Category Archives: Thought Leadership

A look back on 2010, and a view forward to 2011

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New Year 2011 pushing 2010 downAt this time of year there are many articles and posts that provide insightful, amusing and thought provoking summaries of the year nearly completed.  The fact that I have read a number of excellent reviews of 2010 has helpfully discouraged me from trying to compete.  That said I cannot resist some personal observations on how I experienced 2010.

2010 was the year where we went from talking about the potential of cloud computing to seeing that future state take shape in the market.  Regardless of your position on solution maturity I doubt many would argue that cloud computing has not arrived and has had no impact on corporate IT strategy.  However, it is not cloud computing that stands as my key inflection point in 2010; that is reserved for the moment that the penny dropped for me on the closely related force of IT consumerisation.

My moment of clarity arrived during Fujitsu’s VISIT 2010 event held in Munich during November.  I’d just walked around the exhibition hall with three client CIOs and moved through the whole range of Fujitsu activities from our endpoint products to our server and storage technologies to cloud computing offerings, our extensive partner ecosystem, right through to our research activities under the strategic intent of human centric computing to enable an intelligent networked society.

I was asked by one of the CIOs which of the areas we’d just seen were having the most impact on my internal IT strategy; after some thought and the sound of a penny dropping I replied none of those as such but rather the change in expectations of my IT delivery.   Two of the CIOs looked at me as if I were slightly deranged whilst (luckily!) the third nodded and agreed with me.  Over a coffee we convinced ourselves that the key challenge is not technology aspects such as device proliferation, or the shadow IT landscape funded by credit cards, nor even social media finding a way into the enterprise.  We decided that the key disruptor is actually the one of expecting choice and an increasing demand to apply the market dynamics of the consumer marketplace to the corporate world.  This brings with it an expectation that using corporate IT should be “pleasurable”, “exciting”, “immediate” and dare I say “cool”; a customer experience as opposed to user experience.

At the start of the year many people including me were using the term “Generation Y” to encapsulate a set of behaviours and expectations that we asserted were generational.  Today I still argue that the characteristics attributed to Generation Y exist but now believe that that many of them are not restricted to a given generation.   Indeed if I look at my weekly barometer of demand (see my earlier post about IT consumerisation) I know enough of the names in my mailbox demanding iPad connectivity, Android access to corporate systems, adoption of services like DropBox, access to social media sites to know that the majority are actually Baby Boomers or Generation X.

The tension created the moment you attempt to reflect consumer arena expectations and demands in your corporate IT strategy is perplexing.  You rapidly find yourself becoming at best the voice of caution, at worst the voice listing all the reasons why not, despite the benefit that could accrue to the organisation.  Balancing risk against benefit is a key part of the CIO role but unsurprisingly I find the role much more rewarding when able to operate as the Chief Innovation Officer.  There is a strong temptation in the face of escalating demand for which you lack funding, quite apart from the information assurance implications or indeed those relating to the operational cost management, to simply say “no, because” and forget all of your consultative customer centric training in how to respond to challenging demands!

I think 2011 is going to be a challenging year for CIOs as I don’t think the economic climate has suppressed the demand for technology solutions arising from the consumer sector centric expectations.  Those of us fortunate to be in CIO roles are certainly not going to be bored. I say fortunate as with those challenges come change and if we don’t like change then IT is the wrong career choice!  So have a good rest over the festive period and recharge those batteries – 2011 is going to be interesting.

Image credit: © VBar – Fotolia.com.

Assessing IT performance

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Mind the GapIt is interesting how sometimes a collection of apparently random events, articles or reports gel in your mind.  We are just in the process of finalising our revised internal IT roadmap for the next three years, with a more specific focus on what exactly we will be focusing on over the next two years and the programme portfolio for the first year.  So perhaps I was subconsciously more receptive that normal to registering content around maximising the value my team delivers to my company, how you might define high performing IT units (and their leaders!) and how that relates to the frequent use of the word “innovation” across business and IT trade press.  Regardless, I alighted upon an excellent report that was recently published by Accenture entitled “Mind The Gap“, providing insights from their third annual global research into high performance IT. A good deal of the content in this report resonated with me, in relation to my CIO role but also to conversations I’ve been having with fellow CIOs, including some of our clients.

The headline in the Computer Weekly article discussing the research was “Top UK CIOs admit their IT is behind the times”.  This was drawn from the fact that in the UK 90% of the CIOs interviewed for the research said that their systems were not sufficiently flexible whereas 67% took the same view elsewhere in the world.  Personally I don’t think that gap is necessarily real and, if pushed, would probably argue that the UK respondents may perhaps have been more brutally honest.  One gap that is clearly apparent from the research is that the gulf between the highest performers and the others is widening from one year to the next.  Now, no CIO wants to be towards the back of the pack so that certainly got my attention and prompted me to download the full report – and I’d recommend that you do too as is very interesting reading.

In the Accenture model they measure IT performance across three primary areas: IT Execution; IT Agility; and IT Innovation.  I thought these were excellent prompts for me in reviewing my strategy and the programme portfolio we are planning to execute.  Now we all have our trials and tribulations lurking within our deployed technology base and I’m not about to bore you with a self-pitying whine on my challenges. However, legacy system maintenance and refresh challenges aside, what I did was to compare what Accenture define as attributes of high performance IT to our plans, generating a checkpoint and some insights.  In summary our plans around IT Execution stood up to scrutiny given our funding constraints (I cannot help myself from complaining!), I found some improvements points in relation to IT Agility and, somewhat depressingly, I found us reverting to a technology-centric perspective truism on IT Innovation and not business value articulation.  It was certainly a worthwhile afternoon of reflection and approach review; and I’m not saying that to be a nice Accenture alumni.

Whilst on the topic of innovation, I recently read an excellent post by Gary Hamel on his Wall Street Journal blog, entitled “Who’s Really Innovative?” Unsurprisingly, given the author, this was an entertaining and insightful article which discussed the questions many of us have grappled with – what is innovative and, whatever it is, how would I embed the generating behaviours into my company DNA?  I need to think through which of his five types of innovators relate to my company and whether we have multiple in play.   It was certainly food for thought as Fujitsu are focusing one of our Executive Discussion Evenings next February on the question “Innovation at the sharp end: how can organisations turn good ideas into bottom-line growth”.  I’ll be on stage, sharing my views on the topic, along with Matt Kingdon (CEO at !Whatif?) and Marion King (CEO at Vocalink).  Find more details of how to request a seat at Fujitsu’s Executive Discussion Evening on 9 February 2011.

Image credit: © QQ7 – Fotolia.com

The consumerisation of enterprise IT: resistance is futile

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I spent a fascinating afternoon with Apple today in the briefing centre above their flagship Regent Street store.  What was even more impressive to my wife (and to me!) was that I managed to resist the urge to go and buy myself, for personal use, the lovely new Macbook Air laptop.  The agenda covered a number of interesting topics including the use of Apple iPad as a corporate device and, specifically, a topic critical to me – the impending Apple iOS 4.2 release.

There are many indicators that CIOs use to judge the emergent trends and the high demand requirements within their remits.  One measure I use is my weekly barometer of the “why oh why cannot I not….” volume of email refrains I receive.  Currently there are two requests dominating this demand flow, the first is “why will you not allow my Android smartphone to connect to corporate systems?” and the close second is “why will you not allow my Apple iPad to connect to the corporate systems for which you support Apple iPhone based access?”.  In this post I’d like to stick with the Apple theme but I will return to the Android request volume at a later point as it is twice the scale of the iPad request volume and is more than matching the levels I saw earlier in the year in relation to our delivering corporate services to Apple iPhone.

Internally we operate a Fujitsu mobility service called Mobile Professional through which I allow company and personally owned smartphones to receive corporate services such as messaging.  The personally owned devices have to meet prerequisites such as operating system/version, operating our corporate airtime provider SIM, individuals signing up to monitoring and remote wiping etc.; however, to date I have refused to certify the iPad OS as it currently fails to meet our minimum requirements but that will hopefully soon change with the release of iOS4.2.  What was really interesting was the conversation I had with the Apple representatives in that meeting around the market trend of IT consumerisation and the opportunity that represents for Apple to grow its share of the corporate market.

Indeed the phrase “corporate market” is an interesting term as the trend for companies to provide cash allowances and give some freedom to their employees to select/operate their computing device of choice.  Clearly as a CIO within a technology company which manufactures laptops I’m not likely to adopt this approach anytime soon!  However, I effectively have implemented a variant of that approach in relation to smartphones, partly recognising that mobile phones are a very personal choice it is hard to consistently meet and partly recognising the value that can be derived from employees purchasing their own if so motivated and thereby removing the device cost from the P&L. The drive of the employee to demand 21st century capabilities at work to match what they have at home rather than being stuck in the late 20th century has been commented upon many times, sometimes under the Generation Y banner and sometimes under IT consumerisation.

What is clear to me and I’m sure to many of you is that, regardless of the driver, the demand is here today, continues to grow in strength and must be harnessed to generate business value, sidestepping the ultimately fruitless war of resistance.  If you accept that point to any level then those technology providers who are dominant in the consumer space are going to become part of your portfolio under corporate management sooner or later. At that point, the key is whether you can manage that evolutionary process to an acceptable level of risk or whether it overwhelms your standards and your ability to contain both the risk and indeed the potential incremental cost implications.

Sustainability is about more than just green IT

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This morning I took part in a panel at an event within an initiative entitled the SMART Series which Fujitsu Ireland jointly sponsored with the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.  The focus of the initiative is the SMART economy strategy that the Irish government has published as part of its response to the current economic challenges, the event being titled “Ireland & The Green Economy”.  The opportunity had partly arisen as a result of a week I spent in Tokyo with Fujitsu Laboratories in September where their two key research themes of “Human Centric Computing” and “Intelligent Society” had within them a number highly relevant to the aim of enabling a sustainable “smart economy”.

I wanted my contribution to convey to the audience that I feel passionately that Fujitsu Group can make to help build genuinely real societal benefits around sustainability and building a “smart green economy”.  As part of building Fujitsu’s credentials as the leading Japanese technology company I also talked about the impressive progress that Japan has made as a country in the sustainability arena, which is very impressive.  In an IDC report published last year Japan were the only country rated “tier 1” on the IDC ICT sustainability index being “able to use ICT to reduce emissions more effectively than any other country” (the United States, United Kingdom and Germany were listed as tier 2).  I believe the IDC report is annual and due out in November so I’ll be returning to this topic I’m sure.  An interesting statistic shared with me by one of the CEOs attending the event in Dublin was that between 1998 and 2003 Japan accounted for 40% of all the green related patents registered and was the most active in 12 out of 13 fields tracked in a study by CERNA and OECD.

The keynote speaker was John Shine, Deputy CEO for the Irish Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and I thought he did a really excellent job in clearly making the case for the part information technology can and has to play in enabling the innovative energy management strategies essential to building and operating a “smart green economy”.  What resonated for me was how the energy management solutions his company are deploying in Ireland assume enablement by information technology for the required capability rather than for technology’s own sake.  This is critical I think to how we need to embed the concepts of sustainability into our corporate information technology provision.  The focus must increasingly be on ensuring the business outcome and the “green credentials” of the solution must be implicit, expected and delivered.  Of course we all need to focus on driving the “Green IT” agenda by optimising the carbon footprint of our data centres, using hardware that consumes zero watts in sleep mode, providing communication solutions that minimise travel, etc.  It is part of our role to enable our companies to achieve the carbon management targets relevant to our sector/sphere of delivery but these are often only a means to an end, not necessarily the end itself.

The really interesting area is how we can use ICT to build smarter cities (to borrow an IBM term) in which technology enables the society to behave in a more intelligent, sustainable way. The concept of the “Internet of Things” comes alive here for me with sensors embedded in a massive range of devices with the ability to communicate data back to processing centres and then receive instructions on how to react automatically to be more efficient and optimise emissions.  The McKinsey Quarterly had an interesting article earlier in the year where they explored this topic and discussed a range of implementations including “sensors on patients that help physicians modify treatments rapidly: sensors in vehicles that help insurers set prices and driver avoid accidents: sensors in factories and data centres that automatically adjust operations.”

At the event we had some good discussions around “smart grid” in the energy sector and how the concept of smart metering had huge potential to enable our sustainability agenda. It was good to relate the activities of Fujitsu in this area in specific to the audience and I’m hopeful that some opportunities to deploy our solutions in Ireland may have been triggered by the debate.  That’s the joy of these events – you are not there to overtly promote you company, except that really you are there to promote your company!

What I hope I conveyed to the audience was that ICT can play a bigger role than is typically intended by labels like “Green IT”. I’m not knocking in any way the contribution that can be made in that area; however, the combination of sensors, communication solutions, rapidly evolving analytic techniques and the flexibility/elasticity of the cloud computing promise can all combine to make a broad contribution to a “smart economy” being a “smart world”.  It is critical that those of us in the ICT sector do not lose sight of the sheer power of the contribution we can collectively deliver.

Harnessing the cloud: balancing business benefit and risk

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This week I attended the Symantec Vision conference in Barcelona and also took part in a panel discussion on cloud computing at their CIO Engage event.  The content I heard at both events resonated strongly with me.  It was relevant to both my internal role at Fujitsu as Chief Information Officer (CIO) and also my market facing guise as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) trying to ensure that our market offerings are relevant and evolving aligned to the demands from our clients and the market in general.  Indeed it was at the Symantec CIO Engage that I was also effectively “outed” in responding to a question put to the panel as having a third role within the organisation, that of Chief Security Officer (CSO).  The intertwining of all three role perspectives I guess in retrospective was inevitable given the breadth and nature of Symantec’s product range, combined with the pervasive market dynamic force of cloud computing.

The question with which every CIO I met during the week was grappling can be summed up as “how do I access the business benefit promised by cloud computing at an acceptable level of risk and return to my company”.  My proposition on the panel was that CIOs fundamentally know how to manage this market inflection point and that the disciplined approach was far from new and scary.  The crux of the matter being what corporate IPR should be exposed to obtain the desired business outcomes to an appropriate level of risk and financial return whilst ensuring that all the data implications were guided by the trinity of security, privacy and residency.

A group of CIOs with extensive off-shoring experience ended up concluding over a drink or two one night that we knew how to handle this challenge.  Our conclusion was that our experience of managing the arrival and maturation of the off-shoring dynamic which is common place in the market today placed us in a good position to do navigate our companies through the cloud.

One area where there was universal agreement, was that we need to evolve new solutions, technology, process and procedure around updating our data management capabilities to reflect the flexibility and associated risks of cloud computing.  There was specific focus from all on how we ensure that data is appropriately processed, stored and transmitted as part of the move (at a rate on which none of us could agree!) towards business process orchestration in the cloud and its far reaching implications.  There was agreement that some of our existing strategies in the security arena of creating layered defences from different vendor toolsets to avoid the “too many eggs in one basket” management of risk were probably not sustainable moving forwards.  The example I raised with the group (in case someone had a neat solution for me!) was my having an estate of endpoints all nicely encrypted with one vendor’s toolset represented a barrier to my implementing a sophisticated Data Leakage Protection (DLP) solution provided by another; the DLP toolset cannot interrogated my encryption solution and if it could well arguably that would see me with a different immediate challenge entirely! To me it is clear that the technology company that can help us manage data as it is processed/transits multiple clouds whilst providing the many levels of assurance required depending on the data entity value is going to have a queue of customers; you’ll not be at all surprised wearing my CTO hat that I am actively engaged in the Fujitsu Group response to that challenge and opportunity!

Translating innovation potential to business benefit

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Spending a week with the researchers of Fujitsu Laboratories in Tokyo certainly provides food for thought.  It was not just the technological inventiveness and potential that we discussed but it was arguably the far more challenging issue of how we take that innovation and translate it into business benefit for our clients and wider society.   I am here with a party of nine colleagues from Fujitsu UK and Ireland who are the technology leads for our operating divisions and our market offering portfolio capability delivery units.  The overt intent of the trip is mutual education; we articulate the challenges and opportunities we see in our market and client accounts and our Japanese colleagues share their strategic thinking and the quality of their collective intellect.

My primary objective was related to, but subtly varying from, the declared agenda – I initiated the event to facilitate both sides of the equation recognising the urgency of our directly linking the innovative thinking and research to our clients and to jointly take the step of collaborating to align an idea with a need, i.e. open innovation. In my role as Chief Information and Technology Officer for Fujitsu UK and Ireland I see both sides of that innovation coin every day: as CIO I see the operational delivery challenges and the opportunities to obtain business benefit waiting to be solved; as CTO I see the potential as technology evolves bringing new capabilities into reality.  What I wanted to achieve from immersing my colleagues in the “art of what might be possible” was their recognising the importance of what they could provide, the business challenge that needs to be solved.

On the final day of the workshop we spent three hours collating all the interesting research detail into groupings that we could relate to the current challenges each business division either already had as a live issue or were new opportunities to create business value sparked in people’s minds.  We were helped in this mapping process by the Fujitsu Laboratories activities all being codified as supporting the two key top level research themes, human centric computing and the use of technology to create an intelligent society.  Of course the real challenge was in planning how we could take the potential and make it vibrant and compelling to our clients and sales leads whilst also retaining the sense of urgency that ensure business value would be derived sooner rather than later. Managing the time horizons of rigorous and thorough technology development alongside the intense demand for innovative solutions to deliver business benefit in the short term is ultimately the challenge CIOs and business leaders need to balance to attain benefit at acceptable risk and cost.

As you would expect there were many debates held over drinks late into the evening and one topic which related to innovation arose consistently; how could we unleash the creativity of our employees to provide insight on innovation opportunities?  Eventually I came to realise (or was clearly told, you take your pick!) that having handed out objectives to each member of the team for the trip it seemed right and proper that I accepted one of my own!  So I agreed to deploy a social media platform that would allow us to operate a “power of the crowd” event where we would set a defined set of topics on which over a defined time period we would invite both input and people to vote for the suggestions they thought most compelling and worthy of pursuit.  Of course this is a variant of open innovation that many companies are already successfully operating either internally, in closed communities or publically to great effect but it is new for us internally (we have used this technique with the public to defined/refined equipment for a number of years). We will run the event during October and I will share how it went, warts and all, at some point in November.