The Evolution of Work

I'm at the Google Atmosphere conference at the moment just outside Paris in a chateau. Sounds more glamorous than it is, the nearest I got to Paris is when I flew over it, and we're not actually staying in the chateau, but some purpose built conference rooms in the grounds. Still, the sun is shining and it's a lovely setting.

The conference has about 300 attendees, and are mainly CIOs from public and private sector from all over Europe. The topic of the conference is The Evolution of Work, and is mainly about cloud computing. There were many sessions and a lot of information, so the next few posts will mainly be in note form

So, the opening session started with some statistics.
Smart phone sales will overtake PC sales this year
Cloud computing is top of Gartner's list of strategic technologies for 2010
85% of new vendors will be focused on SAAS by 2012.
40% of iPhones sold are going into business, despite being a consumer device ( example of User driven computing)
Smartphone sales will overtake pc and laptop combined by 2012
57% of blackberry users want something else a their next device
2m iPads were sold in first 2 months ( the iPad has done more for cloud computing than anything else. Just imagine, a computer that doesn't run Microsoft office!). There were lots in the room.
120 new features have been added to existing google apps.
200 new applications in the google apps market place
200,000 android devices being activated everyday. Not coming at expense of other os. iPhone still growing.
3m business now running Google apps
30m active users of Google apps.

Then some information on cloud computing. There are 2 phases of cloud computing. Do the same things cheaper eg outsource your email to make cost savings. But most important phase should and will be about doing things you've not been able to do before.

Some features of cloud:
Massive storage, (cost of storage moving to practically zero)
Huge computer capacity
Real time interaction

New possibilties:
World mapping, millions of devices collecting data across the globe about everything
Real time translation. Now a feature of gmail and docs. Also available as an API
Voice to text. Eg voice search

Examples of applications of cloud
Last April, when the volcanic ash cloud disrupted European air travel, Google had several hundred people stranded. They used a google spreadsheet to collect information about where peoppe were and where they were trying to get to, and in 2 hours had detailed information about 270 people. A simple idea.

Motorola use google apps to manage their IT resources and projects.

Organisations are moving away from owned facilities. They're expensive to maintain and protect. They're inflexible and it's difficult make them fit into todays mobile lifestyle. Most of our infrastructure and systems were conceived in a world when the only computer you used was the one on your desk. They break easy, and it's easy to take information out of them eg on memory stick on put on other devices or lose.

With the cloud, your firewall can be much smaller, but your data can be in a more secure environment.
Security is the single area of concern holding people back form embracing cloud, but is being addressed (more later)

Apparently a CIO of a US University said a few years ago that those CIOs responsible for moving to Google would eventually be fired! As was pointed out, 40% of US Universities are currently running Google Apps, and no-one has been fired. Yet.

The future?

One of my most keenly anticipated talks at any Gartner conference is that from Nick Jones, their mobile and technology futures expert. A great speaker and very knowledgeable. That said, there's something I thought he got quite wrong in this talk, but we'll come to that later...

Some key points from his talk:
* Mobile is critical, don't ignore it.
* The next generation of workers will have different expectations and will work in different ways. They will demand more autonomy and more input in the choice of technology, expecting to be allowed to connect anything.
* Location independent work and more use of teams and collaborative tools will also increase.
* There will be less device centricity and the expectations of technology will be driven by the consumer space. We will have to accommodate it because they will use it anyway.

Interestingly this is what we are seeing in Universities now and have been for some time. We are dealing with a very mobile population, who already turn up with any device running any operating system, and will use any software that they can. But present at this conference were CIOs from all sectors, where they are not so liberal at the moment.

Nick also talked about connectivity which he termed the fallacy of the Cloud. Cloud computing will only really be useful when networks are free, fast, have unlimited bandwidth, have no latency and are everywhere. This is not the case at the moment, and although they are improving but they are nothing like the wired world yet. This will take time as nothing in the network space happens quickly. Again, this mirrored the Digital Britain discussion I had at the roundtable on Tuesday.

In terms of mobility, smart phones are apparently taking over the world. There are a number of operating systems, and some predictions you can make about them. Android is growing in market share, the iPhone is staying strong, Microsoft is low and may never get back into top 3, and Symbian has no presence in North America so may find it difficult to compete. With smart phones come App Stores, which can be used for business purposes and distribute apps, but there are some risks and education and care are needed.

As usual Nick gave a good overview of what technologies we might expect to see in the next 5 to 10 years, and these included Epaper signage, 3D displays, cleaning and delivery robots, indoor navigation, and more technologies using voice. Voice controlled search, emotion detection, voice controlled applications and voice over wifi.

So as users demand more choice of devices, we have to look at different support models. In brief they are:

Control orientated. We tell users what device they can have, we guarantee service levels, put in place metrics and security. This model is going to decrease over time.
Choice orientated. Users can have a bigger choice of devices, but smaller number of applications. Eg mobile email and web
Innovation oriented. Users have the autonomy to create new processes and deliverables on any device they choose
Hands off, or bring your own IT. Let users use what they want or their own personal devices.

All good stuff, and the different models of support are things that we're all looking at.

So, what did I disagree with? Well, Nick was rather scathing about tablets, and iPads in particular, offering the opinion that they would only ever serve a niche market, would never be used in an enterprise way, and wouldn't replace laptops because they didn't have the functionality of a laptop to handle spreadsheets for example, and had a "crippled" operating system. Well, I beg to differ, and this is no Mac vs PC argument. They may never become ubiquitous, but they will replace laptops for many people, mine already has. I can type and read documents, handle spreadsheets, annotate PDFs, get my email and calendar, access all of our web based enterprise systems, with one notable exception which hopefully is about to be fixed :-)

It fits in my handbag, so I don't have to lug a briefcase around, and the screen is big enough to do everything i want to, but the absolute killer for me for the mobile life I increasingly lead? The battery life. It can easily last 10 to 12 hours of heavy use. The last two conferences I've been to I haven't had to look for power sockets, or sit by the edge of the room, or stop taking notes by lunchtime because my battery's flat. Yes, there's some stuff that needs improving, but I wouldn't write them off and there's nothing crippled about the operating system.

Social Network Analysis

One of the themes to come out of many of the presentations and discussions was that successful collaboration projects recognise that 80% of the effort should be put into the people issues. The technology is only part of the story. One way of getting a perspective of what issues might exist is to do a social network analysis.  Look at current relationships and connections between people, identifying nodes and information flows. If you look at how work gets done you can identify influential people, groups who work together, and loners who don't communicate. It can then be interesting to compare with the organisational structure. In the above hypothetical example there's an individual easily identified who seems key, but would not be easily identifiable from the organisational chart. Without him, the "blue" team would be totally disconnected from the rest of the group. The Head of the Dept (red) is also fairly disconnected.

So, could doing such an analysis on our own departments/teams tell us anything we didn't know? Could we use it to better understand how we work, and where there might be issues?  The presentation included some examples of social network analyses of projects and their interaction with stakeholders, which did illustrate  how integrated the members of the network are, how well information is being shared across the network and how influential certain project participants are. It seemed to provide a more useful depiction than a project organisation structure diagram since it can identify critical relationships in projects.

Definitely food for thought.

Manchester City's web site

A great talk from Victoria Stansfield, Digital Delivery Manager, Manchester City Football Club about the development of the Manchester City web site. After the club had been taken over by new owners, a decision was taken that the site had to be radically reworked, with the ambition of being the best football web site in the world.  Four months later, they had their new site.

Developed using Sitecore, it's interactive, contains video, high res photos, real time updates and is integrated with many other systems such as online marketing and ticketing.  It took 357 developer days using scrum cycles, an agile rapid development technique. It copes with high traffic volume in peaks, and has been translated into arabic requiring right to left reading. On match days it takes in OTPA feeds to give people live stats, live commentary, photos.

I was very impressed with what they'd achieved with a relatively small number of developers (I think there were 3 in total), and the level of integration and functionality they'd achieved using Sitecore. My only criticism was that I was trying to look at it during the talk on my iPad, and it doesn't render properly on an iPad (or on Firefox on my mac) , and the video and Matchday Centre are in flash so they don't work.  We were told though that it is being rewritten into html5 and should therefore be compatible by Christmas.

As an indication of how important they see the interaction with fans, they've  appointed a permanent, full time social media executive, who manages the Facebook site, Twitter, forums etc. It did amuse me slightly that they can't have live twitter feeds, or open fan forums because the language the fans use can be less than tasteful, and they get sabotage posts from Man Utd fans!

Evolution in real time

Today I'm at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in London. The opening session was an interesting and amusing look on how things have evolved in this area. The first slide - a TripAdvisor web site announcing the 2010 dirtiest hotels as voted on by visitors to the site, showed how little control some businesses now have about the messages being put out about them. No-one know who'd voted, whether they'd really been to the hotel, whether they were competitors....

There's a complex ecosystem over which we have no control - but we can influence. Technology has made communities more powerful and enabled change to happen more rapidly.

There was a quick look back at some themes that were being discussed 15 years ago at similar Gartner events in 1995 including:

• The desktop of the future (do we talk about desktops anymore?)
• The future of end user computing (its not about computers anymore but devices)
• The integrated personal assistant on your desktop (who remembers Microsoft's clippy  -  the most reviled piece of technology ever)
• The paperless office (are we any nearer?)

Then a look forward to some developments we might see in the next 5 to 10 years:

• No-one will be interested in or know about the device operating system (I would say for some users esp MacOS that's here already)
• most new IT investments will be sourced as services from the Cloud
• User experience will be key
• Displays will be tactile, flexible, 3D, projected anywhere

Crowd sourcing  - using groups of individuals to solve problems - is already on the increase. This is based on the premise that its easier to solve a problem with a diverse group of non experts, than with a small group of experts.

Memory is getting cheaper - terabyte memory sticks are on their way - so it will be easier to record and store everything rather than be discriminatory, so good search and retrieval tools will be essential. We're seeing this already with photographs and films. I take loads of both, and can't be bothered most of the time to sort through them, I just store everything, and if necessary buy a bigger hard disc.

A good opening talk, setting the scene for the rest of the conference.

Roundtables

The rest of the day at the IDBG CIO meeting was taken up with roundtable discussions and talking to suppliers. The roundtables are a good way of sharing information and exploring different issues, especially with colleagues who aren't in the HE sector.

The first was entitled Towards a Digital Britain, and really focused on what we thought the issues were in achieving a totally connected society.  I think we all agreed that one of the biggest barrier was connectivity.  We have much poorer 3G and wireless coverage than some other countries, even less well developed ones.  And even were there is good coverage, some people are still "not connected", probably because they don't want to be, or can't see the benefits or can't afford a PC. Some towns (close to Sheffield!), have less than 30% of people using the internet, and as things are geneally cheaper on the internet, and more services are moved there, this is going to disadvantage them.

The second roundtable was on cloud computing, and focused very much on local authorities, especially Westminster. This council has being 'infrastructure free' as a strategy, and aims to be so by 2014. It is outsourcing everything, including network provision, desktops and applications. I would argue this isn't really cloud computing, although the definitions of outhosting, outsourcing and cloud are becoming a bit blurred. As usual, they were interested in what Universities are doing, especially the move to things like Google.

The final roundtable I went to was about reputation and brand management, and the role of technology. We looked at how technology, especially social media, can enhance your reputation, and how if not used properly it can damage it.  I used the recent example of The Royal Opera House.  A blogger, Intermezzo, blogs about the ROH, gives information about performances, reviews, promotes shows etc and generally enhances their reputation. However, the ROH head of legal affairs decided they were using some copyrighted images illegally, and sent an extrodinary series of emails to them, including the threat to ban them from the ROH, and also including some fairly interesting grammar and spelling.  There's nothing the blogging/twitter community likes better than a cause like this, and suddenly the ROH was a trending topic on twitter  for all the wrong reasons, was appearing in the news and blogs, and was inundated with emails and poor  feedback.  In the end, the Head of Corporate Communications had to step in an apologise. I know, because I was one of the complainants, and received a very apologetic email.  Very poor handling of a situation by someone who clearly didn't understand social media. But I have to say, very well recovered once the comms people got hold of it.

As I'm staying in London tonight for a Gartner Summit tomorrow, I took the opportunity to see a show  - We Will Rock You.  Brilliant!

Data security

Today I'm at an IDBG (Institutional Business Development Group) meeting for Public Sector CIOs. It started last night with a presentation on partnerships, and then the first session this morning was from David Smith, the Deputy Information Commissioner.

There have always been losses of data, it used to be personal data discovered in black bin liners on refuse tips, but now the scale has changed with the use of data sticks, laptops etc. Recent high profile data breaches have led to tightening up on data security in the public sector, but there is still a lot that can be done.

The Information Commissioners Office powers have increased recently, and they can take enforcement actions and audit government organisations. Under their voluntary breach notification they receive about 30 to 40 notifications a month with the public sector predominating and the NHS top of the list. This doesn't necessarily mean more breaches, just might be more willing to report under a voluntary system.

Some key points:

• Theft and loss of portable media is highly significant, but it was interesting to note that the ICO doesn't consider the loss of a properly encrypted form of media a data beach.

• Retention and lack of weeding of data continues to be a problem, and we should work to minimize the amount of data stored where possible on the grounds that if you don't have it you can't lose it.

• Many problems arise from a lack of proper risk assessment and a one size fits all approach with organisations treating all personal data in the same way.

• The DP Act says appropriate security must be in place, not absolute security. More support for a risk based approach.

• All systems/services should utilise Privacy by Design, ie design in privacy from beginning, don't try and fit it afterwards.

• It's all about building public confidence. Take Google Sreet View, it turns out that they hardly collected any personal information, but they took a reputation hit because of perceptions.

• If you have rules that are too strict, people will get round them. For example, some firms banned memory sticks, so users just emailed data to their personal email accounts.

• As mobility and access to networked information increases, try to avoid anything being downloaded to devices.

After the talk I had an interesting chat with him about the implications of outsourcing things like email, and the simple answer to my question about whether safe harbour was adequate for data held outside the EU in the US was "yes".

No longer the gatekeepers....

A couple of months ago I found myself presenting at a number of confereces - the theme seemed to be the same at all of them - what challenges are we facing as a sector, and how they might they shape the future of IT departments. Last Friday I repeated the talk, this time to the department.  All staff were invited, although it was particularly relevant for the IT staff. Always interesting to see who turns up (or rather, who doesn't - I wonder if it's the same people who claim not to know what's going on and we don't communicate enough...).

I'm not going to repeat everything I said - anyone interested can watch it here. But my conclusions were that we have to become more flexible and agile -  the days of the two year project are gone, we need to be thinking of development time in months or weeks. We need to simplify things and help the University become more efficient, and look at different service delivery models. Outsourcing, out-hosting, shared services - all need to be carefully considered so that we can focus our resources on supporting the University's key business objectives of teaching and research. This might need us to make some hard decisions, and in some cases reduce service levels or stop doing things completely. No longer the gatekeepers of information, we need to facilitate, help and educate our users to get the best out of systems and services we provide as well as those provided by others.

And we must continue to innovate - some might ask if we can afford to in these times of financial constraint, but I would argue that we can't afford not to. We will die as IT departments if we don't - we can't afford just to keep the lights on, we have to find new ways of doing things. It's all about getting the balance right, and deciding where resources should go.

Suppliers to the University

Busy week this week - lots of HR stuff with promotion cases due in today, our SRDS (Staff Review and Development Scheme) Moderating Panel meeting this morning, and a meeting earlier about a scheme for 360 review of senior management staff.

Also this week it was our suppliers exhibition. Organised by our Procurement Department, it brings together many organisations who provide services to the University to have a stall, show off their products and meet staff and answer questions. As a major supplier of services to the University we like to make sure we're represented, and this year had 4 stands. The Print Service had examples of the different things they can print (its not just paper!) - mugs, pens, bags, posters, etc, and information about how to print in the most environmentally friendly way.

The Learning and Teaching Technologies section were there to answer questions about AV equipment, and the Computing Services stand had a "Green IT" theme, giving away green pencils made from recycled CD cases, and a quiz to test how much staff knew about environmental issues, with a bottle of champagne as the prize.  Questions such as how much does it cost the University if you leave your PC switched on overnight (c£70 per year)), and how much have we saved so far by virtualising our servers (c£400,000 over 5 years). Continuing our green theme, Transport Services were promoting our hybrid car, the Toyota Prius for those wishing to use it for University travel.

It's a great opportunity to talk to staff, and to find out what their thoughts and concerns are and get some feedback on our services.

Wireless expansion

Our Voice and Data team have very busy these past few weeks, migrating our existing wireless system to a new platform. This has entailed some very early starts to change the access points over without causing users inconvenience.

There's been a massive effort from the team to install new points and increase the coverage of the network as well as change the existing service.  We consulted with  Faculties to find out where they needed the coverage, and at the moment we have 378 wireless access points in active service and this number is going up  every day.

The rollout has seen the introduction of a new model of access point which has introduced cutting edge 802.11n (5ghz) access to the University network. 802.11n more than doubles current wireless throughput and provides a much more resilient signal through obstacles and walls. Most modern computers such as Macbooks and higher spec PC's come fitted with the required adapters.

We have recently seen a huge increase in load on our wireless network, particularly in areas such the Information Commons.  Many more devices are connecting to it - students have smart phones, iPod Touches, laptops -  and will often have more than one wireless enabled device with them. As we make more of our services available to mobile users, a pervasive, powerful, resilient wireless network is essential, and I'm glad to say that we are working hard to achieve that goal.

Buff dogging.....

Yesterday I was in Edinburgh for a UCISA Executive meeting. As part of our mission to extend our working relationships with other similar bodies, we invited the chair of the British Universities Finance Directors Group (BUFDG) to join us. We had lots of things to discuss, and when we compared notes very similar agendas.

We know the government and funding councils are encouraging shared services, and one of the things we wanted to explore was whether the Finance Directors believe that the use of common finance systems by groups of Universities are achievable. As IT directors,  we think the technical issues could be overcome, but the resistance has in the past come from the end users of such systems. Other items we talked about included difficulties of costing services, and how we can use our finance systems to best effect to do this, which might mean changes to the structure of accounts.  We all agreed that this was a prerequisite to looking at changes to models of service delivery, whether that involved shared services or outsourcing, as it would be difficult to demonstrate cost benefits when you don't know what the service is costing in the first place.

Funding of IT and in particular capital vs recurrent funding was an area we touched on, with an agreement that we do need to understand each other's language better. A joint workshop between finance and IT was suggested - a sort of IT for dummies for the finance people, and vice versa for us!

A very useful discussion with the potential for some joint projects, and some joint funding bids to produce best practice case studies.

On a lighter note, it amused me that BUFDG is apparently pronounced Buffdog, and I can't get the image of a small dog out of my head now. And then today I found this which amused me even more.

Getting back to normal

So, things getting almost back to normal now after extended email outage.  All users have a service, and for a small number we're recovering some mail from our backups. But we have sent them a list of what mail should have been delivered to them which they seem to have found useful.  As in all such incidents, communication is vital. In this case we were without one of our major tools - email!  All internal customers were pointed to our service status web page which we updated frequently, and the stats of the hits on it showed that people were using it - from 10 hits on Monday, to 39,000 on Wednesday!

We had a link on our home page to an information page for external users, and also kept in touch with key departmental contacts by phone. In general our customers have been very understanding, and the number of complaints relatively small.

Next step is the incident review where we look at what went wrong technically and how we can minimise the risk of it happening again, and the process of managing the incident and what lessons we can learn.

Interesting times

The Chinese allegedly use the phrase "May you live in interesting times" as a curse.  Well, for many of us today, it has been an interesting time. After yesterday's disc failure, and subsequent filesystem rebuild failure, the infrastructure team had spent most of the night cloning the discs and repairing errors to start the rebuild again - we were all fairly confident that we would be able to have email up and running again mid morning. By just after 10am we were delivering mail again, and waiting until we had delivered the backlog before releasing it to users.  The unix team office was a bit like mission control as we all gathered to make sure it was stable, when we suffered another disc failure. You could have heard a pin drop. And a few expletives. And we ran out of biscuits. Luckily we could get more biscuits.

What followed was several hours of analysis, creative thinking, problem solving, phoning our email administrator who was on holiday in France who dropped everything to help remotely. Unfortunately the pressure is on very few people - most of us can offer support etc but we really rely on those with the technical ability to solve these problems.  I was feeling very out of the loop, as I had to leave at lunchtime to catch a train to Edinburgh for a UCISA meeting. My phone battery was running out, the power sockets in the carriage weren't working, and there was virtually no 3G signal! But, thank goodness for twitter and that 3 of the team doing the fixing were using it, so I just about kept in touch.

Eventually, by moving the much of the mail on to our new central filestore were were able to get a mail service up by mid afternoon for over 80% of users, with the rest being recovered and will be live tomorrow morning.

A huge thanks to everyone  - the infrastructure team who worked almost throughout the night (and are still working as I type this), to the incident management team, the communications team, the web team, the switchboard who handled the external calls, and the helpdesk staff who had to deal with many, many calls - over 800 yesterday afternoon alone.

When I arrived at my hotel, I was told I was staying in a converted asylum. Seemed rather appropriate somehow!