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Cloud and legalities 30 Sep 2009

Posted by InformationSpan in Consumerization, ITasITis, Managing IT, Tech Watch.
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Just come off a Bright Talk webinar, part of a day on issues around Cloud. Miranda Mowbray of HP Labs, Bristol, gave a comprehensive round-up of legal issues which might arise through organisations’ use of externally-sourced Cloud services (everything from basic infrastructure like EC2 up to full-featured applications such as salesforce.com). Sherlock Holmes, apparently, would recognise the issues from Baskerville Moor.

It reminded me of attending a conference in the early days of the Web, where I heard the first attempt to figure out what the regulatory issues might be for pharmaceutical companies, with our heavy and very country-specific regulatory issues to work through. As so often, we’ve been here before: legislation necessarily lags behind technology, and case law has not yet started to accumulate.

The recording is available on the Web and there’s a published paper too. So I won’t attempt to precis it here. Suffice it to say that the issues range from “Where’s my data held?” (and that includes my account and usage data as well as the data I’m handling in the cloud) to “What happens if …” questions (the service goes down, the provider goes out of business, and much more). In particular, beware: most terms and conditions mean that it’s the user, not the provider, who normally carries the responsibility for continuity of service and for backup.

A great deal was packed into thirtyfive minutes and although Miranda Mowbray is not a lawyer (so the advice, of course, is “If in doubt, consult one!”) she clearly has a good grasp of the issues that may well arise.

Something to reference in the end-user guide on “Signing up for web-based IT” which I’m working on. Watch out too for a posting here in a day or two about analysis of “Distribution characteristics” for business and business applications, a piece of work I did many years ago which is highly relevant to today’s developing cloud environments.

Links:
• Cloud Computing and the Law, BrightTalk webcast, 30 Sep 2009
• Miranda Mowbray’s home page at HP Labs
• The Fog over the Grimpen Mire: Cloud Computing and the Law. Mowbray, M., SCRIPTed Journal of Law, Technology and Society vol 6 issue 1 (April 2009) pp.132-146 (the link is directly to a PDF of the document)

Scale out, not up: the Cloud mindset is different 16 Sep 2009

Posted by InformationSpan in Consumerization, ITasITis, Impact of IT, Managing IT, Tech Watch, Technorati.
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Just come off a call with a group which meets regularly by phone to think about the issues of moving corporate IT services to the cloud.

The debate is moving on. Originally, it was triggered by the emergence of Amazon’s EC2 and S3, and similar services, which enable individuals to have easy by-the-drink access to high powered and flexible compute and storage power.

Then, it was key questions about how to enable enterprises to move services to “the cloud”: what do you move and how, and what are the risks that have to be understood and managed?

Now, there’s an understanding that a hybrid model will have a lot to recommend it. Cloud services offer flexibility, and that’s more important than cost saving. The question is no longer “In-house or cloud” but “How do we integrate cloud with in-house, for flexibility and overflow”. You set up multiple-hosted services so that when in-house runs out of capacity, the request is routed seamlessly to a cloud resource.

Someone on the call characterised this as “Scaling out, not up”. And it requires a different mind-set when applications are created. Something which recalled to my mind the “reverse assumptions” for heterogeneous wide area distributed systems, created by the UK/European ANSA project something like 20 years ago. I said I’d re-publish them. Here they are.

When building a distributed system, a number of assumptions which are commonly made when engineering systems for single hosts not only become invalid, but have to be reversed. The most important of these are:
•	local >> remote more failure modes are possible for remote interactions than for local ones
•	direct >> indirect binding configuration becomes a dynamic process, requiring support for linkage at execution time
•	sequential >> concurrent execution true concurrency requires mechanisms to provide sequentiality
•	synchronous >> asynchronous interaction communication delays require support for asynchronous interactions and pipelining
•	homogeneous >> heterogeneous environment requires common data representation for interactions between remote systems
•	single instance >> replicated group replication can provide availability and/or dependability
•	fixed location >> migration locations of remote interfaces may not be permanent
•	unified name space >> federated name spaces need for naming constructs which mirror administrative boundaries across different remote systems
•	shared memory >> disjoint memory shared memory mechanisms cannot operate successfully on a large scale and where remote operations are involved.

There was, and is, another one as well. When you’re creating an application – any application! – don’t assume it will always stay with the localised architecture you’ve created it in. The gotcha assumption these days is that the app is being created with links to a private cloud not the public one, so it’ll stay that way. Deal with it – interfaces, databases, security, the whole nine yards – as if, one day, parts of it will sit on public infrastructure.

Links:
• ANSA project, 1984-1998, document repository (now free access)
• ANSA: An Engineer’s Introduction to the Architecture, ANSA project, Nov 1989 (see section 2.1 p 3 for the reversed assumptions)
• Distributed architectures: reverse assumptions, still relevant, my previous post (ITasITis, Jan 2008)

The Long Tail of Innovation 15 Sep 2009

Posted by InformationSpan in Consumerization, ITasITis, Impact of IT, Social media, Tech Watch, Technorati.
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I’ve had a note for months to catch up on reports which quote Pfizer along the lines of “Watch out for the Innovation Killers”.

It’s not new news; see some of the Links at the end or try a Google search. But when I finally got to it properly, I discovered two things. First, it’s even less new news than I thought. The “Innovation Killers” idea goes back several years, and has been covered by Christensen et al (who else?) in Harvard Business Review.

Second, I was alerted to this by a note from Doug Neal of Leading Edge Forum (LEF). And his trigger was (I believe) a presentation from a LEF session, which is very well worth working through. It’s available, open access.

Yes, it does contain the “Innovation Killers” slide. But its primary thesis is much more than this. And it’s compelling for anyone trying to develop successful innovation strategies that depend on more than just serendipity.

Rob Spencer’s main theme, in Falls Church back in April, was that innovation is a “Long Tail” phenomenon. There may be a handful of people who can come up with a lot of worthwhile ideas. But if you can open up to the vast array of individuals in a large organisation (such as a global pharma company) then the potential number of ideas increases enormously even if only (say) 20% of those people contribute only one or two ideas each. If you don’t, you miss out. Big time.

When I started writing this piece, I mistyped the title as “The Log Tail …”; and I almost left it that way, because Rob shows that the metrics of this kind of innovation activity don’t become predictable until you learn to use a log-normal plot instead of our usual mean-and-spread bell curves (such as Six Sigma is based on). A metric like “Average number of ideas per individual” is meaningless. In a telling phrase, Rob categorises it as “not even wrong”. That is, it’s the basis of the analysis that’s way off target, not just the maths.

This Long Tail version of innovation can’t be done without means of reaching out to the wide area community. That doesn’t just mean a wiki; the presentation includes a string of practical and structured techniques, far too many to summarise here.

So, innovators and, even more, innovation facilitators: get hold of this presentation, and some of the materials surrounding it. Read, review, and learn!

Links:
• Horses, Carts and Long Tails, Rob Spencer (Pfizer) at LEF Forum, April 2009, PDF
• Making innovation count in uncertain times, In Vivo, 25.1, 1-8 (Jan 2007), PDF
• Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things, Christensen, C., Kaufman, S.P., & Shih, W, Harvard Business Review, Jan 2008, pp 98-105. Web link is to summary only; library access required for full text
• or search Google for “innovation killers”

iPod goes into decline – apparently 10 Sep 2009

Posted by InformationSpan in Consumerization, ITasITis, Impact of IT, Social media, Tech Watch, Technorati.
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Today’s Technology section in The Guardian carries a piece about the decline in sales of single-purpose digital music players in general, and Apple’s iPod in particular. If the data are accurate, it looks like the market (at least in western markets) is pretty much saturated, and new sales are limited largely to replacements; the lifetime of these devices, apparently, is about two years.

Well, not really a surprise. Classic S-curve stuff. There are only so many people in the world who want to own an iPod. And, so it’s suggested, the trend these days is towards devices with their own connectivity so that they can download directly and don’t have to be plugged in to a computer. Something like the iPhone, perhaps … or even my beginning-to-expire Nokia N73 Music Edition, which I only bought because it was the only one in stock in the store, I don’t use for music, and find highly annoying when every so often it starts to play noises in my pocket.

But one of the reasons I bought this particular phone is because it will replicate calendar and address book with my Mac. I take pictures with it; and I store a small handful of useful documents, like the local bus timetable, or schedules and confirmations for the current trip. And very occasionally I even do Internet or email on it. So multi-function is definitely In; I just don’t happen to combine music with it. Apple have sold 30 million iPhones in two years, as Steve Jobs announced yesterday. Part of the success of the iPhone and the iPod Touch is attributed to the App Store, which has notched up 1.8 billion downloads from 75,000 apps. Multi-functionality joins the consumer economy!

But the Guardian’s report goes on to suppose that the decline of new purchases of iPods will take the music industry with it, and I need convincing of that. The report quotes Mark Mulligan of Forrester who believes that “logically” the slow-down in device sales leads to a slow-down in downloads. But that assumes that the only people who buy downloads are first-time new iPod users. I don’t recall that sales of old-fashioned singles were expected to slow down when every teenager in the world owned a record player: or CDs, for that matter.

And it doesn’t square with Mulligan’s published research. Admittedly I can only see the abstracts, but in his most recent report he talks about the “immensity of the new creative opportunities that will accompany the radical product innovation that the music industry so desperately needs“, and about the continuity of relationship between music-makers and their buyers.

On Forrester’s Consumer Product Strategy blog, he admits, like many commentators, to being “underwhelmed” by Apple’s announcements this week – though the faithful were clearly glad to see Steve Jobs back in circulation, and gave him a standing ovation. But he suggests that “Apple is playing a smart game that builds the social context of their devices …”, with links emerging between iTunes and the social mediaverse (Facebook, YouTube, Spotify and so on). Perhaps, in line with what Mulligan suggests, more like my N73 than my iPod?

Links:
• Apple Special Event, Sept 2009: watch the video. Or see the iPod and iPhone press releases at Apple Hot News
• Music Release Windows: The Product Innovation That The Music Business Can’t Do Without. Forrester Research, 9 Sept 2009
• Is Apple Playing a Subtle But Smart Platform Strategy? Forrester Consumer Products Strategy blog, 9 Sept 2009
• Twilight of the iPods The Guardian (Technology), 10 Sept 2009

Bing(o) or B(or)ing? 30 Jul 2009

Posted by InformationSpan in Consumerization, ITasITis, Impact of IT, Tech Watch, Technorati.
Tags: Bing, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!
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Lots of developments recently for Microsoft-watchers to get their teeth into. I’ve not picked up the individual announcements here, because lots of other people do it; but it’s time for a round up.

So the most recent announcement is Microsoft’s at-long-last deal with Yahoo! which will move Microsoft’s Bing search technology into Yahoo’s space. Subject to regulatory approval it might go live next year.

Well I haven’t seriously tried Bing, so this isn’t a technical evaluation. But for a business analysis of the potential impact of the deal (or lack of it), there’s an interesting discussion on Knowledge@Wharton. In brief, they suggest, the real target of Bing wasn’t Google but precisely to achieve the kind of deal now done with Yahoo. And that the impact on market share will be negligible despite the marketing deals. People like Google. And perhaps that the smaller deal will “invite less anti-trust scrutiny” than last year’s proposal to swallow Yahoo entire.

There’s a joint website called “Choice. Value. Innovation”, set up as if it were a fully fledged independent company with “Investor Relations” and “Press Room”. Draw your own conclusions.

What else? BOPS of course; Microsoft’s Business Online Productivity Suite. The “Standard” package capitalises on existing brands (or tweaks them to work outside the office perimeter): Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.

So BOPS It doesn’t occupy the same space as Google Docs or other offerings like ThinkFree (who I visited with a study tour to Silicon Valley in 2006 and, I must admit, didn’t think they’d still be here by now). It does overlap Google Wave, which I reviewed recently. Gizmodo reports that Office 2010 Web apps will be free; Office Live, Windows Live and Azure exist. Either we can believe that Microsoft is still playing catch-up, when there’s so much technology already out there that’s integrated and works; or we can see the pattern of a lot of pieces about to come together and create something really powerful

Microsoft still owns the business IT mindset. Gartner quote a case study with a headlinecollaboration cost reduction of 20% So what do you think?

Links:
• Microsoft-Yahoo a Yawn for Google, Knowledge@Wharton, 29 Jul 2009
• Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape, Microsoft Press Pass, 29 Jul 2009, featuring videos from both Ballmer of Microsoft and Bartz of Yahoo!
• Choice, Value. Innovation.
• Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, Microsoft
• Move to Microsoft BPOS Cuts Collaboration Costs by 20%, Gartner, 9 Jul 2009 (client access only to full document)
• ThinkFree
• Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps Will Be Free; Testing Starts Today, Gizmodo, 13 Jul 2009
• Microsoft Windows Live
• Microsoft Office Live and Office Live Small Business Edition
• Microsoft Windows Azure

Social computing and the enterprise user: something’s missing 27 Jul 2009

Posted by InformationSpan in Consumerization, ITasITis, Impact of IT, Managing IT, Technorati.
Tags: guidance, security, self-provisioning, social computing, users
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Something’s missing from our discussions about social media (and Web 2.0 more generally, and Cloud even more generally).

We often discuss the benefits of user-managed technologies (is that a useful phrase?) and despair of “The answer’s no. Now what’s the question?” from corporate rottweilers. Thought leaders like Euan Semple provide clear case studies and benefit realisation.

That stereotypical response (and no, it’s not always like that in practice) is driven perhaps by two things. A perception that central is better and that the need for control is absolute. And, more in line with the business, a strongly developed sense of risk both to the corporate infrastructure and its data stores, and to potential leakage of intellectual property.

As I’ve commented elsewhere, these reactions are not new. They characterised many companies when email and the Web began to replace newsgroups and FTP networks. But let’s look at more positive scenarios.

Suppose you’re a member of an enterprise research team; you use many external sources of information. Should you create a Googlemail account for these, separate from more specifically workplace-oriented email? What’s the case for? and against?

Suppose you’re a senior international manager, with direct reports in several countries and your own boss in yet another. You have a range of industrial strength collaborative tools at your disposal, but simple desktop videoconferencing isn’t one of them. Some conversations benefit substantially from face to face contact, and your travel budget has been cut. So should you buy a cheap webcam and use Skype on your company computer? Or on your mobile phone? Or from your home computer if Skype is blocked at the firewall? What’s the case for any of these options? Or against all of them?

You’re a marketer. You want to experiment with virtual presence but SecondLife isn’t accessible through the company network. Do you just go and do it from your home computer?

These choices can be made without involving the corporate IT department. Or even in order to circumvent the restrictions of the corporate environment, which might be as simple as lack of bandwidth, as complex as incompatibility with a core company application, or as explicit as the threat of disciplinary action.

But so far as I’m aware there’s little help for responsible users trying to make decisions, or which supportive IT groups might deploy to guide them. Not “can this do the job?” but how to assess terms of use, risk to the organisation, standards, interoperability, unintended consequences … We can ignore cost, I think; these services conform to Euan’s rule that “No-one bothers about ROI if the I is small”.

But take the SecondLife (2L) example and suppose that our user is a genuinely responsible corporate citizen. How far is it reasonable to go?

In her own time at home she creates a private persona in 2L and experiments with what she can do there – learns to walk, sit down, communicate, attend meetings, build property and so on. I don’t think anyone at work would be concerned.

But she then begins to develop ideas for a marketing campaign and wants to keep the credit. She stays home for a couple of days, on her own initiative, and works intensively in 2L. Still on her home computer, and not involving the use of company information. No problem?

Later, her enhanced presence could identify her or the company to those with sufficient information to recognise the clues. The competition, most likely. She forgets to fence off her 2L area with “No entry” barriers. She then discovers that the 2L protocol isn’t actually blocked at the company firewall, so she demonstrates her work to a couple of colleagues through the company network …

Now re-cast the example, but with the latest, newest, unproven, “risky” cloud service in place of SecondLife (which, after all, is getting pretty respectable by now).

The point is this. Our employee is working for the best interests of the company, as she perceives them. But she’s working in a vacuum. There’s no set of guidelines she can consult. And I do mean guidelines, not rules. Not “SecondLife is forbidden”, for example. There might need to be a few like that, but it’s a losing battle of the boil-the-ocean variety.

Here are a quartet of ideas. I’d like to gather yours.

1 – Always look at the terms and conditions when you sign up. Read them with the company’s needs in mind. These are enforceable legal contracts.
2 – Do you lose control over the content which you confide to this system? (Look at Sharing your Content and Information, for example, on Facebook)
3 – How far does the provider claim the right to monitor your traffic? (Most systems at least prohibit explicit or inflammatory content)
4 – Does the service claim access to your computer? (You don’t get a more respectable institution than the BBC; but the early versions of iPlayer operated peer to peer, so they used everybody’s processor cycles and disk storage)

Please contribute, so we can build up a body of advice on this. I look forward to your ideas. And if anyone knows of a body of best practice like this that already exists, I shall be delighted to be corrected!

Links:
• Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities
• The Obvious Euan Semple’s blog (or see my posting Social media Q&A: Euan Semple at Guru Online)

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	Posts about Gizmodo … on Bing(o) or B(or)ing?

ITasITis

Cloud and legalities 30 Sep 2009

Scale out, not up: the Cloud mindset is different 16 Sep 2009

Bing(o) or B(or)ing? 30 Jul 2009

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In brief … self provisioning ups its profile 18 Nov 2009

A life on the (Google) Wave) 17 Nov 2009

Cloud and legalities 30 Sep 2009

Scale out, not up: the Cloud mindset is different 16 Sep 2009

The Long Tail of Innovation 15 Sep 2009

iPod goes into decline – apparently 10 Sep 2009

See ITasITis on Social Computing Journal 3 Aug 2009

Bing(o) or B(or)ing? 30 Jul 2009

Social computing and the enterprise user: something’s missing 27 Jul 2009

Social media Q&A: Euan Semple at Guru Online 21 Jul 2009

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InformationSpan

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