Anything, Anytime, Anywhere

Here I am at the Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit. Opening welcome is slick as always. Covered the most important interconnected forces around today:
Information, Mobile, Cloud and Social.
Combine to create an "always on" era.

First keynote follows on from this and is entitled Always On. Anything, Anytime, Anywhere. I remember going to a SUN ERC conference about 12 years ago where I heard that phrase coined for the first time.

Industrialisation of IT does not mean the death of the IT professional, but frees us up to do more interesting things.

Picture of a typical CIO. Looking out over the horizon. Or, not sure what it is or how it got there.




CIO technology priorities at the moment include cloud and mobile, and are looking for customer experience to drive innovation. This latter one is a big change from previous surveys. IT more than ever now has to be part of the business, cannot be separate.

Social computing not very high on CIO list of priorities. (NB, it is on mine :-)). But, the only way we will deliver solutions to our business problems is by collaborating with each other.

How do we put the Nexus of the 4 forces, Information, Mobile, Cloud and Social, to work? Things we should be looking at to build really cool collaborative apps:
Image and position capture
Integration into the social network through APIs
Tagging
Approval workflow
Text and natural language analytics

Some other scenarios:
Second screen
enhance real works with virtual overlay. Eg watching a film with iPad on your knee to interact and look things up
Or meta data over a sports event.

Healthcare
Health management of the whole individual based on the individual's interactions inside and outside of a doctors office. People are more honest with their friends than their doctors. Big privacy and ethical issues of course.

People are driving a convergence of information, social interaction, mobility and cloud. Using multiple devices and applications of their choosing people connect with each other and interact with a wealth of information. Seamlessness of the experience relies on underlying cloud infrastructure.
People expect this interactivity in all of their roles, ie personal and work.
BYOD will be the norm. Followed by bring your own applications.
We used to talk about rogue developers. Now we have citizen developers.
We have to give up some control, in order to have some control.

People are drivers. Customers switch between open and closed environments, apps, devices etc, but all they see is the glass. They don't know, nor want to know what goes on behind it. User manuals barely exist now. Things just work. Or they should. Big challenge for our architectures which are often complex and based on legacy technologies.

What is a portal now? Integration of different apps? But iPads do that without a portal. Tying to solve problems in wrong place in the architecture. Too close to the glass.
Existing architectures are usually conceived in isolation and are techno centric not user centric.

Empowered individuals are untethered, work anywhere on anything. Have access to great design, technology and app choices, and will quickly discard apps that they don't like and move on. They aggregate and integrate information. They will engage with technology if it provides value to them.

Information is key to good apps. From multiple sources, historical and in real time, specific to the individual, relative to the individual's social connections, informed by their behavioural patterns. Interesting problems to work on.

Is our view of enterprise content management in our organisations informed by the above, or are we still document pushers?

Interaction across devices is important. We all use different devices for different experiences. Eg iPads for consuming content, laptops for creating. Therefore consistent state and data access is vital.

Lots of architecture implications for everything covered in this talk.
We need to embrace a post modern architecture,
Think in terms of an ecosystem. Mutual and interdependent. Co-creative, innovative and collaborative.
SOA is important.
APIs are the skeleton key, design APIs for your consumers
Choose from the range of app development tools
Legacy modernisation is the elephant in the room. It's required but not easy.
Architect for the Cloud.
Evaluate IaaS and PaaS providers
Understand the business. Build things that add value.

We need to channel our inner anthropologist, sociologist and ethnographer
It's not just about technology anymore!



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