deal architect

And these are our most paranoid...

InformationWeek has a sobering assessment of the state of mobile security - over 25% of those surveyed say at least 10% of the mobile devices at their entities have had a "security incident".

But what's scarier later in the article is how unprotected so many of the  attendees at the recent Black Hat conference were. These are security wizards, born paranoid and paid to continue to be so. If they are oblivious  to mobile security risks, think about the majority of us.

One really scary scenario for most of us who travel is the tempation to use charging stations at airports, cafes etc - need to watch out for juice jacking ...

 

 

The tree of innovation

During my early summer visit to Software AG HQ campus in Darmstadt, Germany I opened the door to the balcony of the second storey room I was working in, and was impressed with the friendliness of the Blauregen (literally Blue Rain) which wanted to come in and work with me. The campus has plenty of other inspiring features - ponds with frogs who constantly plead to come work with you (more likely they were celebrating the arrival of warm weather). The campus reflects the "in touch with nature" philosophy of the company founders.

I did some research on the plant, and it is in the Wisteria family. Wikipedia says “It is very hardy and fast-growing. It can grow in fairly poor-quality soils, but prefers fertile, moist, well-drained soil. They thrive in full sun.”

It is a good metaphor for innovation even in the summer doldrums.

The New Florence blog will have logged 420 innovation entries through the end of August.  A bit slower than last year’s record crop of 750, but still nice with the book project and other commitments this year.  It is ceratinly inspired by the largest wisteria in Japan which covers nearly 2,000 square meters.

The Big Revelation

My summer project developing a book for the CEO of Software AG gave me a glimpse at innovation at 30 of the largest  brands in the world in 15 industries and 10 countries. Truly invigorating - and revealing in that very little of what they are doing will likely show up in analyst reports or tech media, and then not for a few years. And probably never on Twitter.  These are not cool social or  mobile apps, but complex, multi-technology initiatives that I call systems of (competitive) advantage. 

I have always tried to balance my time between customers, large vendors, startups, tech investors and analyst/bloggers. My summer experience has convinced me to increase the time I spend with customers. I am ramping up consulting time with customers. And with conference season starting up in a couple of weeks (Workday, Oracle, Salesforce among others) , hoping to reach out to more customers at these events.

And to spend less time on Twitter. Seriously, few of these customers spend time there and even fewer have interest in sharing their innovations there. You have to make time for them in one on one calls and visits.  It's worth the investment.

 

Enterprise UX in an “age of invisible design”

I was reading this Wired quote about Dieter Rams' philosophy about product design: "It doesn’t draw attention to itself; it merely allows users to accomplish their tasks with the maximal amount of efficiency and pleasure. At its best, it is invisible."

And thinking, in contrast, how loudly "visible" enterprise software UI is. It is a major competitive feature in enterprise deals with plenty of screamns about "our UI is prettier".  "Lipstick on a pig" is a common exeuctive put down when they have to say something kind about competitive product upgrades.

In general, though enterprise UX which cannot break free from the bounds of keyboard and mouse (or more recently, touchscreen) is looking so dated compared to the experience in so many other fields.

Take the retail industry. It is experimenting with soft POS and self check out technologies. It is using facial recognition and unique audio signals to mobile phones to identify frequent and VIP customers. It is using depth sensors to analyze shoppers’ reactions toward various products and full-body scanners to take measurements of customers.

Take healthcare. We are seeing bracelets to monitor various vital signs, under skin sensors to communicate with embedded devices, and brain machine interfaces. Barcodes and audible, escalating alarms are the staple interfaces of most devices in hospitals

Closer to home, take home devices. De Dietrich offers “smart” induction hobs.  Should the user move the pan anywhere in the cooking zone, the hob’s automatic pan detectors ensure that the temperature of the pan remains constant. The user no longer has to guess where the hot spots are.  The Nest thermostat glows orange when it’s heating and blue when it’s cooling. In addition, it turns on when you approach it, and it discreetly goes dark when nobody is nearby.  It also “learns” from the user’s manual adjustments.

Finally, take autos. Radar is helping drivers with assistive cruise control, sonar with parking, cameras with rear view and blind spot vision, sensors with low tire pressure, lasers and proximity sensors with gestures to raise rear tailgates, eye tracking with reduction of knobs and buttons in the cabin, Bluetooth and other audio technology to answer calls and play music.

There is something liberating with these products not requiring the driver (or the passengers) and other users to use a keyboard and mouse.

Think if enterprise UI designers were told - pretend the keyboard and mouse are declared illegal.

How do we think we would re-envision enterprise apps in the “age of invisible design”?

The underappreciated art of technology supply chain management

Ever since I researched these topics for The New Technology Elite, I have continued to marvel how complex technology supply chains have become:

a) The need to demand forecast and plan for launch of several million units or just a few thousands of a tablet, an eBook reader, an app or a game etc. There is no history to go by in a new product category - and you either have a runaway success or a dud, and the supply chain has to be prepared to absorb either shock

b) The magnitude of a global smartphone launch with need to coordinate with hundreds of telcos and local digital agencies in various markets

c) The politics of tantalum and other "conflict minerals" from the Republic of Congo, rare earths from Inner Mongolia, the labor issues with contract manufacturing in China etc

d) The many hiccups the supply chain has to plan for - the havoc caused by the Iceland volcano, the Japanese tsunami, the Thailand floods etc (BTW this new APQC study looks at the growing occurrence of such disruptions)

e) The secrecy and security needed in a hyper-competitive market, while continuing to use contract manufacturers and component suppliers that your competitors also use

f) The channels - retail investments, app stores, ecommerce sites - that the supply chain has to accomodate

g) The incredible number of peaks and valleys in global demand the supply chain has to accomodate - Back to School, Black Friday, Chinese New Year, other campaigns.

h) The sophistication of the logistics providers - Fedex, DHL, UPS, others - and the unsung efforts of countless 747-400 freighters, Chinamax liners, and the new 'Orient Express" (the rail service which connects W. China to Germany)

i) The sophistication of the digital supply chain - cloud data centers and networks to handle a torrent of streaming media, apps downloads, elctronic activations of service, customer support etc.

I had several case studies in the  book which covered these themes, but one in particular brought out the complexity very vividly  - the HP supply chain one. I have attached that below if you want to download.

Given all this, I am amazed our industry does not recognize more the wizards who run our tech supply chains.

Glad Steve Jobs for one did with Tim Cook.

Download HP supply chain

 

 

The sum of all cloud fears - and dreams

This snarky comment in a Seattle Times blog summarizes the stability and security concerns people continue to have about cloud computing

“With the three largest cloud software companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) in the U.S. all having glitches in the same week, you’ve got to wonder if the NSA is updating its routers or something.”

Personally I am more excited about a milestone the Bessemer blog writes about (thanks to Jason Corsello for the pointer)

With 30 large public companies collectively representing more than $100 billion in market capitalization and $12.5 billion in estimated 2013 revenue                                     

And Bessemer does not include IaaS or PaaS revenues or growing cloud revenues at Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and others.

But then I am biased.

This blog has been a big cloud fan since it started in 2005. My posts and books have celebrated cloud pioneers like Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Zach Nelson (Netsuite), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Aneel Bhusri (Workday), Mike Manos (early architect of Azure data centers), , Narinder Singh (co- founder of Appirio), Sridhar Venbu (Zoho), Byron Teeter (Bessemer) and so many others. 

It's good to see the their toil pay off in the milestone Bessemer points out. Personally I am salivating over another factoid they point out - Cloud penetration is still only 2% of IT!

 

Category "Killers"

I was part of a group of analysts Gartner started hiring in the mid 90s to expand their business applications coverage. It launched the Administrative Application Services (AAS), Customer Relational Management (CRM), Integrated Logistics Services (ILS), and several vertical ones starting in 1995. Its coverage of these areas started to get richer and soon there were all kinds of Magic Quadrants and events focused on the categories.

But you could see major chunks of the enterprise and the tech industry would not fit easily into these categories. So, there would be frequent debates around where Order Management would go. It was customer facing, so CRM? It also involved pricing and invoicing, so AAS? Similarly with procurement – indirect items like pencils under AAS, but where to put procurement of production related direct materials? Who would cover lifecycle issues such as application TCO? Who would cover packaged software focused SIs? 

Twenty years later we have seen many more tech categories get defined (and an occasional one retired). And yet the world of business continues to become exponentially more complex. In my book project this summer I spoke to a number of companies who described many projects in areas using technologies few analysts have Waves or Quadrants for. And most of these executives were not even discussing their work with biotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other technologies – the kind of multi-disciplinary projects and products that I had described in The New Polymath

Having created the narrow silos, the IT industry has also perpetuated a group of opinionated category watchers – not just analysts, plenty of bloggers, consultants, journalists also fall into that definition. They view every industry trend and challenge from their category lens. Either their category supposedly solves every problem, or the problem is not worthy of attention. Their Magic Quadrants and vendor lists keep getting more nuanced – mid market versions, European, Asian versions. Their events showcase newer specialists in their category. But the category itself does not typically grow wider in scope.

The good news is many customers, and at least some vendors think outside these silos. The majority of the 3,000 posts on New Florence do not neatly fall into single market categories. Maybe that’s why we go wow when we see them.

The curious case of IBM's Watson

Bill Kutik announces IBM's Watson will be at his HR Technology show. It is positioned thus in a LinkedIn update he posted:

"Watson is not connected to the Internet. It does not research the questions. It’s been taught the domains it knows, rather than programmed. Think of it as Siri’s much wiser great-grandfather. As a result, it’s a little large to get out of the office much. So Rudy will be accessing Watson through a laptop but will be joined onstage by a Watson avatar, as on Jeopardy."

Watson was greeted with wild enthusiasm 2 1/2 years ago. But while IBM keeps promising big things  - in healthcare in particular - it has shown little commercial success. And Bill's description of it just conveys the image of something very old and largely immobile.

I keep hoping Watson is like Benjamin Button, as in the Brad Pitt movie. As it ages, it becomes more nimble and usable.

Honestly, that's a tall order given IBM itself is looking very old and immobile. And if anything our expectations of a natural interface have grown with our experience (and frustrations) with Siri and Google Now which arrived after Watson made its Jeopardy! debut.

Code Halos – High Praise and Furrowed Brows

Final post in a series by Ben Pring who co-leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work.

In laying out how “Code Halos” – aka our digital fingerprints –are changing the competitive rules in fast digitizing markets worldwide, we have provided the backstory, defined the various attributes and types of Code Halos, and revealed a model that we have seen play out time and again among Code Halo pioneers

In this final installment, we offer few concluding thoughts based on the feedback we have received from- Cognizant clients and prospects, Cognizant staff, industry analysts and other interested parties. Firstly, the response to our ideas around Code Halo-thinking is overwhelmingly positive. I and my co-authors, Malcolm Frank and Paul Roehrig, have spoken at dozens of client and industry events and engaged in numerous post-presentation discussions with a wide array of senior IT and business leaders who when presented with the Code Halo idea and follow us through our Crossroads Model tell us of the opportunities Code Halo-thinking offers (including the risks of “extinction events”) are very real in their industry or market. For example, the narrative resonated with a major soft drink manufacturer that saw a new way to think about the social network around its soft drink; with an international airline which is beginning to socialize and internalize the new metaphor of a Code Halo- to rethink how it moves customers from point A to point B; and with a leading financial services institution that admitted it was only too aware of the “ionization” happening all around it as new ideas from start-ups begin to change the competitive dynamics the company faces.

The second major reaction though – which may or may not surprise you, if you’ve read any of the previous pieces here, or on New Florence, is that many people immediately internalize the Code Halo story and find “the dark side of the Halo.” Rather than focusing on the positive transformational commercial opportunities Code Halos present, they land on the dystopian, Orwellian world of constant surveillance by Big (and little) Brother that Messrs Assange, Manning and Snowden (which sounds like a perfectly respectable firm of solicitors in the Herefordshire countryside, doesn’t it?) have brought to the fore in recent weeks, months and years.

Typically we hear a torrent of worst-case scenarios. “I don’t want to share my information with retailer x”, “I don’t want the government to have even more information on me that they do already”, “this is just going to make hackers’ lives easier”, “I get bombarded by enough advertising already; this is just going to make it even worse”, “I don’t want to live in 1984”, “I am not a number”, “how can I control who knows things about me”, “this is the final nail in the coffin of privacy”, “these ideas will never take off.”

The prism (excuse the pun) that people have is perfectly understandable. Their concerns and fears are, of course, entirely valid and understandable. We share many of them. As digital immigrants ourselves we are at times as dazed and confused as any set of middle aged men by the emergent and volatile social mores of the new world and have to fight back the temptation to wallow in nostalgic revelries of how “this wasn’t the way we used to do it back in the day/old country.”

The grand experiment that we are all engaged in – creating a world of unprecedented hyper-connectivity of time, space, and culture - which the Code Halo phenomena is supercharging, is, by its very nature, unknowable and logically contains good things and bad. Lots of good things are going to happen in a world of Code Halos, as are lots of bad things.

In short, we have no intention to deny that bad things will happen as a result of code meeting code. We fully expect they will. There is a very real dark side of the halo. All of the worst-case scenarios with which we are presented will happen., and are happening now. People will get hacked. Government intrusion will grow. Advertisers will create new ways to embed advertizing into every nook and cranny of our lives through every IP addressable form factor we use. Privacy will recede. The nefarious will have new opportunities to hurt us. Many innovations enabled by Code Halos will have unexpected consequences which will compound over time to produce unanticipated negative outcomes.

And yet we firmly believe these fears, concerns and objections are overblown, irrelevant or moot. Every objection is entirely the same objection that people raised as Al Gore’s Information Superhighway was entering the public consciousness in the middle of the 1990s; “I’ll never put my credit details onto the web,” Average Joe said in 1996; now Joe is routinely spending thousands of dollars online.

The Internet has been a crime scene in the last 20 years -- repeatedly. And it still is. And it always will be. But, today the Internet has 634 million websites and 2.4 billion users, according to uptime monitoring company, Royal Pingdom, and is here to stay. Nobody is going to un-invent it.

In 2013 so much of our lives are already online – shared, visible, transparent, open, all proffered voluntarily through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, et al, or less voluntarily via our credit score, phone records, movements, and key strokes that the government can impound without warrant -- that privacy is already an illusion, hackers already hack, advertisers can already advertise within our email, pharmacies already send our 16-year-old daughters coupons for diapers when neither they nor we knew they were pregnant; we are numbers, we are code.

The world that we are describing is already here. The Code Halo era is not imminent. It is now.

Just as the upside of the Internet has won over the downside we believe the upside of a Code Halo world will win over its downsides. The “give to get” ratio of the Code Halo world will be so positive that, in the same way that the cost and convenience of Internet era 1.0 triumphed over its doubters, the new Internet era of Code Halos will similarly see it detractor’s voices diminish and disappear.

And one last thought; the ultimate value of Code Halos will originate out of the openness of data that is shared and this, of course, will mandate good behavior and accountability. Just as lousy service that once went unpunished is now broadcast on social media with sometimes devastating impact, individuals or corporations that misuse or exploit information exchanged via Code Halos will struggle to enrich and inflate their Code Halo and to generate commercially material sparks. Bad Code Halo behavior will exist in a world of instant high visibility and will push some towards their extinction event.

If you’ve enjoyed these blogs over the last few weeks please look out for our upcoming app and book “Code Halo” where we’ll be exploring these ideas in more depth. In the meantime please check out below the trailer video for our app and please share your thoughts about the world of Code Halos and the Crossroads Model at www.unevenlydistributed.com

HP’s Data HAVEn

I was invited to be part of a panel at a HP Vertica event in Boston this week. It was their first major user conference and I expected most of the focus to be on their technology. But the icons at the bottom of a few keynote slides suggested a much wider data vision.

And during breaks and in sessions, I was impressed with a wide array of conversations and presentations – from social analytics to security analytics, from video analytics in surveillance settings to healthcare analytics.

And each of them represented a blend of multiple technology components from HP. So, sentiment analysis leverage Autonomy IDOL’s ability to interpret “slang, industry-specific words, sarcasm or variants in spelling” . The security analytics combine HP ArcSight securtiy tools with Vertica’s analytics. 

Partners like Tableau and Tibco with Spotfire enhance visualization in many solutions. Others like MZI Healthcare provide solutions aimed at Accountable Care Organizations. 

I now have a much better appreciation for the “n” in HP’s HAVEn vision below.

The execution will be the challenge.

Can the HP Field, HP Services, HP Partner management come together to support the growing “n” or would they be better off with a finite, single digit  number of solutions? HP, as a company, has never been afraid of a large portfolio of products, but they tend to be "me too" products in many categories, as a result.

Look forward to seeing how HP quantifies the "n" in the analytics space.