Did you see a recent Forrester announcement? In line with their own recommendations, they’ve replaced the CIO post with a Chief Business Technology Officer. With hindsight I’m surprised it’s taken this long; “Not IT but BT” has been a Forrester theme for several years now.

Another place where I’ve seen the Business Technology tag used is in McKinsey‘s quarterly newsletter. Their Business Technology office has just reported their sixth annual technology survey. According to the newsletter, “executives say their companies are boosting IT spending and adopting new technology platforms to support innovation”. McKinsey see a significant challenge to IT: “Aspirations—and current expectations—for IT have never been higher”.

Here are a few other pointers.

IDC Insights believe the CIO’s 2012 agenda will be shaped around the “Four Forces” (Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Big Data). I’m registered on their webcast (10th Jan: free) to hear more. Yankee Group also offer a focus on mobility. Their focus is on the market for devices, but their research speaks also to the corporate buyer strategist when they see an even smartphone market between Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. Oddly, though, they refer to the Bring-Your-Own market but don’t have a focus on tablets. They do, though, see both personal Cloud services and HTML5 becoming important in the coming year.

Gartner, of course, have created their swathe of Predicts 2012 content. Of course, most of it is client-only access. But the front page of Predicts 2012 includes a 15-minute podcast from Darryl Plummer. He highlights the same four areas as IDC (except he says “Information” instead of “Big Data”). It’s worth listening to Darryl; he’s quite listenable-to.

Significantly, Gartner’s highlighted report for the IT community is titled “Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2012 and Beyond: Control Slips Away“. You almost don’t need to read the report; but there’s a useful summary by Peter Galen at Infosec Update. Corporate control of users’ IT assets has been useful, but is now increasingly a myth. Seems like Gartner are saying that this year is the year it will reach tipping point. But, listening to Darryl speaking in this area, I did rather wonder “What took you so long?”

IBM, in their “5 in 5″ (five trends in five years) take the argument a step further and look beyond the WENA (western Europe/North America) corporate market. Thanks to Basex for the alert to this, but I’m not entirely clear that Basex is looking at the same report. Their focus on mobile devices is on the super-smart, not on the abolition of the digital divide. Worth a look, to lift your eyes beyond the immediate page.

Finally, Ray Wang (now at his own Constellation Research) highlights “10 Mega Business Trends To Watch For In 2012″.

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Perhaps the key one, for IT, is “Keep consumerisation of IT enterprise class”: in other words, ensure the right balance between enablement and discipline. Here’s a world class statement of the issue:  If IT is too strict, business fails. If business fails to have a level of discipline in technology adoption, IT can not keep up with the lack of standards and scale. Ray sets this in the context (and there’s a timechart) of the change from transaction to engagement as the basis for business. There are comments for innovators, and for those who are scared to innovate.

Happy New Year!

Links:
• Forrester Research Names First Chief Business Technology Officer, Forrester Press Release, 5 Oct 2011
• A rising role for IT: McKinsey Global Survey results, McKinsey Quarterly, Dec 2011
• IDC Insights 2012 Predictions: The CIO Agenda, IDC Insights, 4 Jan 2012, in IT Governance and Executive Strategies. For the webcast (10 Jan), the registration link is at the foot of the page.
• Register and download 2012 Mobility Predictions: A Year of Living Dangerously, Yankee Group , Dec 2011
• Predicts 2012: Gartner; summary at Infosec Island, Peter Galen, 3 Jan 2012
• IBM the next 5 in 5, see also Basex Tech Watch
• 10 Mega Business Trends To Watch For In 2012, Ray Wang, constellation

For interest, the Guardian offers a fully accessible list of the honorands. I found a couple of CBEs for computer science professors (one at what’s now Queen Mary, University of London, where I started my IT career), and a couple of retired Civil Service IT directors, but otherwise remarkably little recognising the UK’s information science capability.

Interesting that, to publish this information, the Guardian has created a Google Docs spreadsheet. No point in inventing your own infrastructure when the cloud can do the job!

Links:
• New Year honours list reflects my aims for ‘big society’, says David Cameron, Guardian, 31 Dec 2011
• New Year’s Honours, 2012 …, Guardian datablog, 31 Dec 2011
• 2012 New Year Honours, Google Docs

There’s a post on the stocks which is a round up of various predictions for 2012. But it didn’t get finished so I’ll post it possibly next week

Have a good break and enjoy the holiday.

So here’s an article by Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard (no, TR doesn’t restrict itself to MIT authors!) discussing the development of the platform vendors’ stranglehold on applications and, therefore, on content delivery. The piece is called The Personal Computer is Dead but that’s not actually what it’s about.

Zittrain takes for granted the shift from the desktop-like devices of the past thirty-odd years to mobile, highly personal smartphones and tablets. What he’s concerned to point out is that the enterprises who define the functionality of these devices, via the OS – Apple, Google, now Amazon, and still Microsoft – also lock down, with varying strictness, the means by which software can be loaded.

And with software goes content, which these days is often in the cloud and can only be accessed through the authorised App. Change platform and you may lose your content (not just your software). Zittrain suggests that this restrictive practice puts Microsoft’s tactics with IE (remember the anti-trust case?) in the shade. Yet it’s crept in under the radar, perhaps because we see these devices as “appliances”. They’ve become ubiquitous computing and content devices, as it were, by stealth.

As well as these socio-legal issues, the article does capture quite neatly the changing models for development and delivery of both software and content; for its more or less draconian review and authorisation by the platform vendors (and the reasons for this); and for payment, including the impost imposed by the app stores which have become, in some cases, the only route to market.

Well worth a read. Thankyou, Frank!

Link:
• The Personal Computer is Dead, Jonathan Zittrain, MIT Technology Review, 30 Nov 2011
• Frank Zimper via Google Plus

The IT1 service is now referred to as Gartner IT1, although the Burton name is still attached to Gartner’s lead web page for the service. But the separate Burton Group website, which was maintained independently for a while, has now joined the AMR site in being consigned to oblivion.

Gartner’s online page outlines how they differentiate IT1 from the mainstream Gartner technical service. They pitch IT1 as adding the technical depth to the mainstream (“detailed technical insight to help your technical architects and engineers deliver outstanding results”). This was indeed the rationale for acquiring Burton: the need to provide service-oriented IT professionals with deep technical support for their architectural and implementation decisions, and an admission that Gartner, as they were, did not have the full resources needed to deliver this insight – though I’m not sure they would have admitted it before the acquisition!

At the same time, the Burton legacy blogs have also joined AMR in the Delete basket. This means InformationSpan has been able to simplify our Blogs Index for Gartner by removing references to Burton information. It’s been updated, with a few new names and other changes.

We’ve also introduced new indicators to identify blogs which are active and those which are, in various stages, dormant. Currently, of 123 Gartner analyst blogs which are accessible online, only 53 have content published within the last three months. For a further 18, the most recent post is between 3 and 6 months old; for 10, between 6 and 9; for 9, between 9 and 12; and 33 are at least a year out of date and sometimes significantly more. Also of these 123 blogs, 24 are still on the system but don’t appear in Gartner’s own list of analysts who are blogging. Some of these relate to analysts who have left Gartner: but not all; correspondingly, not all blogs are removed when an analysts leaves. It’s a touch confusing, but our index shows clearly what’s what and who’s who.

On the positive side: all the titled blogs, including Mastering the Hype Cycle (which had been dormant) have recent content. The Symposium blog is particularly worth visiting at the moment, while the Autumn cycle of Symposium events continues.

Links:
• InformationSpan Analyst Blogs Index, updated 11 Nov 2011
• Burton IT1: service page from Gartner

For the uninitiated: PCI is the Payment Card Industry and DSS is its Data Security Standard. PCI is an international body, and the standards are effectively set by the “acquirers” – that’s PCI-speak for those bodies such as card issuers and banks who “acquire” the transactions and transfer money.

National information security requirements are very much to the fore too. In the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently took enforcement action against Lush, the cosmetics firm, and their press release uses that case to emphasise that organisations must implement PCI DSS, or some equivalent standard, in order to be meet the basic requirements for compliance. This issue was resolved by an undertaking from Lush, but ICO information outlines all the enforcement options and potential penalties.

Compliance to standards doesn’t replace the need to understand potential vulnerabilities, not least when using embedded page elements that can be hijacked!

Glossary:
PCI – Payment Card Industry
PCI DSS – PCI Data Security Standards
CSRF: Cross-Site Request Forgery
IDS : intrusion detection system
IPS: Intrusion Prevention System
ISA: Internal Security Assessor
QSA: Qualified Security Assessor
ISO: Independent Sales Organisation (in this context!)

Links:
• PCI SSC Data Security Standards Overview, from PCI Security Standards Council
• ICO warns retailers to implement PCI-DSS or face “enforcement action”, Security Vibes, 12 Aug 2011
• Online security must be a priority for retailers, says ICO, ICO Press Release, 9 Aug 2011
• Taking action: data protection and privacy and electronic communications, ICO information (including a list of recent prosecutions)
• PCI DSS: An Acquirers guide for PCI Compliance Best Practices, from the PCI Compliance Guide (an independent PCI source)
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), information from the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)

Links:
• Green IT Expo presentations
• A Gartner perspective on Green IT, ITasITis, 1 Nov 2011
• Green IT; encountering Connection Research, ITasITis, 1 Nov 2011
• Green 3: Andy Lawrence of 451, ITasITis, 1 Nov 2011

This article admittedly starts by profiling a dysfunctional CIO who doesn’t understand the issue. But it looks at the issue from the whole business perspective – that is, the CEO’s. It shows how investment can be viewed, even when it’s core infrastructure that’s at issue; it talks about benchmarking capabilities against non-competitive industries, not just competitors; and highlights some of the perceived wisdom which can, sometimes, be plain wrong and a distraction from the real challenges.

How strategic is our technology agenda? McKinsey Quarterly, Oct 2011

He promises an overview including a European Union Framework project called Optimis. I’ve been involved in EU research in the past, didn’t know about this one: that’ll be interesting.

Here’s a sort-of hierarchy of energy efficiency for the data centre. At the base, five years’ work on reducing the power use of datacentre infrastructure: PUE, best practices, EU Code of Conduct. One tier up: work on lower power chips, efficient drives, virtualisation, power management etc. Above that again, the ability to look holistically at an application or service: for example, what’s the eco-impact of choosing 1 second response rather than 1.5 seconds?

So: Cloud. Cloud should be more eco-efficient and it’s often asserted to be so. But is it? 451 believes the assumptions are largely unproven. [Private] cloud and virtualisation, as a matter of observation, seems – so Lawrence says – to show under-utilisation so some of the eco gains are not realised..

We’re about to see another measurement framework. Here, there are four axes: economic, compliance, CSR (corporate social responsibility), operational effectiveness. Again, take a holistic look: e.g. what’s the energy cost of insisting backups are permanently online rather than powered-down (on tape, for example).

How do you measure resource efficiency? There are some proxy metrics; there are  direct measures (i.e. actual measurements, not estimates: how much carbon now); and metrics (e.g. PUE). They are “good; but be careful: unreliable for business decisions”. We’re promised a tour of some cross-industry initiatives, and also a few highlights from individual companies.

The EU’s Optimis project provides a list for assessment: trust, risk, eco-efficiency, cost (TREC). The aim is to create an architectural framework that looks at all of these, and a development toolkit. Lawrence asserts the need for multiple metrics: “a lone metric never works”. The hard stuff is the effort to associate carbon with a cloud service, especially where the actual data are locked up in the provider’s data centre and they may well have no interest in providing the detailed data to feed into the models. It is, at the least, a hard problem.

Lawrence outlines an alternative proxy approach. It still relies on cloud providers doing the sums; but they may well already be gathering the data, and may well be more willing to deliver a category-based per-hour or per-VM footprint  (kWh and carbon per VM hour, perhaps). Its accuracy needs to be similar to that of billing, neither much more nor much less.

This presentation has given me an incentive to revisit what I know of 451 Group: perhaps the most encouraging aspect was Andy Lawrence’s willingness to identify, and review, academic/industrial research projects which are easily overlooked by an insight market which tends to look only at vendors’ own development pipelines. It admits that development of real, workable methodologies is some time away: Optimis, like all EU Framework projects, is pre-competitive research. But while the project itself may not deliver the ultimate solution, the ideas it generates will certainly inform future metrics and tools.

Links:
• The 451 Group and The Uptime Institute
• Optimis EU project: Optimized Infrastructure Services
• EU GAMES: Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service centres (similar, for high performance computing)
• (These projects are within the EU’s 7th Framework Project; the CORDIS database holds information on these and all projects)

Related posts:
• A Gartner perspective on Green IT
• Green IT; encountering Connection Research

This is an as-it-goes blog, plus a bit of later tidying up.

Connection reckons to work from real data, determining metrics and developing benchmarks. Their areas are: communities; green IT; the built environment; and carbon/compliance (Australia is about to introduce carbon pricing, around A$23/ton).

Connection also recognises “green fatigue” and “greenwash”; but broader issues are gaining prominence for PR; from regulation; or for financial reasons (direct, or indirect because of brand and reputation issues). There’s a perfect storm of issues, because the rise of “big data” is increasing demand; transparency is being demanded; energy security is a rising issue (in Australia as in the USA, though not so much in the UK); and simple cost.

Connection has helped to develop an ICT Sustainability framework and index, with academic partners, across: equipment lifecycle; end user computing; enterprise & data centre; and IT as a low-C enabler. Essentially, in this, is the same distinction as in Simon Mingay’s presentation: doing IT green, and enabling green business by IT. He recognises Bring Your Own plus mobility as a sustainability strategy – it creates fundamental savings and helps reduce the need for permanent facilities on the current scale..

The Fujitsu Global ICT Sustainability report, published Sept 2011, surveyed 80 different areas. It appears that results on the IT Sustainability Index (ITSx; see Connection’s website for more information) have generally regressed recently, and this isn’t a drag effect from emerging economies in China and India. Within the detail, it’s interesting that Government is ahead of the across-sector average index. Surprisingly, brand reputation is driving some “dirty” industry (e.g. mining) up the stack. Nationally, Canada is the leader and the UK second; regulation has been driving this market; and few markets excel in all the sectors.

Ehmcke highlights the major slip in the ITSx for Professional Services; odd, because these industries have only buildings, people and intellectual property. They ought to be easily able to excel; but they don’t, and have slipped relative to 2010 as has, more understandably, manufacturing.

In response to a question: an interesting national measure is GDP value per unit of carbon emission, where Japan leads the way (though not included in the Connection stats; the survey wasn’t done because of the tsunami). Ask how much carbon your enterprise uses per $million of revenue … the use and development of effective metrics is falling back and, without data, action is impossible. Over half the CIOs surveyed have no idea about their IT power consumption, for example.

In response to another question: a point was made that sustainability, in many corporations, is handed to Risk Management (even where there’s a Sustainability Officer), because it’s seen as being about compliance and a holistic view isn’t taken.

A couple more questions, and then a quick outline of the Foundation for IT Sustainability, and the new Green IT Fundamentals course based on licensed training material from Connection, linked to CompTIA, and supported by the Global e.Sustainability Initiative. A useful presentation; the emergence of training, metrics, and certifications is important and the topic was expanded in a presentation from the BCS which I haven’t blogged.

Links:
• Connection Research
• ICT Sustainability: Global Benchmark Report Reveals a Lack of Visibility of the ICT Energy Bill Has Delayed Success, Fujitsu Press Release, 21 Sept 2011: headline summary, with link to obtain a copy of the full report
• Foundation for IT Sustainability (FFITS)
• Global e.Sustainability Initiative (GESI)

Related posts:
• A Gartner perspective on Green IT
• Green 3: Andy Lawrence of 451