GartnerSym 20:20 Vision

My second session on Wednesday was more about the future, which is the kind of session i like as it gets my brain thinking and buzzing around with ideas and opportunities. The Session was called 20:20 vision  and the Gartner Analyst was Steve Prentice.

The format of this session was to look at where we are how we got here and then instead of making forecasts or predictions – Steve was going to suggest some projections.

These notes bounce around a bit as it wasn’t a standard session it was intended to stimulate thought and suggest a potential future.

The life cycle of a revolution

In the 1920s Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev described 1920s, the regular “S-shaped” cycles of technological innovation (each lasting 50 to 60 years) that drive the world economy – In 2003 Carlota Perez in 2004 produced “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital” and built upon Kondratiev’s model and introduced 4 stages:

1. eruption
2. frenzy
   (1 & 2 are supply side innovation)
3. synergy
4. maturity
   (3 & 4 are demand side innovation)

Some key dates of our current revolution:

• 15th November 1971 – Intel launches 4004 microprocessor
• 12th August 1981 – IBM introduce the 5150 the IBM PC
• 6 August 1991 – Web made available to the public
• 10th January 2001  – wikipedia is created
• August 2003 – Myspace goes live
• 4 February 2004  – Facebook goes live
• August 2004 – Google goes live with expanded offering
• 23 April 2005 – you tube goes live
• 21 March 2006 – twitter goes live

Projection – We won’t see any new technologies over the next 15 years – but we will see an increase in applications built upon existing technology that enable people to consume information and engage with stuff better and more efficiently

More stats

• global ip traffic is doubling every 2 years
• mobile traffic is doubling every year (games consoles, digital photo frames, tv’s fridges etc)
• currently 60 billion smart devices

The internet is big and getting bigger – It is very hard to explain to people how big the web is – a trillion web pages – 250 million websites

Projection – It will take 8 years to get the remaining population of the world connected to the internet.  This is SO SIGNIFICANT you need to pause and consider your business model in this new context?

Device and Data Proliferation will be significant

15 petabytes of information every day – This is huge, in fact i can’t really imagine what all this data looks like, however some common references say that we produce more information in a day 1500 time greater than the contents of the library of congress which has 32 million books on 650 miles of bookshelves. again we produce more than that every day?

Just to give some context Steve said:

A book is a printed kindle  –  A library is a like a physical media centre

This did put a smile on my face, but also made me think that one day i’m sure we will actually have to explain stuff in this way!!

To get a sense of where we are going we need to understand the drivers:

Social
Simply put we are naturally social creatures:

• 74% of people visit social networking site and remain on their for an average of 6 hours a month
• 50% of facebook users logon everyday
• 22% of online time is in social networks
• 1 billion users across all social media

Practically no one makes a purchase decision without referencing either google or social networks very pervasive

We can now, as individuals build our own infrastructure online and pretty much for free.

Knowledge
The younger minded people of today (notice i write “minded”) often say “why do i need to know something if i can just ask google”  – however people have a naive assumption that what appears in google is the “truth”. Search results are also available in “klingon”!!

Entertainment and Recreation
Gaming is bigger than the movie industry
Average online gamers are 34 years old and core gamers play 48 hours per week?
Social gaming – farmville has more than 60 million active users – 100 million dollar business

What is interesting about this is almost at the same time i was in this session Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio tweeted the following:

http://twitter.com/#!/AndreaDiMaio/status/2304046811578370

It is already starting to show in people’s thinking about Government and I’ve already posted some thoughts on gaming and government in my World of Govcraft posts:

• World of Govcraft
• Moving from Attention to Engagement to Participation – More World of GovCraft

Mobile

• SMS 6.3 billion messages a day
• 150 million mobile facebook users
• more than 100% penetration in some countries
• “to text” is now a verb
• mobile data traffic is rising
• for the first time in september 2010 mobile data traffic exceeded mobile voice traffic

Commerce
online transactions are growing
social gaming is a huge industry

is access to the web a basic human right and should it be free?

Net neutrality (wikipedia definition)
the power to control what a user can do on the internet

Interestingly Hollywood and China had shared agendas about controlling the web?

Looking forward – the dark side
The web is full of opinion, not facts
Can you distinguish the fact from fiction (if users are influenced by peers, maybe this will be an important issue to consider)
Do a search of your “company name” and the word “I hate” and see the results?

Looking forward- context and cloud

Taking advantage of location and time
Cloud is inevitable but not without risks

Resistance is futile – you WILL be assimilated, i’ve heard this before, but considering this was a future session, it really will be the future.

Enterprises are losing control – the outside is coming in – the walls are tumbling – consumers have choices and they are bringing them with them…wherever they go.

Questions

• what new institutions will arise – what does a company look like?
• what new business models will emerge
• working practices – what does a career look like? portfolio working
• social integration or tribalism
• social innovation or technology innovation – how can we manage this effectively
• does technology free us or enslave us –  we need downtime and we need to disconnect to get balance  “off the web is off life”
• what is the role of government?
• will the internet break apart and become the splinternet

Societal change despite constraints
issues – people, resources, geography
by 2025

• 2.7 billion will face water shortages
• 60% live in urban areas
• 24% is over 65

Question: how will tech best serve a global population that is growing, aging and urbanised to levels never seen before?

People need to understand anthropology, social sciences, behavioural psychology to address the societal changes.

The session ended on a slide which spoke about TRUST,  a number of questions relating to this and how we should be considering these from a personal and business perspective. We all need to think about this question in a future which will clearly be very VERY different to what we see today.


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GartnerSym – Social CRM The Next Generation of Customer Innovation

My first session on Wednesday was about Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which I was looking forward to and it didn’t let me down, it was very interesting and highlighted a set of case studies where organisations have successfully used social media for customer relationships and where some had clearly failed to understand what was really going on with social media.

The Gartner analyst leading the session was Jim Davies who started by stating that very few organisations are executing Social CRM against a clearly thought-out social strategy that complements their overarching CRM strategy.

There is much confusion and uncertainty around the impact and scope for nurturing customer relationships through social channels, Jim highlighted 4 different approaches organisations take with regard to Social CRM:

• Kamikaze – jumps in without a care or thought
  Jim highlighted the Nestle facebook example as an example of “fail”
• Strategic – Focuses on business opportunities
• Toe dipper – most people do this
  Curious and doesn’t want to miss out
• In denial
  Doesn’t believe it will impact on them

The challenge for organisations who are in denial is that the next generation of talent will expect organisations to be socially aware.

Issues

What is social CRM, the following represents my view and interpretation on the areas that Jim outlined:

1) Internal –  “your people, your place”
Essentially this area is about looking at the internal opportunities that are there for you. This is an area which I personally feel will deliver great benefits not just around the learning but in supporting a wide range of internal business issues.

It is important to remember that unless your organisation has articulated business issues you will struggle to get buy in or support.
Some potential business issues you might hear which you could link to these tools are as follows: NB this list is an example and is not comprehensive. It also doesn’t imply any particular approach.

– people finder or skills finder (internal staff directory)
– project spaces and business collaboration
– real-time or near real-time internal communications (yes email is an option but that isn’t always collaborative)
– learning communities and peer support groups

2) External – “your people, other people, your place”

The second area that Gartner referred to was external but a platform that was managed by the organisation. An example of this would be where you host a community function for people to discuss and or support each other like a helpdesk community support function. In local government terms this is a challenge as we need to be careful about trying to create communities that we intend to be organic. So the difference here is that we are clear and open about what we would expect such a community to do or what broad outcomes we would expect.
Again some potential business issues you might here to link to would be as follows:

–  service improvement function
– service user support community
– shared communities of practice
– project spaces and collaboration with partners and other organisations

3) Public – “your people, other people, their place”

This aspect is the area that to be honest most people focus on, it includes facebook environments, twitter, youtube etc. This is where stuff (for most social media people) get interesting. However this is also where most fear resides and organisations are low in awareness around the possibilities, case studies, return on investment figures. BUT this is where the MOST VALUE will be gained to all.

Again some possible business issues (not comprehensive) you might come across which could be linked into these solutions or approaches – however i stress and i say this all the time now. Don’t focus on a single technology, do your homework, work out what will actually deliver the value in any given circumstance.

– connecting and engaging with communities
– civic debate and discussion
– trend spotting, listening to the social web community or as Gartner refer to it “the collective” can provide insights into what might be the next big opportunity or next big issue developing.
– people to people connections
– building relationships

Definitions

Jim outlined a set of definitions which is useful when thinking about “Social”:

Social systems — describe the context for the way all of us work. They emerge from the people, processes, tools, organisation, relationships, skills and information associated with a group of individuals. 

Social computing — describes an approach to IT whereby individuals tailor information-based collaborative technologies to support the way they work.

Social networking — describes the use of online services such as Facebook to share information and interact with others. It is a subset of social computing.

Social CRM – a business strategy that mutually benefits cloud based communities and the business by fostering engagement while generating opportunities for sales, marketing and customer service

One of the key aspects organisations and in particular CIO’s need to recognise is that you need to shift away from Controlling Relationships to Guiding Relationships.

I started to think at this point about all this shifting to “social” If organisations and enterprises invest, adopt and completely embrace social media then do they by definition become Social Enterprises?

One of the top reasons organisations have invested in Social Media is to improve Customer relations, So Jim reminded people of the Eight building blocks for CRM:

1 Vision

2 Strategy

3 Customer experience

4 Organisational collaboration

5 Processes

6 Information

7 Technology

8 Metrics

For me the key is to Socialise these aspects in order to truly embrace and adopt social CRM. This means the whole organisation.

Also organisations will need to understand the links between Social CRM and Knowledge Management. How do we capture community knowledge into organisational knowledge bases and if we take this further – When does social knowledge replace corporate knowledge?

Kim completed the session by looking at the Ultimate sales (engagement) cycle < I’ve added in engagement as i see this as a model for Local Government as well and the sales bit is merely conducting an online transaction.

• Mobile
• Presence
• Social
• Sales (engagement)

I need a bit more head space to explain this in a local government context so I’ll just leave the four headings there as placeholders.

GartnerSym – SharePoint 2010: Is It Enterprise-Class?

My day so far has been a bit scattered as there have been supplier sessions interwoven between Gartner sessions. I’ve also allowed some time today to actually write some of the reports I’ve been tasked to produce on the back of this – although I’ve been primarily been putting in placeholders as my brain needs a bit more time and a nights sleep to make sense of some of this stuff.

Anyway this post is about Sharepoint 2010.

The first thing that struck me from the session was the Strategic Planning Assumption shared by Gartner Analyst Regina Casonato:

By 2015, SharePoint will be as popular a platform for enterprise content applications as the iPad and iPhone are for consumer apps.

So i tweeted a comment along these lines which lead to quite a good mini discussion about “what was really meant by this” < My tweet is below:

http://twitter.com/#!/carlhaggerty/status/1923864636432384

Gartner Analyst Regina did cover the improvements in Sharepoint 2010 since 2007 and broadly major improvements to search and integration have been made and some improvement to workflow have been made, but i still ask myself is this really enough?

In terms of the Gartner Magic Quadrants Microsoft sit in or near the top right quadrant for ECM, Portal (internal) and Social software (internal) < Whilst you can’t ignore the dominance, it still doesn’t quite feel right considering that we were also told that Sharepoint is and i quote Gartner Analyst Regina here

“Basic social computing tools are “Good Enough” to challenge tactical suppliers”

However for local government and in this current economic climate can we really think about this level of investment or should we being more innovative and radical and consider shared options across the sector, something like the Knowledge Hub project is something which came to my mind and this lead to another interesting side discussion in twitter about whether we should consider making strategic decisions about IT on this scale without really knowing what the shape of our own organisations will be in 12-18 months time.

A very brief  summary would be that Sharepoint 2010 is better than Sharepoint 2007 but is just average at most things which overall means it could be good enough < each organisation needs to work out what value this would bring and whether or not they are prepared to accept the risks and issues associated with large systems.

Update: The views above are observations and people should check out the full features list of sharepoint 2010 to ascertain what value and benefits can ben realised in their own organisations

GartnerSym – Key Priorities in Data Management and Integration

My first session today was about Data Management and Integration (DM&I), which although is primarily related to the work i am doing for Socitm is actually a very interesting and relevant topic.

For local government to be effective and efficient the business systems which it relies on to meet its business objectives must interoperate and collaborate. In most organisations, these systems have evolved over a number of years, and in the majority of cases utilise a number of differing technologies, platforms and packages. To maximise business benefit and with the growing reliance on the internet as a mechanism for enabling customers, business and partners to access systems, interoperability between systems is becoming ever more important.

Recently I’ve seen DM&I as a conceptual model for intelligent and strategic commissioning in local government. I also see a huge relationship and cross over to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) – SOA is an approach for aligning business needs with IT investment and then building distributed systems that deliver application functions as loosely coupled services. This provides a well-modeled and reusable basis for common business functions. SOA offers a standard way to represent and interact with application functions by building on open standards.

As Public Service pressures increase, IT constraints are also rising. The most fundamental question being asked by service managers is how to build business applications to support business change or how do i increase my business agility? In other words, how to take legacy systems that constrain business today and make them assets for the business. IT structures frequently hamper business agility, so it is imperative to understand how to break down IT barriers to flexibility and innovation.

Enough of the broad overview, now on to my notes and observations:

The session was provided by Gartner Analyst Mark Beyer who shared the following Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2015, data management governance strategies — which include metadata management, master data management and data quality capabilities — will more quickly absorb more data and data types, lowering data integration costs by as much as 20% annually.

The Key Priorities

• new data types
• extreme data volume
• data quality
• data integration
• master data management
• alternative strategies
• metadata management

One aspect which i think does not get enough attention and is critical Metadata management and this is critical for DM&I – Essentially metadata makes everything useful – which in turn informs what information/data assets look like and how to use and transform them

Issues

Competencies – organisations need to look at developing competencies in all aspects of DM&I, in particular Master Data Management, Service Oriented Architecture and Data Quality.

You also need to ensure that you have Data Stewards, whose responsibility is to understand when data crosses a domain.

Cloud and cloud based failures – In just over a one-week period during 2009, a number of Internet-based services experienced embarrassing failures that affected millions of people. A couple of examples.

• 31 January, ma.gnolia, a large provider of personal bookmarks, experienced a fatal data corruption.
• 1 February, Google’s Internet search capability became unavailable for up to 45 minutes.

Emerging trends

The new types of information – Unstructured data types, social networks, video, audio etc will present challenges and opportunities within the DM&I area.

There were a set of do’s and don’t but i didn’t get a chance to capture what was on the slide.

GartnerSym – EA for CIOs

My last session of the day was EA for CIOs: What Does Enterprise Architecture Really Mean to You and Your Organisation? with Gartner Analyst Brian Burke.

The main reason for attending this session was to kind of get a feeling from a wide group of people who generally  understood the value of EA and that this recognised and appreciated.

Well, it wasn’t that straight forward, we started by introducing ourselves to the person next to us and saying what we thought our own organisations thought EA was about and the type of stuff we were doing – I spoke to a guy (can’t remember his name now) who was from the Financial Sector – Banking who basically said to me that his organisation were still working out what it thought EA was – this was comforting and reassuring but also at the same time worrying as it only meant that there was still a long way to go before people (CIO’s in particular) had a consistent view of what value EA’s brought to the table.

However i started worrying too soon, as Brian Burke said that EA will be different for different organisations as we all have a different “strategy direction” so EA’s will naturally offer different value depending on that vision.

Brian likened EA’s to Witch Doctors – No one really knows what we do but something “magical” happens < I chuckled at this point, as I’m still waiting for the magic to be honest, but i understood and agreed with what he said as I often face the same question over and over again “What does an Enterprise Architect Do?”

Again Brian had this covered as he recently put out a note on twitter asking for a definition of EA in no longer than 140 characters which is as follows:

Enterprise architecture increase business value by providing direction to shift the optimisation point from the project to the Enterprise = 138 characters

The key is to create not the perfect or most elegant architecture for the moment, but the most adaptable architecture for the future EA future. There is still a huge problem with most EA team around communications, but that was recognised by most people in the room.

brian went on to outline an example set of value that EA delivers – Value can be derived from:

• Identify standards (business processes, information, technology, solutions, people skills, etc.).
• Consolidate expenditures by reducing duplication.
• Assist in application rationalisation.

There were more on the screen but I didn’t capture them all…

After that the session covered aspects of reports I’d previously read or had access to so my concentration wavered. It was a good session, although i was perhaps hoping for something which providing a unified picture across all sectors – but that just isn’t possible – EA is about what your organisation requires you to do, so it has to be organisation specific – the approach and disciplines can be similar but this session wasn’t about that.