Another session today was on how social business is changing the way organisations work by Stuart McRae from IBM
More companies now use social media internally than externally.
We are entering the post PC era. Apple selling 100m iPads in 2013. Usage shifting from creation at desks to consumption on the move
McKinsey estimates that social technologies could raise productivity in some areas by 20%
Driven by 4 disruptive mega trends. Social, mobile, cloud, analytics. (Now, where have I heard that before....)
Increasingly influential and vocal customers. We can't just listen to them. Need to interact and lead them,
Growing demand for 24/7 and mobile connectedness. People collaborate on the move.
If you want the best talent and employees, have to give them a working environment which gives them the best experience and productivity.
A Social Business strategy should be driven by the above challenges
It should enable the workforce to work more effectively, increase productivity and improve employee satisfaction
It should also produce exceptional customer experience, customer engagement and customer delight!
Primarily a culture issue, not technology.
Need to encourage employees to collaborate and not compete
Collaborate with partners to serve customers better
Engage employees in conversations with customers
Social businesses deliver better results by empowering their people to perform better and to serve their customers better.
Need to empower employees, even when it requires working across organisations
Corporate IT has to go away and become cloud based to achieve this.
20th century collaboration tools are no longer good enough. Eg email.
Email model vs social media model. With email everything is pushed to you, just in case you might need it. With the social media model you pull the information - when you need it, you can find it.
"It's not information overload, it's filter failure" , great quote from Clay Shirky
Encourage sharing of information, eg tweeting. Success comes from changing user behaviour, from "knowledge is power" to "knowledge sharing is rewarded".
Content needs to get away from being document centric. Move to online creation and collaboration with mobile device support. Focus on sharing.
Simplify the media. Focus on content and communication.
Make the content discoverable, use tags, social bookmarks. New generation of knowledge management.
Adoption is key to business success.
A thought provoking talk there's a lot more Information on this topic on his website.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Showing posts with label cisg13. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cisg13. Show all posts
Thursday, 21 November 2013
I've looked at clouds....
We had a session today from Tim Marshall, CEO of JANET on Cloud.
One of the first things he suggested that we should do,is make sure we know what's going on around us. Don't do things in a particular way just because we always have done.
A wonderful example is TVs coverage of tennis matches which is always for. The end of the court. That's because the aspect ratio of TVs used to be 6 by 4 and the end of court view fitted better. Now the aspect ratio is much wider, so you'd better a better picture if you put the camera in the middle, opposite the umpire. But, they've always done it like that...
We also need to examine our appetite for risk? Is it too low? Can cause innovation inertia.
Cloud doesn't change our business. Our business is not running IT. Our business is teaching, learning, research etc. Cloud is about changing the way we do our business, not the business itself. It's also about IT becoming more service orientated.
Much of the infrastructure is commodity now. If someone can do it better and cheaper why don't we let them.
We have to look at why we might want to keep things out of the cloud. Is it because we love the smell of a hot server in the morning...
the essential characteristics of cloud are:
On demand self service
Broad network access
Resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measured service
Tend not to get all of it, but bits here and there.
JANET 6 is our world class network which launches next week. It needs using. We should look at co-location. Get the tin out of the institution and somewhere else. (More than 50 miles away so people can't get in there cars and go and hug it.)
Several options from do nothing, to fully off site, via hybrid
UCAS uses cloud for burst capacity. Doesn't happen by magic. Took a lot of work to prepare UCAS applications to be cloud ready. But benefits huge.
Risk and innovation needs balancing.
What are the advantages of cloud?
Capacity, reliability, flexibility for large scale applications that are peaky
Cost effectiveness. Office 365 and Google are free.
Business Continuity
My comment, it's about service delivery and improvement
Cloud is about value, not cost
Barriers.
Mainly culture.
Some technical, ie getting applications cloud ready. But are lots of tools you can use.
Some competitive reasons eg HPC often kept in house. But why? Maybe culture. A lot of is commodity and people are buying it from amazon on their credit card as we speak.
JANET working on a provisioning portal for amazon
Some barriers are senior management who are concerned about cyber security
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
One of the first things he suggested that we should do,is make sure we know what's going on around us. Don't do things in a particular way just because we always have done.
A wonderful example is TVs coverage of tennis matches which is always for. The end of the court. That's because the aspect ratio of TVs used to be 6 by 4 and the end of court view fitted better. Now the aspect ratio is much wider, so you'd better a better picture if you put the camera in the middle, opposite the umpire. But, they've always done it like that...
We also need to examine our appetite for risk? Is it too low? Can cause innovation inertia.
Cloud doesn't change our business. Our business is not running IT. Our business is teaching, learning, research etc. Cloud is about changing the way we do our business, not the business itself. It's also about IT becoming more service orientated.
Much of the infrastructure is commodity now. If someone can do it better and cheaper why don't we let them.
We have to look at why we might want to keep things out of the cloud. Is it because we love the smell of a hot server in the morning...
the essential characteristics of cloud are:
On demand self service
Broad network access
Resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measured service
Tend not to get all of it, but bits here and there.
JANET 6 is our world class network which launches next week. It needs using. We should look at co-location. Get the tin out of the institution and somewhere else. (More than 50 miles away so people can't get in there cars and go and hug it.)
Several options from do nothing, to fully off site, via hybrid
UCAS uses cloud for burst capacity. Doesn't happen by magic. Took a lot of work to prepare UCAS applications to be cloud ready. But benefits huge.
Risk and innovation needs balancing.
What are the advantages of cloud?
Capacity, reliability, flexibility for large scale applications that are peaky
Cost effectiveness. Office 365 and Google are free.
Business Continuity
My comment, it's about service delivery and improvement
Cloud is about value, not cost
Barriers.
Mainly culture.
Some technical, ie getting applications cloud ready. But are lots of tools you can use.
Some competitive reasons eg HPC often kept in house. But why? Maybe culture. A lot of is commodity and people are buying it from amazon on their credit card as we speak.
JANET working on a provisioning portal for amazon
Some barriers are senior management who are concerned about cyber security
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
Whack-a-Mole of new ideas
Next session was from Abilene Christian University about lessons from their mobile learning initiative
ACU is in Texas and has 5000 students,
They were the first university to establish a comprehensive 1to 1 mobile learning initiative that provides every student with an iPhone or iPod touch.
One driver was innovation and providing something to attract students.
But, the primary driver was the student profile.
Students coming in now were born in 1995, (he made the point that some of us have t shirts older than that)
They've never lived in a world where disaggregation isn't possible; where you can't always pause and rewind live TV.
They inhabit a world where you are always connected. There are more text messages sent now in a day than there are people on the planet.
Consumption spreads faster today, eg it took 2 years for Facebook to get to 50m users. It took 39 years for radio.
Implementation to saturation is very fast. It is only 3 years ago that the iPad was invented.
The world has changed, but have our classrooms?
Are our students engaged?
At ACU they had been trying to address the above two issues. In 2007 the iPhone was released. The Internet could now be in your pocket, all the time.
They set out to explore how this could be used in HE to foster innovation, and decided to give one to very student.
Some myths around innovation that they leaned during this implementation:
Innovation doesn't happen in eureka moments.
Innovation doesn't have a methodology. Need lots of trial and error and risk taking.
Best idea always wins. It doesn't.
People love new ideas. Not all do. Need to give people permission to go slowly. So, when they decided to roll out iPhones to all students, ( and they told faculty staff after they'd announced it), they told staff they didn't have to let students use them if they didn't want to.
Resistance to change is part of our culture.
Are we playing Whack-a-Mole with new ideas? As they come up, we smack them down.
Organisational cultures are like an iceberg.
Top of iceberg things you can see. Artifacts
Below the surface are exposed beliefs. What we think is important
Down below. Basic assumptions. Things so engrained we can't find words for them. Each bottom one trumps the one above.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Only way to change culture is to work together to solve a problem. We need to reframe our discussions into a problem that we can solve collectively.
As you think about innovation on campus, remember that it's not about the technology. It's about the students, and preparing them for the world they are going to inherit, not the ones they live in now.
ACU is in Texas and has 5000 students,
They were the first university to establish a comprehensive 1to 1 mobile learning initiative that provides every student with an iPhone or iPod touch.
One driver was innovation and providing something to attract students.
But, the primary driver was the student profile.
Students coming in now were born in 1995, (he made the point that some of us have t shirts older than that)
They've never lived in a world where disaggregation isn't possible; where you can't always pause and rewind live TV.
They inhabit a world where you are always connected. There are more text messages sent now in a day than there are people on the planet.
Consumption spreads faster today, eg it took 2 years for Facebook to get to 50m users. It took 39 years for radio.
Implementation to saturation is very fast. It is only 3 years ago that the iPad was invented.
The world has changed, but have our classrooms?
Are our students engaged?
At ACU they had been trying to address the above two issues. In 2007 the iPhone was released. The Internet could now be in your pocket, all the time.
They set out to explore how this could be used in HE to foster innovation, and decided to give one to very student.
Some myths around innovation that they leaned during this implementation:
Innovation doesn't happen in eureka moments.
Innovation doesn't have a methodology. Need lots of trial and error and risk taking.
Best idea always wins. It doesn't.
People love new ideas. Not all do. Need to give people permission to go slowly. So, when they decided to roll out iPhones to all students, ( and they told faculty staff after they'd announced it), they told staff they didn't have to let students use them if they didn't want to.
Resistance to change is part of our culture.
Are we playing Whack-a-Mole with new ideas? As they come up, we smack them down.
Organisational cultures are like an iceberg.
Top of iceberg things you can see. Artifacts
Below the surface are exposed beliefs. What we think is important
Down below. Basic assumptions. Things so engrained we can't find words for them. Each bottom one trumps the one above.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Only way to change culture is to work together to solve a problem. We need to reframe our discussions into a problem that we can solve collectively.
As you think about innovation on campus, remember that it's not about the technology. It's about the students, and preparing them for the world they are going to inherit, not the ones they live in now.
IT at the Olympics
The opening keynote at CISG was from Gerry Pennell, former CIO for the London Olympics, and now Director of IT at Manchester University. Unfortunately I missed the first few minutes as I was at an organising meeting for next years UCISA conference - apparently he started with a video of the highlights of the olympics which I would have liked to have seen. He went through some of his experiences, and pulled out some learning outcomes for HE.
Some notes I took of the key points:
We only had one shot at it. Getting it right was key - Atlanta suffered reputation damage by not being able to deliver the results needed.
Embrace deadlines - they are your ally. This was an IT project you can't be late on.
Olympics is a fantastic example of real time data distributed to different channels and audiences.
Real time data & provision of mobile meant that the way people engaged digitally was different to any other Games. In previous Games, people had checked results about 3 times a day.
60% of traffic during peak web activity during Andy Murray tennis final came through mobile device
Consumer behaviour has changed. They had put lots of infrastructure in people were checking the real time data much more frequently - checking results on a blow by blow basis and in the Andy Murray example, point by point
This lead to lots of requests to central servers which were running 88% utilisation when they had planned for 25%
Learning point: get your plans right, but build in flexibility
Lot of testing took place. 1000s of hours including set piece technology rehearsals.
There were also 42 test events between May 2011 and games (eg the London marathon)
They learned things from the subtle to the blindingly obvious.
Good example of the blindingly obvious - everything depends on the delivery of cabins which have to be connected to the radio network.
At the first test events the cabins were made of metal. A faraday cage! They then discovered that they had been procured in a bulk deal for of all test events, and the Games!
Learning point: Don't test technology in isolation. Have to test with processes and people for real learning
Cyber security was critical. They knew games would be cyber attacked and were advised that it would be from anonymous hacktivist groups.
There were 6 fairly serious cyber incidents. Some a surprising including:
A probing attack from semi professional hackers in Central European who have form for looking at web sites and publicising vulnerabilities. A DDOS attack from 90 IP addresses for 20 mins. Very sophisticated. A carefully timed and synchronised Botnet. Still don't know who or what they wanted
Another DDOS attack causing them to fail over.
And a state sponsored attack.
Learning point: Build your cyber defences around people, processes and technology. Its about how fast you can respond.
Dealing with operational challenges was interesting! A really good example was the photo finish cameras in the main stadium which have to be at a steep angle, and subject to no vibration or movement. The best position for the angle was the top of the stadium, but this was subject to vibration. So, they constructed a steel cage, connectect it to the bedrock, put a vibration dampening platform on it, tested it by getting hundreds of people jumping up and down to look for jitter. However, after when Jessica Ennis had won her final race, the photo at the finish line was blurred. They concluded that the incredibly loud roar in the stadium had travelled up the steel cage which had acted like a tuning fork and vibrated!
Learning point: Life is not always what you think its going to be. Expect the unexpected.
A question from the audience about how to motivate staff when they are engaged on a limited contract, with no real sanctions such as performance management or financial rewards got a good answer. Get them engaged with the vision. A shared vision aand one that everyone is committed to is the oly way to do it.
Another good lesson for HE.
Some notes I took of the key points:
We only had one shot at it. Getting it right was key - Atlanta suffered reputation damage by not being able to deliver the results needed.
Embrace deadlines - they are your ally. This was an IT project you can't be late on.
Olympics is a fantastic example of real time data distributed to different channels and audiences.
Real time data & provision of mobile meant that the way people engaged digitally was different to any other Games. In previous Games, people had checked results about 3 times a day.
60% of traffic during peak web activity during Andy Murray tennis final came through mobile device
Consumer behaviour has changed. They had put lots of infrastructure in people were checking the real time data much more frequently - checking results on a blow by blow basis and in the Andy Murray example, point by point
This lead to lots of requests to central servers which were running 88% utilisation when they had planned for 25%
Learning point: get your plans right, but build in flexibility
Lot of testing took place. 1000s of hours including set piece technology rehearsals.
There were also 42 test events between May 2011 and games (eg the London marathon)
They learned things from the subtle to the blindingly obvious.
Good example of the blindingly obvious - everything depends on the delivery of cabins which have to be connected to the radio network.
At the first test events the cabins were made of metal. A faraday cage! They then discovered that they had been procured in a bulk deal for of all test events, and the Games!
Learning point: Don't test technology in isolation. Have to test with processes and people for real learning
Cyber security was critical. They knew games would be cyber attacked and were advised that it would be from anonymous hacktivist groups.
There were 6 fairly serious cyber incidents. Some a surprising including:
A probing attack from semi professional hackers in Central European who have form for looking at web sites and publicising vulnerabilities. A DDOS attack from 90 IP addresses for 20 mins. Very sophisticated. A carefully timed and synchronised Botnet. Still don't know who or what they wanted
Another DDOS attack causing them to fail over.
And a state sponsored attack.
Learning point: Build your cyber defences around people, processes and technology. Its about how fast you can respond.
Dealing with operational challenges was interesting! A really good example was the photo finish cameras in the main stadium which have to be at a steep angle, and subject to no vibration or movement. The best position for the angle was the top of the stadium, but this was subject to vibration. So, they constructed a steel cage, connectect it to the bedrock, put a vibration dampening platform on it, tested it by getting hundreds of people jumping up and down to look for jitter. However, after when Jessica Ennis had won her final race, the photo at the finish line was blurred. They concluded that the incredibly loud roar in the stadium had travelled up the steel cage which had acted like a tuning fork and vibrated!
Learning point: Life is not always what you think its going to be. Expect the unexpected.
A question from the audience about how to motivate staff when they are engaged on a limited contract, with no real sanctions such as performance management or financial rewards got a good answer. Get them engaged with the vision. A shared vision aand one that everyone is committed to is the oly way to do it.
Another good lesson for HE.
Keep calm
Monday was our Business Continuity Steering Group where we caught up on all things BC related, including Phase 2 of our incident contacts system where we'll be developing it to be used by departments to store all of their staff contact details and BC plans. We also looked at a number of procedures that we've been documenting in the light of various incidents and exercises including using our student accommodation in the event of a major incident, and evacuating buildings in an emergency that's not a fire. That's more complicated than you think! We've also produced a handy little fold-out card telling you what to do in an incident - which is summed up by Keep Calm and Call Control.
At the moment I'm at the UCISA CISG conference, primarily to have some meetings relating to next year's main conference which is being held in the same venue. I'm on the Conference Organising Committee, and with such a big and prestigious conference its important to get every detail right if you want to keep attracting delegates. Its is the little things that can make people enjoy, or not, a conference. The quality of the coffee gets as many comments as the quality of the speakers! Being at a conference in the same venue means that we can check these details out. For the first time last night I was involved with choosing the menu for the gala dinner, which involved trying 6 starters, 6 main courses and 3 desserts. I wasn't very hungry this morning.
At the moment I'm at the UCISA CISG conference, primarily to have some meetings relating to next year's main conference which is being held in the same venue. I'm on the Conference Organising Committee, and with such a big and prestigious conference its important to get every detail right if you want to keep attracting delegates. Its is the little things that can make people enjoy, or not, a conference. The quality of the coffee gets as many comments as the quality of the speakers! Being at a conference in the same venue means that we can check these details out. For the first time last night I was involved with choosing the menu for the gala dinner, which involved trying 6 starters, 6 main courses and 3 desserts. I wasn't very hungry this morning.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)