Faster than a potato

Tuesday morning began with some more demos. This time Chrome - the browser and the OS. Browsers have to change to cope with speed and imagery of new web applications. Chrome has 80m users two years after launch and Google maintain has forced other browsers to get better. They showed a video of how fast it was. Personally I've never used it, what bit I've seen of it hasn't been enough to tempt me away from Firefox, but would be interested to know what others think.

Then a demo of chrome OS. Developed and designed only for the web. PCs are expensive, need patching, upgrading, have to store data, have licence costs etc. The demo had chrome running on a Dell laptop. It took 6 seconds from turning the power on to boot up (they're aiming for 5), so it's fast. Looks like a web browser, uses wifi, VPN, can have multiple desktops available. Video chat available from within browser. PDFs open instantly.  I was quite sceptical, but was quite impressed with it. Will have to see what it looks like when released and how it takes off.

The Father of the Internet

Vint Cerf has a great title at Google - Chief Internet Evangelist. But he has another good one as well - the Father of the Internet. He was responsible for many of the early internet developments, including TCP/IP, and it's always an honour to hear him speak.  He did a Q and A session for us on Monday, and spoke positively about cloud developments. Some points from the various answers he gave to questions:

The world of the cloud is more than reliability and scalability, it's about taking media that so far has been distinct (eg audio, video, text, mail) and delivering it in different ways. Now we can create complex digital objects using technologies such as mash ups. One of the problmes with any digital object is will we have the technology to read it in the future (the bit rot problem). Cloud may help with this.

Do we run the risk of creating propriatry clouds that can't talk to each other? Yes, but we mustn't. We have to find a way eg a networked virtual cloud. It's only as hard as inventing the internet, and that wasn't hard :-)

Storage is not a problem, it's cheap, it's getting stuff out ie finding it that will be the problem.  He suggested putting pizza ovens at the top of the racks in the Google data centre as a second line of business but hey were worried the cheese might drip into the servers.....

He had some comments on security,  particularly about the physical location of data which people get hung up about. If safe harbour is OK, then make all of the cloud safe harbour. To make cloud work we will have to redefine physical location.

As I said, an honour to hear him.

Up, up and away.....

Dr Bertrand Piccard balloonist, doctor, explorer, pioneer, first person to circumnavigate world in hot air balloon, about to do same thing in solar powered plane..... Brilliant man, inspirational talk. Hope notes below give some flavour of it.

Life is like the atmosphere. Lots of winds. Some good, some bad. Take us by surprise and push us towards the unknown. How much effort do we put into fighting against the unknown? Lots. In a balloon, exactly the opposite. No control. Carried by the wind, towards the unknown. Have to understand that the unknown is our only certainly. Atmosphere made out of different levels of wind. Have to change altitude to find different wind to take you in direction you want to go. Can do same in life.

How do we do it? If balloon wants to go higher, pilot has to drop ballast, things you don't need anymore. This is what we must do in life. Identify our ballast.
Take our real conviction on how things should be done and envision the exact opposite.
Don't be fixed in your ideas. Take a little from many different views. Can apply to politics, religion.
Try other behaviours and strategies, other ways to think etc.
In life we have advisors - friends, colleagues, family. Listen to them. Balloonists have weathermen. In the balloon, told to stay at a certain altitude which would mean slow speed. Piccard ignored weathermen and went higher, found wind speed that would take them faster. But, weathermen had spotted low pressure system to the side of them. Traveling fast would mean they would get in front of it, and be pulled backwards by it. Is it better to go fast in wrong direction or slow in right one.
Need a long term vision but can be scary, leaves time for fears and doubts.

Took off with 3.7 tons of liquid propane. Landed with 40 kgs. Promised himself that next time he flew round world would do it with no fuel at all. He's going round in solar powered plane. Pioneering spirit about throwing away lots of preconceived ideas, and thinking differently. We need to be more independent from fossil fuel energy. If he can do it in plane, can do it with anything.

Have to fly day and night. Plane needs to have 64m wingspan. Size of 747 but weight of a car. Quarter of its weight will be in batteries. Power use same as a small scooter.

Went to airplane and glider builders and was told it was impossible to build such a plane. Then went to a ship constructor. He had no idea it was impossible, so he built it.

Plane is called Solarimpulse, and has made test flights. First night flight had just one goal, to make next sunrise before batteries run out. At sunrise, had 6 hours of power left.
A huge team effort, and demonstration of how to get rid of common assumptions. Identify what all world believes and do it the other way round.

To make a difference to climate change, will need more people who understand they can do same in their daily life as they do in their airplane.

Try and watch some of the videos on the web site, especially the video of the first night flight.

Google and the Cloud

Next session focused on Google's cloud offering with some new features announced.

First a few more stats/points.
Consumer technology is racing ahead. It has continued to innovate when the enterprise slowed down.
Out of room of 300 attendees, 50%'of room have an iPad with them, and about 30% support them in enterprise.

Information is overwhelming. 294billion emails are sent every day. That's 50 emails for every person on planet. Wonder how many of them are spam?
There's 1.2zb digital information in the world. (What's a zigabyte?)
Every minute, 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube
Average office worker spends 13 hours a week dealing with email

Collaboration is key, and mobile work is common. IT is more complicated than ever. It's expensive. Unleashes more security vulnerabilities. There's a sense of inertia once there's a lot of capital and time invested in infrastructure which is difficult and slow to change .

Cloud provides way for us to provide some of these new services users want. It's flexible, lower cost. more secure. Allows speed. Integration, collaboration and particularly innovation. New functionality can be added with no upgrades on client or server side very quickly.

4 key aspects of google cloud:
Scale. Big data centres. Very big. Google earth picture showed new data centre being built with the size of a football pitch marked for scale. Hundreds of thousands of servers. Google has 3rd largest IP network in world. Completely custom stack at every level. Can add new capacity where needed.

Reliabilty
There's Geographic redundancy with data centres in various countries.
Logical redundancy as servers will fail! Service will recognize failure and failover and heal.
Replication of data so it stays available to users.
Transparency over failures and status with status dashboard available.

Extensibility
Has to be open and flexible and integrate with other systems. Get rid of silos.
Developers can build apps on the google cloud using App engine, or can buy apps from google market place.
Take your data and run. Data exchange into and out of google cloud. Strong migration tools provided. In and out. No lock in

Security
V important. Need to protect users and data. At the technology level, user data chopped up into small pieces, encoded and stored on different discs.
In terms of people and processes there are policies, tools and procedures in place. More on security later.

Biggest vulnerability is passwords. They can be weak, snooped, hacked, phished or cracked.
New feature just announced, two-stepu verification.
You need 2 pieces of information, something know (a password), and an object which gives you a token. In this case the object is the mobile phone. There are apps for android, blackberry and iPhone to deliver the token, or it can be delivered by SMS or voice. Available from today.
Demo looked good.

Then we had a demo of other features:

Google translate, intelligently recognizes language of emails, and translates instantaneously using the computing power of the cloud.

Google apps can now render attachments on server side eg big PowerPoint files and stream them to you.

Priority inbox. If can block bad mail, ie spam, can do things like looking at common people you mail, categories, subject lines and come up with suggestions of what is important.

Can bring in real time data sets into spreadsheets

And then a pre-announce ( Google speak for a feature not yet released but about to be)
Google docverse, which is basically integration between google apps and MS Office

They also pre-announced the ability to edit google docs on the iPad, iiPhone and any mobile device running android.

How IT changes the enterprise

Next speaker was Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics. His latest book, Macrowikinomics, isn't out yet but Google managed to get us a copy each.

His hypothesis was that we are at a turning point in history for the enterprise. Financial systems, Newspapers, Universities, Healthcare, energy providers, the music Industry. All are changing.

There are 4 drivers for change:
Web 2.0. Accessed through many inert objects now, not just computers. Other important features are broadband mobility, geospaciality, true multimedia, web services. The new web is a platform for computation with the internet becoming a giant computer. The old web was presentation only. The Web didn't used to be considered real IT but it is now. It is more cost effective and has better integration than many of our legacy. Many of us have systems old enough to vote and drink. God may have created the world in 6 days but he didn't have an installed base.

The net generation. There's a demographic change and the kids now coming into employment will be a driver for change. They are a generation which processes information differently.

The social revolution. HTML being eclipsed by XML. Now the we is being used for collaboration, not content. Allowing people to self organise into communities.

The economic revolution. The enterprise is changing. There are different ways to do things. Good example of guy who owned a gold mine. Couldn't find any gold. Published all his geological etc data on Internet and announced a competition with a prize of $500,000 to anyone who could tell him if he had any gold and if so where it was. He found $3.4b of gold, well worth the half a million prize money.

5 principles for innovation, wealth and sustainability:
Collaboration. Openness. Sharing. Independence. Integrity.

Work is changing. The old work best characterised by Dilbert.
The new is more people orientated.
A new operating platform for the enterprise needs:
Personal profiles
Social networking
Blogging and microblogging
Wikis and document co creation
Ideastorms
Team project tools
Deliberation decision making
New generation knowledge management
IT integration and administration


The worst mistake people can make is thinking things will "get back to normal". Newspapers will never be the same. The music industry (whose third largest source of income is suing people who love its products), will never go back to how it was.
We are in the age of networked intelligence, beautifully illustrated by a video of a murmuration of starlings demonstrating a social organisation where there is collaborative leadership with each bird each taking responsibility.

Excellent, entertaining talk.

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.