Monthly Archives: February 2011

Smugness, leading to a moment of insight

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They say that an addict never stops obsessing about the object of their addiction; so does my still being awake 6 hours into a flight to Tokyo and working not relaxing mark me as an addict to work? Scary question and one I think best to ignore for now as too much self-awareness can be way too disconcerting! Still what I’m reading is really interesting – alright – that might be my addiction still typing but stay with me for now.

I’ve just finished reading a Gartner report entitled “The CIO’s Role In Making The New Realities Real” which was really thought-provoking. I started off feeling super smug as they list five actions a forward-thinking CIO should be actively progressing now and I hit four out of five of them. However, having a plan and executing that plan over the required period in a sustained way are very different propositions. For the record, if you do not have access to the report, the five actions are: see beyond your enterprise and sector to understand the changes underway in the industry/role; build an innovation engine; shift resources to growth and innovation; rethink risk management; increase focus on governance.

I’ve talked about governance and the need to reset the place CIOs and their function have in driving value for the organisation in a world of “have credit card will purchase cloud computing” and “shadow IT” in a previous post. I’ve probably bored people rigid with opinion on the importance of innovation and how I agree with the analysts arguing that the future CIO will be as much about innovation as they will information. However, what I am finding the toughest action to progress is shifting resource to growth and innovation in a world where I have to deliver year on year cost reductions, minimise my spend and maximise the value derived, ideally via that lovely fantasy of many of zero cost, ever-lasting, self evolving IT perfection. It is a constant challenge to free up resources, people or money, to enable strategic value enhancing initiatives (as opposed to making IT systems cost less) whilst broadly performing the same function and enabling a non-innovated business process/outcome. This is what really caught my attention as it relates directly to a current challenge with which I’m wrestling: how to tackle, in a way that does not involve simply buying more storage, our insatiable corporate appetite to store more and more information, structured and unstructured.

My thoughts were focused on this topic by a mix of CAPEX requests, strategy proposals, an extremely interesting set of articles in the February edition of Wired (UK) entitled “Your Life Torn Open, What The End Of Privacy Means for You” (Sharing is a trap; Zuckerberg’s next move; get over it) and the fact I will be meeting Professor Nonaka this week, a business guru with a track record in knowledge management. I cannot do justice to the thought-provoking issues and insights contained in the Wired portfolio but I would strongly urge that you read them, soon. However, in this context it hammered home to me that we need to revisit the information we are storing, ask why we are storing it and ask what value is derived from the sheer volume as opposed to the knowledge that may be harvested from it. We absolutely cannot continue chasing the lowest cost solution to the ever growing demands for storage space nor can we allow the volume to make it ever more difficult or slow to access the knowledge. At the same time, we absolutely cannot allow our growing unstructured data storage requirements to be constrained by the consequences of our structured data “file everything multiple times” habit. Hardly a eureka moment or even very insightful but sometimes the spur to tackle preconceptions and reset your approach can arise from the least likely component convergence. So clearly, the key question now is “What am I going to do exactly then to break the cycle of ever expanding storage spend?”…

Image credit: © DigitalGenetics – Fotolia.com

Stereotypes – Shaken and Stirred?

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Last week I was invited to talk at a D Group event on the topic of Generation Y.  The discussion after my monologue was wide ranging and extremely interesting, particularly as it had a business leader perspective rather than a technology orientation. One element of my material that generated a deal of debate was a demographic analysis that I had prepared on ten months worth of my “why can’t I?” email collection. I’ve mentioned this weekly collation of incoming requests and challenges from my user base and how I use it as an insightful barometer of technology demand in an earlier post.  Spookily, the demand alignment to demographic stereotypes is pretty much what you might expect, for example demand for Android based tablets receiving corporate email and other services coming from Generation Y, but the same services for Apple iPhones/iPads coming from Generation X.   An interesting data point for me was that the demand for Microsoft Windows based tablets to be enabled for corporate services was almost entirely from Baby-Boomers which has some interesting implications perhaps for the Nokia/Microsoft link up announced today.  The only other requests overwhelmingly dominated by one demographic related to self selection of of smartphone or computer for use in corporate context; 80% of those requests were from Generation Y.   This is interesting as, just as in many other companies, Generation Y is a minority group within our population but that will change over the coming decade and it signals an emerging demand loud and clear (I’ll discuss the way I meet the demand on social media and also on personal smartphone use in a future post).

The term emerging also figured prominently as I prepared some material to present at the quarterly Fujitsu Executive Discussion Evening event that we provide for our customers.  The topic of the evening was innovation at the sharp end and some event materials may be found on the i-CIO website, including videos taken of speakers and attendees on the night.

I opened my presentation using an infographic which shows the most efficient nations at turning R&D spend into patents submitted in 2008 together with the raw numbers submitted on a world map.  As you view the map from west to east the efficiency dramatically rises until you find that South Korea is massively more efficient than any other country and in the same total number band as the USA and Japan. The United States does relatively poorly on the efficiency measure, certainly not what you might expect for the world’s largest economy; the UK has the same efficiency rating.  Now I would love to see the data repeated for 2009 and 2010 but I think we can probably safely assume that that rise of the countries like China, India and South Korea will not have slowed.

Perhaps what is interesting is to link the demographic perspective from my data set to the population trends in the emerging economic super-powers, and to the efficiency indicated by the infographic, to form a view on the location and drivers for future innovation.  Clearly filing patents is not the same as being certain that the invention will lead to a business innovation, i.e. a change in how we do something in either consumer or corporate space that generates business benefit and ultimately money.  However, it does give pause for though.  At the Intellect Annual Regent Conference last week Mike Lynch (the founder and CEO of Autonomy) gave an excellent interview (as reported by Nick Heath on Silicon.com) in which he said that the majority of start-ups in Silicon Valley today were being established by South Koreans and that, in his view, we need to attract the “uber-talented” to set up their companies in Britain to create jobs and innovation profit engines in our economy.  At the time I was surprised by the reference to South Korea – a day later I saw the infographic discussed above and a penny dropped for me!

It seems that the last a week or so proved some stereotypes to be correct for me but also shook up some of my preconceptions and thinking. All in all, that must have been a jolly good week!

Image credit: © nikkytok – Fotolia.com

[Updated 31 August 2011 to include David’s presentation slides]