Parts per million) instead of percentages or promille’s. Basically the idea was that manufacturing something first time right in the end always is cheaper than having to repair it later on, as all these unplanned repair activities are essentially waste that adds no value. Also in IT the idea of “first time right” is gaining traction and cloud computing, with its large scale, is accelerating this even further. With a million users the impact of an error or (security) flaw is much higher and does warrants a larger focus on quality. Interestingly this focus on zero defects also further another lean concept, namely excluding any functions that the user sees no value in , as these do increase complexity and the chances of errors, but not the value.

Maximize Value, Minimize Waste. Even if the above analogies between Lean manufacturing and IT may seem far fetched to you, one thing you may find useful regardless is using the Lean IT mantra of “Maximizing Value” (only do what adds value to the end customer) and “Minimizing Waste” (eliminating steps that do not add value) to guide your decisions. Just take any idea or proposal and evaluate it against these two simple criteria: does the service in question add significant value in the eyes of your end customer? Or, does it minimize waste by eliminating steps that do not add value relevant to your customers. These two very simple criteria can also prove very useful in streamlining your cloud computing efforts.

Now is the time for organizations to start evaluating how cloud computing can help them transform their traditional IT factories into a modern IT Supply Chain. With the Cloud Academy initiative we are trying to support these efforts. On the one hand by furthering knowledge about basic cloud building blocks and cloud security, but also by discussing possible management approaches to cloud computing in the Cloud Academy discussion group on Linked-In. Regardless of whether you are looking to start your journey to cloud computing with Software as a Service, Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service. May your cloud be a lean one!

How Lean is your Cloud?

Delivering IT services can be in many ways be compared to manufacturing processes, and over the years the concept of an “IT factory” has become a popular way of explaining best practices in IT operations. In this tradition Cloud Computing can be seen as the logical next step, converting the traditional IT factory into a modern IT Supply Chain (see also the recent whitepaper by Sam Somashekar).

The ambition to model IT after manufacturing is understandable. The enormous efficiency improvements gained from innovations in manufacturing management have enabled the economic growth and prosperity of the past decades. With the economy moving further from Atoms to Bits - from tangible products to information services - it makes sense to investigate whether these management innovations can have similar effects on IT. Of course not instead of existing service management best practices, these will remain valid. But as additional source of inspiration.

An additional reason for using such manufacturing analogies is that they provide an easier way to explain the rationale behind major IT investments to non-IT trained audiences, such as the executives needing to sign off these investments. Using the widely accepted best practice of Lean Manufacturing as main analogy we try and investigate the possible relevance of Cloud Computing in that context.

Mass production. Today’s cloud computing offerings all leverage the concept that mass produced is almost always cheaper than custom made. The proverbial Ford Model-T was all about using standardization to drive cost down - any color as long as it is black! Today’s cloud computing offers mass produced standardized services to millions of users, and as a result monthly cost per user can be relatively low.

Mass Customization. But soon consumers no longer accepted only black cars and in Japan Toyota perfected lean manufacturing to be able to offer choice at cost comparable to mass production. Instead of an assembly line dedicated to one make and model, all kinds of different cars ran on the same production line. Thanks to virtualization IT is likewise abandoning “One server per app” and is running multiple applications in varying combinations on a flexible cloud infrastructure. In a comparable way, multiple customers are using the same Software as a Service application in very different ways. In this case the concept of multi-tenancy makes such premium flexibility at the cost of mass production possible.

Mass Standardization in product design. The secret behind mass customization in manufacturing is massive standardization of the underlying components and platforms. In the consumer electronics industry the average manufacturers’ portfolio of television sets went from ten different models - with an average shelf life of two years - to hundreds of different models with major product renewals occurring every 6 months. Product development lead times needed to be slashed from years to months. And smart manufacturers moved from every TV having its own custom designed printed circuit boards to using the same board across most of its models. Agile development and component reuse are the IT incarnations of this trend.

Assemble to Order in product delivery. Before industrialization most products were “made to order” by craftsman. Post World War II, with demand high and supply low, the market went to products “made to stock”. As the market changed from a sellers to a buyer’s market, customers demanded differentiated products at low prices and with short lead times. To be able to meet these higher demands manufacturers perfected an assemble to order supply chain. Where final products were rapidly assembled from low cost often purchased standard components. IT went through as similar transition, moving from tailor-made software via standard packages to a service orient architecture, where end user services in theory can be assembled to order. In a cloud computing context this means sourcing low cost component services and flexibly assembling these either in house or using a platform as a service.

Design for Manufacturing. An approach where R&D designed products and then threw these over the fence for Manufacturing to figure out how to produce them was no longer feasible in modern manufacturing. Products need to be designed with manufacturing in mind. In most modern manufacturing organization R&D and production work very closely together, throughout the whole product life cycle. In a similar fashion we already see that product developers at today’s cloud providers are much more involved with “how it will run”, than traditional developers. With automatic provisioning and scaling up and down of applications becoming standard practice, “design for operations” will be a required discipline for all developers going forward.

Deliver double the features, at halve the cost, every 12 months. Seems outrages? In consumer electronics this may even be understating the market dynamics. Designing and manufacturing products that by the time they reach the market will sell for half of today’s price is no picnic. IT will need to prepare for similar market dynamics. To some extend hardware and basic services like bandwidth and hosting are already keeping up with this rapid cost reduction. But IT needs to prepare for their “Premium Services” to meet these requirements too. The impact of the cloud is here that - with bandwidth making both distance and time-zones irrelevant - competition can come from everywhere.

From Manufacturing Requirements Planning (MRP) to Supply Chain Management (SCM). The main difference between traditional MRP and SCM was that MRP tried to plan the organizations own manufacturing activities, while supply chain planning took into account the activities of the extended enterprise and at the same time acknowledged that not all parameters were under the control of the planner. If the ship transporting cars from Kobe to Rotterdam left on the 12th then production needed to be planned around that. Just like one cannot manage the weather, one can merely predict it and plan around it. Same with Cloud Computing, many of the components required for the final customer experience are no longer under our (direct) control, but we remain responsible for the final result and need to plan around obstacles.

Synchro Kanban. A result of the above is also that trying to micro manage that macro environment is not a good idea. Micro managing would be a futile as having trained butterflies take off from the coast of Japan to prevent a hurricane in Central America. Instead one can better take an approach where the internal management capabilities of the individual subsystems are leveraged. Toyota’s Synchro Kanban approach is a good example. Having a macro level plan that looked factory to factory and country to country level, while each factory was responsible for meeting its commitments using its own capabilities and flexibility. They did so using really simple low tech systems such as Kanbans or dual bins. The perceived centralization of cloud computing has the danger of inviting megalomaniac global planning attempts, but in my view the idea need to be Keep it Stupidly Simple (KISS) just like with synchro kanban.

Continuous Incremental Improvement. It is tempting to assume that such high requirements also require a wholesale approach to innovation. Starting over by building a new factory instead of trying to improve the old factory. With the exemption of some base components in most industries the incremental approach of trying to improve an already working factory has proven much more effective than trying to get a brand new factory to work. With Service Oriented architectures that realization is reaching IT, not building yet another new factory next to our current mainframe, unix, and windows manufacturing plants of the past.

Dedicated new factories In manufacturing there is one clear exception to the above, factories for new base components such as chips or LCD screens are replaced completely when moving to the next generation of product. Also here a possible lesson for cloud computing, for base services, like CPU capacity, storage but also search and mail, it may make sense to plan for an ability to regularly switch vendors (factories) going forward. Locking in to a particular vendor also locks in to that vendors generation of technology and thus to its related no longer competitive cost model.

To be continued….in part 2

Introducing the Cloud Academy: as cloud is not a sprint but more a marathon

More and more people are realizing that Cloud Computing may be a hype, but for sure it is not an invention.  The components that make up or enable the cloud are not new. We have had fairly broad networks for 10 years, have used virtualization for 20 years and were sharing of computing capacity (time sharing) even before I started my working life. As CA’s Ajei Gopal recently said, Cloud Computing is much more a “practical innovation”.   Practical innovation combines existing technology into a compelling new product. Best example of a “practical Innovation” is probably the iPod that combined existing and readily available technology like a portable hard disk, a compact headset and MP3 compression in a new type of walkman.

The thing with “practical Innovations” is that it is not about having the best idea; it is not even about having the idea first. It is all about FLAWLESS EXECUTION. Over the last couple o weeks we saw a few insightful article appear. For example in “Don’t Rush to Cloud Computing”  by Art Wittmann in Network Computing and “Five points to make when your CEO cries cloud” by Chris Murphy in Informationweek. The morale of these basically is that despite the hype and the (peer) pressure “ready-fire-aim” is not a good strategy for cloud computing.

And this is exactly the reason why we started an initiative called “the Cloud Academy” (http://www.thecloudacademy.com/).
The aim of the academy is to offer IT and BT (business technology) professionals an opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss the pro and cons and brainstorm about execution strategies for their complex environments. What the academy is not is a school or course where a “teacher” explains how it should be done, but to facilitate the discussion we do provide a short primer “Shedding light on Cloud Computing” to all attendees. 

 

To start we picked four areas to explore: 1) Security First!, discussing security and governance concerns, as this seems the dominant topic in most initial cloud discussions, 2) The changing role of IT management, what will be the core task of IT (if any) once we no longer are busy trying to keep an assorted bunch of infrastructure in the basement running 3) My first Cloud: about building a private cloud, as most companies are starting there to get their feet wet. And 4) Assuring Cloud Performance, about warranting your customer’s and users experience in a cloud environment. This last one is interesting because – even though many organizations seem to perceive the cloud mainly a something they will consume - reality is that if you’re a bank, a travel agent, a media company or even a government, you likely will be delivering a large part of your customers services over the cloud.

All four session are technology agnostics and touch upon different aspects of cloud computing such as Iaas, PaaS and SaaS. But we also have one technology specific session: Mainframe goes Cloud, why 20 years of virtualization and massive scalability give this platform a head start.

As the Cloud Academy is all about peer to peer communication and exchanging ideas we are running these in our local facilities and where possible in local language, initially  throughout Europe (remember: ready-aim-fire) with the Netherlands and France already underway.  But to kick things of we invited Craig Symons Vice President and Principal Analyst of Forrester Research to give his perspective on how Cloud Computing may change the role of IT. Join us on March 3rd for this complementary webcast.

PS For more discussion and news updates please join the Cloud Academy group at LinkedIn

The Cooperative Enterprise Cloud – Easy as a whistling song

For anyone still doubting whether the Cloud indeed will change everything, the below video is really something to watch. It tells the story of how UK headquartered Logicalis group partnered with Cisco, Netapp and CA to deliver their Cooperative Enterprise Cloud Service. After being the first vendor to deploy Cisco new Unified Computing System in the UK it took the approach one step further and developed it “as a service”.

Don’t let the name BOCS, which stands for “Bespoke On-Site Cloud Service” put you off. Because it seems to deliver everything one could want from a cloud. It runs indoor - nice and secure - during normal conditions, but can scale seamlessly to include additional capacity when needed. And best of all, customers do not have to go out and buy several tyes of software and hardware and piece it all together, that has already been done. Seems too good to be true? Well the video is an animation and the offering is available as contracted service from Q2 of this year, but it sure seems worth the wait.





Now why is this so different, why does it change everything? First of all, this is not traditional outsourcing - where every change is to be regretted as conditions are cemented into concrete. Neither is it “traditional cloud” where even the biggest customer is a mere number and the vendor is typically only reachable via email. This is cloud at a human scale: seemingly promising the benefits of scale and elasticity, but at the same time addressing the potential drawbacks that more and more organizations are starting to realize.

And unlike previous internet innovations, cloud does not seem to be about cutting out the middleman, but about making the IT supply chain as a whole more efficient and effective through intelligent brokering. Welcome your feedback.

BTW in case you’re wondering what technology CA provided to the mix in areas like automation, provisioning, monitoring and energy metering , I am sure Logicalis will be happy to tell you, but reality is that for its customers , it does not matter. And it should not matter. Just like Salesforce makes a point of not discussing what databases it uses and like the specification sheet of a Rolls Royce under horsepower simply says "enough".

This may be your last Windows upgrade, you better enjoy it!

Cloud Computing promises to move all functionality into the cloud. At the same time the consumerisation trend is driving the use of consumer electronics such as of the shelf laptops, iPhones, MacBooks and home entertainment centers as access devices. Typically these devices will be cool, flat, inexpensive and it’s doubtful they will have a physical keyboard. But more interestingly – at least from a service management perspective – is that it will no longer matter how these devices are configured and even whether they run Windows, Chrome, Linux or some kind of mobile derivative. Many organizations are planning their upcoming transition to Windows 7 as the first step towards such a new consumerised, cloud centric future. Through this approach they aim to achieve short term efficiencies while at the same time reaping some of the future benefits already.


Putting the words consumerisation and benefits in one sentence is not something that comes natural for a lot of IT departments. For a long time IT felt “microcomputers require micromanagement”. An idea that may be soon be just as dated as the word “microcomputer” itself. Let’s have a quick look at some of the things that are happening already.


More and more organizations offer webmail as a way to access their email systems. This enable employees to access their mail from their home PC, from an internet café while on vacation or from customer sites where our employees cannot plug in their laptop’s but do have access to browsers. At the same time we see that the API of this webmail is used to set up access from personal phones and PDA’s. With the introduction of intranets and sharepoints many of the received mails however link back to content on the corporate network. So more advanced organizations are already offering instant intranet access, either via the standard VPN protocols supported by modern devices or by offering an “on the fly” VPN, where the VPN client software is installed via the browser during the first connection. A related trend we see is the use of multiple devices by one person. Not many corporations hand out multiple laptops, netbooks and desktops to the same person, but several executives are taken to the idea of an ultralight tablet for short trips and a solid laptop for longer stays, and I guess many of you reading this also have both a laptop and a desktop and maybe even a netbook or MacBook for on the side? If it was not so much work to have the right data on the right machine, we would swap devices much more often, wouldn’t we?

But also on the application side we see several related developments. Traditionally enterprise applications required a specifically configured client (think client/server) and access was only offered to devices inside the corporation’s network. Most modern applications offer access from a browser. Originally the browser interface supported a subset of the functionality but more and more the full scope of the application functionality is available to browser based clients. This reduces the need for client specific configuration but more importantly it allows organizations to offer non-employees, who use non-company provided devices, access to these applications. These can be contractors, temp workers, employees subcontractors etc. And as a result companies have taken to offering access to these applications over the internet. Of course governing and enforcing who is allowed to have access and who is not, is still required. But access itself is no longer depending on physical availability of a specific configuration or specific client device. Offering access to applications irrespective of time or place is cloud computing as original defined by Ramnath K. Chellappa :“a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits.[1]“

The described consumerisation and cloud computing developments basically impact our move to Windows 7 in three ways. First, we may use multiple devices - sometimes on and sometimes off the corporate network. Secondly, most application logic will execute on servers in the cloud (not on our desktop) and thirdly, ideally our data and settings travel with us like a virtual desktop, instead of being confined to one physical device. However there is also a fourth thing to be considered, and – as always in IT - that is legacy. The above approach can be implemented in a green pasture environment, but what about the apps we bought 5 or 10 years ago and we still use every day. For those we will need a “transition strategy”.

With some companies already moved over, how would you go about setting up such a strategy? One of our European colleagues created a simple seven step approach which starts with a small questionnaire to assess where you are with regard to each of these steps. The first step is to define your vision for your “next generation workspace”. This section includes questions on new possibilities such as virtual desktop infrastructures, support for roaming profiles and devices, virtual application streaming etc.

Next step is sketching out a transition strategy in a Project Plan. Part of this project plan are the following areas: Compliance: do your current contracts and licenses allow you to take the planned approach; Training: what new skills (apart from Windows 7 skills) do you need to acquire; Financial: what will be the cost impact of this transition on your services and how will you charge for these services; Hardware & Software: What do you already have and what would need to be changed, bought, upgraded. And the final items are Management & Support of the transition and of the new situation going forward. Especially the changes in the area of support are quit profound. With user-owned “off the shelf” devices and applications predominantly running in the cloud, support will include even more self service and will require more collaboration with your (cloud) service providers and seamless access to the support environments of the device providers.

Like mentioned, this may be the last desktop environment you provide. My kids already take their own personalized laptops and phones to school and fully expect to do the same when they join the workforce. The only thing they find cool about my company supplied equipment is the fact that access fees and subscription cost are covered. Now if we could only find a way to “consumerise” those too (starting at home).


PS If interested in the described step by step plan, leave me a note twitter.com@leanitmanager