Big Data. It's big, but is it clever?

Presentation from Autonomy
Fundamental shift in the "I" in IT. Now all about information. Most of it doesn't fit into neat databases. Eg social media, rich media, clickstreams, sensor data, images, email and more.

All unstructured. Growing rapidly. It's where all the interesting things happen. But, how can we analyse it? Human information contains emotions, nuances etc. Difficult to derive meaning.

Processing human information very complex. Traditional searching is based on attributes. Not looking at concepts and meaning of the information.
Human information is diverse, many different types. Ideas have the concept of distance, no two are the same. Can use very different words, but the concept can be the same. Context is also important. Your point of view can change the context of the information.

Meaning based computing is the answer! Moves away from keywords to ideas and concepts. Has to be done in real time. What's happening not what's happened.

An example. Analyse calls to a call centre to find out what customers think of customer service. Sentiment analysis on all contacts, email, calls etc. using intelligent queries. Apparently it works, and has been used in many areas.

We all have a lot of valuable information locked up as unstructured data, which we can now analyse. Social media, twitter, blogs etc can all be used to extract information.

So, should we be using this sort of analysis, and if so, what for?

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Consumerisation of mobile

I always try and get to a Nick Jones session at a Gartner, he's usually got something interesting to say about future technologies, especially in the mobile space.

This session was mainly about consumerisation in the mobile area.

Have to learn to live with it and love it, it's all we've got. A lot of consumer technology is better than enterprise technology, often cheaper, more features and quicker to develop. Often more innovative.
Some conflicts including security and compliance, cost and risk. Balancing act, has to be win win, there have to be compromises.

Lots of different sorts of mobile work and mobile workers. Some is under the radar, personal iPad used for a mixture of work and personal, through formal BYO programs to traditional company owned device. Consumerisation destroys one size fits all model of support and management. So, you need to segment your workforce, and look at appropriate model for different roles and types.

BYOD will continue to grow. IT can no longer dictate hardware and platform decisions. Staff can use up to 6 devices and share data via the cloud. App stores redefine expectations of app behaviour and appearance. BYOA (apps) is also going to grow. Key mobile vendors have become service and cloud vendors eg Apple, Google, Amazon.

Employee ownership of smart devices is continuing to increase as prices fall and smart phones replace feature phones. Might be a backlash to BYOD from employees who see it as an additional cost to them.

Some future mobile technologies:
3D device display
HTML5
Ubiquitous screens
Context
Biometrics
epaper
Gestural interfaces

Watch out for them!

Internet of things
Apps will connect mobile devices to everything. Toys, toaster, lighting, tyres, you name it. There will be new interactions and solutions. Clothes with stress sensors to help you with Pilates already there. Leads to new challenges in supporting end user devices! Most of management of these things will be through mobile devices. Lots of opportunities, and risks.

Social factors are important. Consumerisation is not for everyone. Technically unsophisticated staff ( I like this phrase!) tend not to be good at self support. Low income workers can't afford this technology.

Consumerisation makes you think differently about vendors.
Windows very corporate
Google very consumer orientated
Apple, mainly customer, not much enterprise focus.
Need to understand where vendor is coming from.

Consumerisation not just about devices:
Personal informatics. Applications designed to support personal goals. Email sentiment analysis. Personal brand management. Apps to remove emotion bias. CBT apps.
Apps store will compete with corporate It over things like expense management. Buy your favourite interface to SAP or Oracle.
Peripherals and cloud. On body monitoring, text to speech headsets.
These things could cause HR issues which will need managing.

Architecture is important, we need to:
Standardise on data formats not applications and tools
Licence people not devices
Become endpoint independent
Authenticate people and apps, not devices
Embrace open standards and strong ecosystems
Allow staff maximum freedom of choice
Protect data, you won't know where it's stored
Encourage bottom up innovation
Don't try and control things you don't own
Assume the user is in control of all decisions involving devices and apps
Be alert for new risks eg location snooping
Move data away from devices to the cloud

Software licensing and distribution not easy in a consumerised mobile world. Bulk licensing often not possible. App store purchases hard to audit. BYO licences can't be recovered when employees leave.

How to make mobile consumerisation safer. MDM (Mobile device management), not the only answer. Consider all of the following and choose most appropriate:
Trust the platform, eg Blackberry. But no one wants to use them...
Trust the configuration, use MDM tools
Trust the cloud, rather than the device
Trust the app. Containerisation of data and trusted app store
Trust the file system, encryption or synchronisation tools, but you may still have to trust the apps
Trust nothing, use thin client. But usability is an issue.
Trust the user? No?

Support is an issue, can we support absolutely anything?
Need to make apps and devices more supportable. Adopt supportable architecture.
Manage risk, address legal, HR and insurance issues. Address issues such as backup
Enable self help. Provide community and peer support. Social networking, wikis etc to share information. Educate users. Suggest and signpost external support resources.

Conclusions:
Segment users, define management regimes
Consumerisation must be win win
Work with users, not against them
Explore new technological solutions
Revisit architecture and tools
Stay tactical and flexible, look for good solutions today not correct solutions tomorrow
Look on it as an opportunity, not a problem








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Being better professionals by being more amateur

Next session is from Ed Smith, a journalist, broadcaster and cricketer, and is entitled how we can become better professionals by being a bit more amateur.

We could all just be lucky, but that's not under our control. So, we need to maximise the serendipity around us.

Seven simple, counterintuitive ways to do that.

1 Evolution is smarter than all of us.
1968 Olympics. Fosbry, wanted to go over high jump backwards. Coaches thought he was mad. He had an intuitive feeling. Broke world record, gold medal.
Sport not about following right answers, it's about problem solving. Good athletes recast the question.
Left field question is always the one to answer. Why shouldn't I do it this way? Don't resist innovation. Allow intuitive original answers to emerge to old questions.

2 Send people home to work, or at least to the nearest cafe. Open plan offices work against the two things we need to do our job well. Solitude, and social interaction. People retreat into solitude, eg with headphones. We should apologise not for leaving the office, but for coming in. Google gives all employees 20% time to do what they want. That's where Gmail came from. Is 20% enough?

3 Bump into people. Innovation and creativity come from being close to interesting people. Renaissance happened in the most urbanised place in the world. Need to read newspapers in print, not following links, it's the article next to the one you're reading that might change the way you think. Put yourself in the way of serendipity

4 Move forward by going around a block rather than hammering at it. Do something else. Free your mind from it.

5 Embrace uncertainty rather than deny it. On the day, trust yourself to make the right decisions rather than always sticking to the plan. Respond to the real world rather than what you think should be happening.

6 Stop being so busy. It's not how long we work, but how much of the time we are fully concentrating. High performance is about self education. Time is crucial. We need time to be high performers. Time comes from not committing to the wrong things. Trusting yourself to allow time. Takes deep confidence to do. Small amount of high intensity work is better than long periods of low intensity. Busyness is not the solution. If you're always saying you're too busy, reassess your strategy.

7 Back love, not money. Doing things for love, rather than the outcomes, will help us to be better. We don't need to be incentivised to do things we enjoy. Especially true for creative work. We don't need to be bribed to do things better, but given the autonomy to find our own way.

Take naps in the afternoon, talk to strangers, don't be busy, do things for love. Be more amateur!


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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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New students, space and data

So, the campus is buzzing this week as the new students arrive back. We had staff up at the student residences all weekend, mainly helping them connect to the newly installed wireless network. Many had completed all of the pre-registration information which gave them a computer account, but those who hadn't were able to do that as soon as they arrived.  It was very interesting that many of them who had completed all of their pre-arrival information, and had been given a username and email address, couldn't use them, as they couldn't remember what password they had created!  This was despite making it more obvious that this password was actually important to them once they got to University. Perhaps next year we should just suggest they use their Facebook password :-)

Now it's Fresher's Week, new students are finalising their module choices, picking up their uCards, and finding their way round campus. Helping them to do that is our newly re-branded mobile app, iSheffield, available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and as a web app. It's got some great location features, including finding the nearest free open access PC.

As well as keeping an eye on what's happening with registration, this week so far I've had a couple of catch up meetings, and the inaugural meeting of the the Learning Infrastructure Group. This is a small, focused group, chaired by a PVC, and with the Directors of Student Services and Estates, myself, 2 academic heads of department, a project support officer.  Its remit is to provide a strategic steer to a number of projects which have an impact on teaching space, including the common timetabling project, teaching space refurbishments, and many projects looking at data which utlimately affect the way we handle process such as timetabling.  I'm not sure anyone understood the complex interactions of these projects, until they tried to study the diagram below!

Later today I'm off to London to a Gartner conference on Portals, Content and Collaboration, so will try and blog as many interesting sessions as I can. As usual, this will take the form of live blogs, so most will be in note form.

Incidents and Awards

Highlight of today was a demonstration of our new Incident Contacts System. For use principally by our Control Centre, it stores  details of staff who might need to be contacted in an emergency. Sounds simple enough but there's a lot of data in there which needs to be easily entered and  searched by  campus zones, buildings, rooms, departments, specialist facilities etc. Not to mention all of the different staff roles we have including building and facilities managers, safety officers, duty managers. It is extremely elegant and easy for individuals to enter their own data, with automatic reminders if you've not updated it in a specified time. A read only copy will be kept off site in case the incident involves access to our services! Developed by our colleagues at epiGenesys, it will be ready for piloting very soon.

Another excellent piece of news today was that a group of our students and their teacher, Gary Wood have won a competition to create an outstanding on-line resource for learning and teaching using Google Apps. The competition was run jointly by ALT (the Association for Learning Technology) and Google, and was announced last night at the ALT conference. It was chosen from hundreds of entries and was judged by an international panel of judges.

AllAboutLinguistics.com was designed, built, and launched using Google Apps such as Sites, Docs, Google+, Maps, YouTube, and Calendar. The project was also a major piece of assessed coursework, through which students deepened their understanding of linguistics alongside gaining skills in project management, team working, use of web-based systems, and communication and collaboration tools.
Great stuff - well done to Gary and the team.

Student Union Officers - team objectives

At PSE (Professional Service Executive) yesterday we had an excellent presentation and discussion with some of our new Student Union Sabbatical Officers.  As well as individual objectives, they have team ones, and we focused on those.  I thought some readers of this blog might be interested to see them, so I've reproduced them below. Hope they don't mind, but I've made a couple of minor additions to clarify them. And added some comments form the discussion.

Diverse and Inclusive Union
To give all students – in particular students from under-represented groups, WP backgrounds and those who do not traditionally engage with the Students’ Union – the opportunity to enjoy the full extent of what is available at the Union, in order for them to both share their diverse cultures and shape their own unique experiences.

Fits in very well with work of Equality and Diversity Board on Equality Objectives. Some discussion about how Alumni Foundation might help with this. Some good ideas, including shop staff wearing flag badges to show what languages they speak - maybe we should adopt same in our frontline areas such as IC?

Minimising Disruption, Maximising Fun
To raise awareness amongst our members of the building works (on the Student Union and University House) and engage and communicate with them as to the reasons why it is happening, and the benefits for them.  We will minimise disruption to our services, communicating that the union is still open, accessible and vibrant.

We have already met the Activities Officer and will be helping student societies and other groups find alternative space and make it easier for them to book it.

The Demo and Beyond
The Higher Education system is changing beyond recognition and the government is choosing to ignore the views of students on this issue. In creating a student movement impossible to ignore we aim to empower students to shape a better future. It is important that we both build momentum for the National Demonstration and then use it to create a generation of activists who will campaign on a range of issues that students care about.

I think this is using the word activists in an interesting way - in a much more positive way than it is often used. Empowering students to shape their future has to be a good thing.

Priority Campaign: Reclaim Your Education
Linking in with our objective ‘The Demo and Beyond’ we will be running a campaign throughout the year voicing students’ objections to the regressive changes in the HE sector.

As usual, we on PSE all look forward to working with the Officers during the next year as partners.

SSB and staff survey

Major meeting yesterday was our Service Strategy Board (SSB). Lots to discuss and a lively meeting. As usual, we had a look at the progress of all of our projects, including everything that we're trying to get in place for the start of term which I mentioned last week. Some new projects which are just starting up include development of an Open Day App, and the introduction of a text messaging service for staff and students. The first phase of this - being able to send a text message to all students in the event of an incident is almost in place, and future phases will involve targeting specific groups. we're also piloting on-line Information Security Awareness training, which will eventually be rolled out across the University.  Every month we get an informative report from our Problem Manager which gives us a heads up of various types of problem. These cover resolved problems, problems unresolved with work arounds, and problems with work on-going to fix them. It also highlights areas where we may have to make policy or strategic technical changes. This time it highlighted some issuses we having around authentication/SSO via our portal and some single points of failure which might need a change to our authentication process. A good meeting as usual.

I've also had a meeting of the Professional Services Executive, where we looked at the results of a recent staff survey. We've got the headline results for the university and also in-depth analyses of our individual departments. As you'd expect, there's things we want to celebrate, things we want to improve, and things we need to investigate. We'll be doing all three in the department over the next few weeks.

Robots, wind tubines and the cave

Yesterday a few of our senior managers when on a trip!  Really exciting - a bit like a school trip. We went to visit the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), part of the Faculty of Engineering which is located on the Advanced Manufactuinrg Park just outside Sheffield. Most people know it by the huge wind turbine which you see as you approach Sheffield down the Parkway, but I suspect not many people know what goes on there.

It's a very large place consisting of a number of buildings - the original AMRC, AMRC2 or Factory of the Future, the Composite  Centre and a Knowledge Transfer Centre. It was a fascinating tour - the AMRC works with many partners, and in essence works with them on highly specialised manufacturing processes, to improve them, cut down product time, improve accuracy etc. They have very highly specialised machines, lathes and, most exciting, of all robots! Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to take pictures of them, but I did get some of assorted machines.

Some of their case studies are very impressive - cutting down the time it takes to fit a blade to a jet engine from hours to seconds for example. In fact, sometimes they cut the time so much, the rest of the assembly line can't keep up. They also work with composite materials, and we had a good session looking at carbon fibre - which is really fibre coated with carbon. Who knew? It's light, so you can make airplane parts out of it such as landing gear, and some planes are now 50% carbon fibre.

The robots were particualry exciting, and the precision of them is helped by a very complex internal GPS system so they know exctly where they are.

At one point we all donned glasses and went into "the cave" - a 3D virtual reality area where we flew over the factory and got up close and personal with a jet engine.

It was a fascinating trip, and one that more people should do if they get the chance to see the real applied research that is going on in the University. We did have a chat about their IT requirements, but mainly it was just to see what was going on. We should do it more often!

What do you do over the summer?

Well, we're really back into the thick of it now. Only a week and half till Freshers Week, and the race is on to get everything up and ready for them.  Our voice and data team are working like mad to get wireless into all of our student residences - we've had it in some of the main social areas such as bars already, but every bedroom had a wired connection. When we put the network in, we thought that was the best way to go, and students loved the fast connection they could plug their desktop PCs into. Now the world has changed. They don't have PCs anymore but laptops, smart phones, tablets, and they don't want to be tied to their desk to use them (that's if their device has  even got a network input), they want to sit on their beds, or chairs, or be social in the communal living areas and use them there. So, major project this summer to get every bedroom wireless. Some easier than others - the new ones are fine, but in the old buildings we have the thorny issue of asbestos to contend with. But we're getting there, and the majority of rooms will be ready for when the students arrive.

Another major project is our new managed desktop - moving to Windows 7. All of the applications  - around 300 - have had to be repackaged and installed, and we're racing against time to get this complete as well. Some sterling work from the team, and some great help from our IT staff from academic departments, 5 of which have been working with us to do this. Some great collaboration between central and devolved staff.

We're also continuing to introduce changes to our on line registration system so students can do more before they arrive, and the module add/drop period should also be online at the start of the year.

Our new VLE has completed its roll out this this summer, and we'll be piloting personal student timetables in google calendar was well.

That's on top of replacing hundreds of student PCs and refurbishing many of the teaching rooms over the summer as that's the only time we can do it.

I'm sure I've missed some things out, but it does always make me smile when people ask us what we do over the summer, as it must be so quiet when the students have gone.  Actually, it's one of our busiest times!

Appalling decision by the UKBA

Last night I was happily watching the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, a great celebration of diversity in every form, when some disturbing news  began filtering through on my twitterfeed. The UKBA had told London Metropolitan University that it had revoked its Trusted Sponsor Status for overseas students. Well, actually, they'd leaked it to a Sunday Newspaper a few days before.   Apparently a press release had been issued, people had seen it, then it disappeared from the UKBA site. But, people had screenshots. Eventually the news was confirmed by a short press release on London Met's page. 

This is an appalling decision by the UKBA, appallingly mishandled. It threatens not just London Met, but UK Higher Education as a whole.  This decision, taken just weeks before the start of term, means that not only can London Met not admit any overseas students this year, (even those who have already been offerred places and may have accommodation booked, flights arranged etc,) but international students who are already studying there who may have done 2 or 3 years of a course, have 60 days to find another course, or face deportation.  This will affect over 2000 students.

If you were a friend or relative of one of those students, or a teacher at a school overseas where one of them came from, would you care that it was just London Met, or would it affect your decision to apply or recommend applying to any University in the UK?  Bearing in mind that two other Universities have had their status suspended temporarily.

The money this is going to cost London Met is many tens of millions, it will threaten jobs and courses, and possibly the University's future. And let's not forget the real losers in this. The students who have either got places, or are already studying there. They have perfectly valid visas, but now face financial hardship, uncertainty over where they can study, and possible deportation.

I don't know the details of the problem at London Met, and undoubtedly there are some. But the UKBA itself admitted that it was a "small minority" of students they audited who hadn't got the correct documentation or leave to stay. The UKBA flexing its muscles in this way  - presumably to send a message to the rest of us that it can - is unacceptable and an overreaction which will have far reaching effects on all of us unless action is taken to curb them soon.

Thanks for all the fish

No more blogging for a week, I'm at my annual pilgrimage of Whitby Folk Week. But just wanted to thank everyone Involved in clearing and confirmation last week. It's always a big operation, with so much depending on it, not just for our admissions, but for the thousands of young people getting their results and hoping to get a place at University.

It's a massive operation, and this year slightly more nerve wracking as we were using a new system, written for us by our colleagues in epiGenesys. This year we had contingencies in place covering everything from the call centre burning down to complete systems failure. But, everything went well. So, thanks to everyone who helped set the PCs and telephones up, looked after the back-end infrastructure and systems and monitored and helped during the days. Particular thanks to Epigenesys, the system worked fine, and it was really pleasing to see them there in the call centre, watching over how the system worked, looking for improvements and helping when there was a problem. Even using the system by working on the phones. Great work from everyone.

I've also just had a really nice thank you from our PVC as we've been one of the first Universities to submit our KIS return to HEFCE. This was a real collaborative effort from many colleagues in different departments, including CiCS.

So, thanks all round! Now back to the fish and chips and folkie stuff......



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Creative Media Suite

I wrote yesterday about the impact of technology on learning and teaching, and one of the things we are encouraging is the creation of media by students.  In the Information Commons we have a Creative Media Suite which consists of a production room and an edit suite.

in the production room students can create media - it's got equipment in for students to produce many kinds of multimedia projects including video editing, podcasts, screencasting, presentation recording and motion graphics creation. It contains both an iMac and a PC, as well as recording equipment and is bookable, and our staff are on hand to help and advise students. We also loan out equipment to students including digital video camcorders and audio/video recorders - these can be loaned to students for up to 7 days at a time.

The newest of our facilities is the edit suite, which has been open for about 5 months now, and is very popular with staff and students. It contains 5 managed iMacs and you can create media work directly over a network using 100 specially created accounts with access to 20GB of storage. This means we don't have to give individual students access to large amounts of filestore, but more importanly, allows students to work collaboratively on group projects through a joint account.

The suite is open 24/7 so students can work when they want to, and we hope to be able to open the production room 24/7 in the near future.  Having just iMacs in there isn't a problem, and we get a lot of feedback saying how easy they are to use and produce media.  There's lots of info about the facilities, including video of how to use them here.  Our staff are available to help, support and advise, and have worked closely with academic staff and students on a number of projects, including Storying Sheffield. This is a community project based in the School of English where students and people from the city  are working and studying together to produce, record, and collect stories,  of the lives of Sheffield people, and the `life´ of Sheffield using a variety of media. A recent workshop made extenisve use of the suite, and thanks to Andy Brown for these photographs.

We expect demand for this sort of facility to increase, and we're intending to put more "media pods" in the IC space we're designing in the new engineering building.