deal architect

Consumerization of IT with a Capital C

Consumerization is not a new concept. In 2005, Gartner defined it as "the growing practice of introducing  new technologies into consumer markets prior to industrial markets". Unfortunately, in the years since, the definition has gotten narrower - to where many primarily use to define how IT should treat a range of employee and visitor devices or what is termed BYOD policies.

As I wrote in this InformationWeek column, consumerization defined in broader terms creates significant new opportunities for IT in the form of smarter products and services:

"Many CIOs cringe when they hear the term "consumerization."...Flip that coin over and celebrate. The same employee who's a pain-in-the-rear user is also your company's new consumer, looking for more tech in everything from cars to a hotel stay. And that fact creates incredible new opportunity for IT teams to be more valuable to their companies."

I am also pleased to see this just out Oracle commerce survey which says

"B2Bs are Becoming the New B2Cs: -- B2B organizations are not just talking the talk, they are also walking the walk and adopting B2C commerce best practices as a way to drive revenue and market share. 80% of respondents agree that customer expectations have changed due to B2C retail practices.  Personalization, online catalogs and SEO continue to be the top three B2C practices that influence revenue the most for B2Bs."

Download the Oracle report - has interesting trends around CX - Customer experience.

And don't miss out on the opportunity to let Consumerization positively influence your operations across the enterprise, not just some narrow IT area.

"How to patch stupidity"

Interesting article in Dark Reading on the relatively powerful defense that comes from users who are trained to be smarter about security.

The article goes into the growing sophistication of "spearphishing" through harvesting of social networks to present personalized data to avoid detection like this example:

"The attacker did extensive research, likely on LinkedIn, and knew that the five executives regularly worked together on projects, Murray says. Using that knowledge, the hacker crafted five different emails, each of which looked like an email from one of the five colleagues to the rest of the group referencing a fictional meeting the recipient had missed. That message included a malicious attachment that was the supposed agenda for the fake meeting. Each email had a made-up thread to make it appear there had been a flurry of responses back and forth among the rest of the group."

In this particular case, one of the conned executives had the presence of mind to tell his IT group about it.

The article points out

"Employees now detect about 10% of the advanced attacks after they’ve slipped by technology defenses. That percentage may not seem like much, but considering that these are employees from all walks of life sniffing out attacks that most security technologies couldn’t detect, it’s a meaningful boost."

Geeky Mad Men

I am constantly amazed people talk about the CMO "becoming" tech savvy. 50+ years of work with Nielsen TV ratings, 30+ years of POS data parsing, and 10+ years of web optimization with Google appear to have gone unnoticed.

Similarly, many in the industry do not seem to realize how tech-savvy creative agencies can be.

In recent months I have posted examples on New Florence where the agency helped on what is a pretty impressive, geeky deliverable:

Ikea's augmented reality catalog - credit to McCann-Erickson

Delta's Photon Shower to combat jet lag - thanks to Wieden + Kennedy New York

Levoreact's allergy video using gaming motion capture tech - JWT

U of Engineering and Technology of Peru's watercooler billboard - converts moisture in local air to drinkable water - credit to Mayo DraftFCB

 

The three seasons

There is something very reassuring when Stan Swete, CTO of Workday signs off a presentation (as he did today) on the latest release of his product with "we look forward to doing this again in 4 months"

Now in 19th iteration, the 3 releases a year tend to be manageable chunks of new functionality and technology that don't overwhelm its customers and which are conveniently delivered in background. This, while allowing customers to personalize by applying custom fields to Workday objects, creating validations associated with custom fields, and apply their own labels to fields.

The regular upgrades also allow Workday to unabashedly present in detail on new features like 170 new ones in 19 such as improved amortization useful for digital asset accounting or to drill into demos like new features like time card entry on the iOS version in shot below.(BTW, 19 also intoduces Android apps in the Google Play store. Previous versions supported iOS and HTML5)

This is so different from the high pitched, high level hype I see from so many other vendors or in reverse, death by bullets - new features listed in a press release or a static PPT presentations.  

In the spirt of Workday "re-imagining the traditional approach to software customization", I think Vivaldi should customize his concertos down from 4 to 3 - to reflect Workday's 3 seasons a year. 

The Real Deal: Mark Herring on "APIs everywhere, but not many I can reuse"

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well.

This time it is Mark Herring, SVP of Product Marketing at Software AG. I recently heard him talk about "Big Services" as a unheralded cousin of Big Data and invited him to write about the changing world of services and APIs, which his webMethods product gives him a nice perch to observe from.

“In my role I meet with many customers and have the unique privilege of seeing the hype cycle through the eyes of my collective customers. Many customers are moving aggressively in exposing their systems as API’s as they try to address the huge demand for mobile access to their systems. One misconception that I have to often address is the perception that there are so many API’s already out there that by combining a few API’s together they should be able to get their systems out even quicker.

The Programmable Web lists almost 9,000 APIs that are publicly accessible, which should be a boon to productivity. Basically the theory sounds fabulous – create new applications by combining an API from vendor A, with another API from vendor B, with a bit of business logic from my business. Unfortunately the truth is that most reusable API’s are not being reused. There are a few reasons for this lack of reuse:

 Many of the API’s that are out there are in the category of “No one cares!”. Well maybe someone cares, but by in large do we need another photo sharing service, a daily fact API or a classified service API. I would put this list at about 50% of all the API’s out there!

The next category “Interesting but no SLA” accounts for another 35%. There are a plenty of interesting API’s that I might want to use but either the company providing them is unknown, or the API has no service level agreement. There is no way that I would want to put this API in my application or mashup since it going down would mean problems for me. No one want to deal with the error “Sorry service unavailable”.

The next category is what I call “Great.. BUT”.  These APIs seem usable, they provide a service I need, they meet my requirements for availability, BUT if only they had this extra return value, or this one extra feature. There are by far the most frustrating API’s to deal with. The most common way around these is just rewrite them to give the exact results I was hoping for. This probably accounts for an additional 10% of the publicly accessible API’s.

The final list is “Widely used”. This is by far the smallest subset, I attribute 5% of all APIs in this category, but even then I think I am being a little too generous. The list includes APIs such as FedEx/UPS tracking,  Google Maps and potentially Credit Check.  The limitations with these API’s is that often an account is needed because the API provider is assuming risk/liability. For instance the Credit Check API will be provided by one of the credit bureaus or card processing services and if the check passes and funds are credited they may assume the liability if at a later stage the transaction was deemed to be from a stolen card.

What Does This Mean For YOU?

Review publicly assessible API’s, but don’t be disheartened that many of them will not fit your needs. API reuse is only one benefit; arguably the biggest benefit of API’s is mobile access to business systems. When building your own API think of public usage and reuse, since these are good design patterns to emulate. And finally, adopt a robust and secure API management strategy."

Mark can be reached at mark DOT herring AT softwareag DOT com

The Technology Switch Hitter

Oliver Bussmann, CIO of SAP is leaving to become CIO of UBS Group and this article has a comment "the idea of somebody moving from an IT services company into an end user company is quite uncommon"

Actually it is not that uncommon. This weekend I finished slides for a presentation in a couple of weeks titled "The Technology Switch Hitter". I point out executives who are good at both consuming and producing technology are indispensable. In the slides I invoke Lance Berkman, off to a great year with the Texas Rangers, and who will retire as one of the best baseball switch hitters in history.

In my recent book,  I included guest columns from Tony Scott, CIO at Microsoft and Vijay Ravidran, Chief Digital Officer at The Washington Post. Scott got to Microsoft after stints at Disney and General Motors. Ravindran was involved with Amazon in its early days and has done other startups since. They represent a growing group of  execs who cross the line from vendor to end user company and in reverse.

Actually, my book was supposed to be called The Technology Switch Hitter. My publisher got cold feet because the term is politically incorrect outside of baseball circles. So they dumbed it down to The New Technology Elite.

For the book research I spoke to some baseball personnel. I learned about the physiology of ambidexterity, the "mood swings" each side goes through, the extra time switchitters have to put in to practice each side. One reason why only about  15% of MLB players are switchhitters and a much smaller percentage is as good as Lance. 

But every team needs some, and every technology leadership, be it at vendor or user organization could similarly use backgrounds like Oliver's, Scott's and Vijay's.

 

Pause your ERP investment?

Time magazine has a cover story on the bounce back of American manufacturing. Worth a proper read (sub required) but they outline several drivers:

a) Smarter products with sensors/software and supported with advanced analytics

b) 3D printing

c) Energy economics - the US is increasingly benefitting from shale oil and gas whereas global sourcing is being hurt by increased shipping costs

d) Smarter US worker - who is looking more competitive as labor costs for more basic offshore talent keeps rising

But they also raise a few caveats

"Manufacturing is coming back, but it's evolving into a very different type of animal than the one most people recognize today,"

"Designs will be altered in real time to reflect the knowledge."

"Wanek says Ashley will reward workers who are adaptive. Part of that involves acquiring new skills while on the job and taking responsibility for devising and implementing improvements."

So,  what does have to do with your ERP investment?

a) Can your ERP system help you effectively evaluate your product design, sensor generated data, shop floor design, global sourcing, logistics, talent management, energy efficiency and many other areas to help you decide how your manufacturing/supply chain  needs to evolve, and how much should be made in the US?

b) And can your ERP itself functionally support this next-gen manufacturing of smarter products, 3D printing etc?

If the answer to a and b is unclear, maybe you should reduce or redeploy the money going to ERP maintenance, hosting, upgrades and use towards higher payback - making your products smarter, reconfiguring your supply chain, retraining your factory workers, etc.

It is an exciting time for US manufacturing. But only if we do several things smarter.

 

More innovation off the global beaten path

We hear so much about Silicon Valley and Bangalore and Shanghai that is refreshing to hear about innovations in unexpected places:

Back to the future in St. Augustine, one of the US's oldest cities

The Big Data of Antarctica's sea floor

Startups in Cape Town, S. Africa

Galileo - the European GPS

Ethiopia's geothermal potential

Screaming from our silos

I had a drink with my former Gartner colleague, Erik Keller and I was describing the stack of OnStar FMV rear view mirrors I saw at BestBuy this week. I was describing how OnStar, with massive GM investment was meant to be a differentiated feature for its Cadillacs and Buicks when first introduced a decade ago, and how Garmin and other GPS devices, then Google Maps on our smartphones dramatically reduced the allure of OnStar. So  it was repackaged as FMV - a service on a rearview mirror which even a Toyota or Chrysler customer could avail off. And now an app like Automatic comes along and reduces the allure of even FMV.

Most top executives are baffled at the massive and rapid changes that technology is unleashing. And yet, as Erik and I were discussing, most analysts and bloggers sit in our silos and argue about SAP versus Oracle and social this and cloud that.

Many grocery executives are startled at the pace at which Amazon, eBay, Google and startups like Zipments are introducing same day, home deliveries. A decade after WebVan, the existential threat of newer competitors becoming viable once the "last mile" delivery problem is solved is back.  But we rather talk to them about Android and AWS.

In my 20+ technology career I have never seen so many new technologies become viable concurrently. I have also never seen more buzzwords fly around at the same time. 

Many market watchers have through HARO helped out reporters. I think it is time for a HAEO - as in Executive  We should all work with a business executive for a couple of days - no buzzwords, no HANA or Hadoop will solve world hunger.

Listen to them, and give them a realistic perspective on their technology challenges and opportunities.  And yes, even send them a bill. Could be the best (and smallest) technology investment they make all year.

More New Renaissance

on the innovation blog

Trends in wearable technology

Xerox: rebirth as a vertical BPO provider

The vibrant medical apps market

A remote control for your life

An early-warning system for the social web

SUNY Albany’s Nanotech complex

Coke’s CIO and its marketing efforts

The Ethnic Grocery Market