Total Immersion

I was recently asked for some examples of events I have spoken at, so for the record this is what I’ve participated in so for this year:

Taking back control of IT, Webinar, 28 February 2008 (video stream - registration required)

Improving business productivity through effective content management, Webinar, 4 March 2008 (video stream - registration required)

Governance in virtual worlds, Pisa, Italy, 13-14 March 2008 (slides)

Which is more Important – Compliance, Security or Operability? (Panel Chair) - Infosec Europe, London, UK, 22-24 April 2008 (podcast)

Progressive IT, Sourcing and Architecture, Microsoft Architect Insight Conference - Windsor, UK, 28-29 April 2008 (slides/video stream - requires Windows Media Player)

How to sell virtualisation (Panel Chair), Channel Expo, Birmingham, UK, 22 May 2008

IBM Optim Internal Data Threat event, London, UK, 29 May 2008 (slides)

If you need any more information please do get in touch.

One of the most fun debates I have had in recent times was with a couple of execs from IBM and Cognos, and with a senior analyst from IDC, at last week’s Information On Demand event in The Hague. The question was innocuous enough - “what do you think is the addressable market for Business Process Management?” “That’s tricky,” I replied, “as I don’t believe that there exists a BPM market, as such.”

There followed a great deal of debate, at the end of which I remained to be convinced that there was such a thing right now as a BPM market. That’s not to say that BPM doesn’t exist - far from it, it is an essential facet of many technical capabilities. However it is exactly this factor that makes it very difficult to define BPM as a market.

Where can we see BPM? The ability to capture business activities and use them as a template for service delivery exists in many technologies, as indeed it has done for some time. We have for example:

• Within content management and collaboration tools, BPM is becoming an accepted term for that element of the software that manages the flow of content across different business roles.
• Within enterprise application integration, there is a clear need to understand how applications and dataflows map onto business activities. Initial releases of Microsoft Biztalk, for example, came unstuck until they built in this element.
• Within software development, a logical extension of modelling business processes as part of requirements capture, is to the use the models to support solution delivery.
• Enterprise applications such as SAP have long been delivered through customisable workflows, which require a level of management from a business process perspective.
• Also, BPM works hand in hand with IT and business service management from an operational perspective, such that service delivery can be monitored and supported appropriately post-deployment.

BPM is clearly a highly valued element of IT. But can it really be considered a market - and if so, how should it be defined? Should it consist of the superset of all of the above, or just the BPM element, if indeed it can be separated out in any useful way? Or should it consist only of the “pure play” BPM vendors, those which have a heritage in one of the areas above but are positioning themselves by leading with BPM?

My debating stance, which happens to still match with my opinion, is, “none of the above.” We discussed the comparison with the transport industry - throwing a car, a tank and a plane into a (figurative) bucket just because they all require an engine does not mean we can define the “engine” market. So, as with BPM, there isn’t a coherent enough boundary to frame a market space.

The debate did not result in any shared epiphanies between the participants (though its always nice when analysts from different firms agree). For me, the thought processes didn’t stop there: a few nights’ sleep allowed things to ferment, alongside all those other things I picked up at IoD, not least a slightly flummoxed acknowledgement about the value of Master Data Management. Absolutely nothing wrong with MDM per se, but I still find it quite surprising that it took the industry so long to work out it would be useful to have a single, shared, defining structure for structured information assets.

To whit: following other conversations it occurred to me that the real pain with BPM remained how views of business activities could be shared across tools. IBM claim export/import capabilities between tools such as InfoSphere and Lotus, for example. But what lacks is the knowledge of which is the “master” view - an issue exacerbated when we consider how such information is distributed (and worse, locked in) to applications and software tools across the organisation.

Perhaps what we need, like with MDM, is Master Process Management - tools that enable representations of business activities to be catalogued independently of any application, and then translated between one application and another. The sign-off of a form in the content management system may also signal the acceptance of a new customer in the CRM system, but such information is stored in the heads of those using the tools, and delivered as a point-to-point linkage. How useful it would (and I’m speaking from experience, having been involved in several such activities) to capture such information and relationships once, and use the “single view of business processes” to feed all of the above applications, if not more.

But let’s be clear. Apart from a couple of obscure vendors (pipe up, if you’re out there), such capabilities do not currently exist. There’s no MPM Gartner Magic Quadrant or Forrester Wave, and even if there were, few if any vendors would appear at all. All the same, if we did have MPM tools, I have no doubt that plenty of end-user organisations out there would be much better off. And indeed, we would have an addressable market.

I can’t remember who said that to me a couple of weeks ago, but its one of my favourite phrases at the moment - it applies so well to so many things we’re dealing with right now: SOA, Identity Management, Information Management, BPM. Give it a go, and se where it sticks.

As I was driving to the National Motorcycle Museum to give a presentation on archiving this morning, I listened to a constable from a Welsh police force on Radio 4, backing up the soon-to-be-announced (or has it been already) statement that there was too much bureaucracy in the UK police force. For anyone who has difficulty (as I do) spelling bureaucracy, it is helpful to remember that the first part is “bureau”, i.e. “desk” - which is exactly where our local bobbies seem to spend much of their time.

The constable was explaining the overheads involved in stopping a group of individuals and asking whether or not they had any knowledge of an incident (say, a punch-up round the corner on a weekend evening). Each conversation needs to be registered on a form, which takes 10 minutes to fill in - one can only imagine the number of such conversations that take place in central Cardiff on a Saturday night.

Now, of course we need to balance any statements about “overheads” with equal remarks about protecting the rights of the individuals that are stopped and questioned - but that doesn’t seem to be the point here. Rather, one is left with a feeling of, if police officers have to talk to the public for anything other than passing the time of day, there will inevitably be more time spent documenting the conversation than holding it in the first place.

This point was reinforced by an IT professional at the archiving event, who happened to be from a city-based police force. I have to ask - is this as far as technology has come - if we still need our police officers to be filling out sheets of paper in triplicate? I had a bit of a chat about the alternatives to form filling - voice recognition, for example. To support the average copper, with the average regional accent, such technologies are still not yet ready for prime time, I am informed. “Police officers need technology to just work - not to sit through hours of training the software for it to understand them,” I was told. This seems such an utterly fair statement given the 20 years of innovation we have seen since I kicked off my career - that technology should just work - so why is it not true?

The answer, I believe, lies in the gap between technology companies and systems integrators. Some of the things that end-users see as fundamental are not baked into the base software, but are left to partners to implement: an example in the voice recognition context would be the level of training required to support it. Surely there are mechanisms that can integrate with how people work today - passive voice recorders, local accent filters, document scanning etc - that could be used to make such technologies “just work” when used by people on the front line of the business?

I’m not totally despondent - but its situations like this that serve as a constant reminder of, even with all the innovation going on, just how far we have to go with technology before we work out how to close the gap between the wonderfully clever capabilities it offers, and the real needs of its users.

Digital Rights Management in music was, to be fair, always doomed. As long as there exist free mechanisms to transport music, it will always be impossible to protect it from unauthorised copying. The Internet was to music distribution like the steam engine to industry - it has revolutionised how things are done, but not without some serious fall-out in the traditional world of large corporations - who, lets face it, have been conducting rear-guard actions without really managing to keep the revolution at bay. Just recently we’ve seen EMI fall to an equity company whose goal seems more to sweat its assets than release the creative juices of its signings. I know, if we put all our effort into Coldplay and Robbie Williams, we can just get them to work 36 hour days. Oh dear, Coldplay have broken up. Robbie, where do you think you’re going?

One of the technical casualties of the demise of the music industry, it is already becoming apparent, is DRM. Today we saw the launch of Qloud (pronounced “cloud”, and to quote from this article (which looks like a royalty-free direct copy of the press release):

“The Qloud My Music application is a revolutionary music service that delivers online music to users how they want it — legal, cost-free, DRM-free, on-demand and linked to their personal music libraries — and where they want it — inside social networks where they can share music with and discover it through their friends.”

Qloud isn’t a one-off. A couple of weeks ago, Apple cut the price of its DRM catalogue to 99cents. Want more? Consider EMI’s earlier announcement of the same, followed up also a fortnight ago by its announcement of a partnership with Imeem. As well as indicating just how confused EMI is right now (one is reminded of Microsoft’s relationship with Open Source), its a sign that things are unravelling rapidly for DRM, for a number of reasons.

Not least, technical. As part of a recent purchase, I was offered a license to download a Keane song. I had to jump through several hoops just to listen to the darn thing: create an account, download file, go somewhere else, download license, install… sure, it was a nice song. At least I think so, I’ve since reinstalled my OS and I can’t be bothered to go through all that rigmarole again. Alternatively I could choose to lock myself into a platforma such as iTunes. Both approaches are directly opposed to the viral nature of social networking, pioneered by Myspace and being picked up by Facebook (no doubt to be continued via Google’s OpenSocial).

Music needs to be made to be shared, and this is what will put the final nails in the coffin of DRM. Be not alarmed, dear musicians - there’s still plenty of money to be made even if the model may sometimes need a bit of tweaking.

P.S. who’s going to bet me a bottle of shandy that Nokia’s spiffing new music store doesn’t go DRM-less by the end of the year?

P.P.S. Steve Jobs wrote a good article on the weaknesses of DRM, here.

Exhibitions are like travel - one spends a lot of time seemingly not doing much at all, and its completely shattering. In the case of Storage Expo, “nothing at all” translates into presenting, listening to presentations, participating in meetings, walking between stands and just downright chatting, all in all very productive from an information gathering perspective but tiring nonetheless.

So what’s a-buzz? Admittedly I was looking through my own, undoubtedly biased “solutions not products” spectacles - there may have been interesting things being demonstrated in the hardware layer, but I confess they passed me by. It was the companies doing “joined up storage” that I found most interesting, such as Copan getting together with Data Domain to offer concentrated offline storage for deduped backups. I seemed to spend a lot of time talking to people about green issues as well, which prompted me to think even harder about the solutions/software side of the house.

Put simply, most storage hardware vendors are currently pretty shabby when it comes to being “green”. For all the talk about “our watts are lower than their watts,” which may or may not be true (but is probably a leap-frog thing between the vendors anyway), the whole notion of a constantly spinning mechanical device is never going to look good from a power consumption perspective - as companies like Plasmon (whose storage doesn’t have to spin constantly) are keen to point out.

It’s a bit of a cruel trick really, a bit like the printing industry might feel if it suddenly had to use paper from sustainable forests (hmm. not a bad idea. but anyway). Since that guy from M.A.S.H first invented the hard disk, the general principle has been, “let ‘em spin” - which of course uses power. The more data your business generates, the more disks you need, and asking a disk storage sales guy to regulate the flow is going to be a bit like asking Cadbury’s to restrict the supply of Flakes to ice cream vendors. Tricky.

But, for all manner of reasons, we have arrived at a point where “get more disk in” is no longer the default answer. All those disks are keeping on spinning, using up power whether the data on them is being accessed or not. Result: almost overnight, storage hardware companies look like the bad guys and are trying to out-do each other and hiding behind the worse-er offenders.  

All of that is missing one fundamental point, however, which is to question whether or not the disks are required in the first place. For example: I was speaking a few months ago to an oil company that had 17 SAP instances, all on different hardware. We have organisations who have “keep everything” policies for data retention rather than spending the time to work out what they don’t need (or shouldn’t keep). There are database compression companies like SAND Technology and Sybase, whose products remain niche due to lack of market take-up.

All of this points the finger of blame at a point quite a bit higher than the hardware layer. Sure, there will undoubtedly be clever things that can be done within the SAN, such as dynamic storage provision into virtual pools, for example. However, to solve what is fundamentally a data management efficiency problem, requires serious thought right up the stack, in terms of clearer definition of what information the business actually needs, down through more intelligent application architecture, to better storage provisioning and resource management. Let’s not stop wagging fingers at hardware manufacturers, but while we’re pointing out the motes in their eyes, let’s also recognise the environmentally unfriendly and resource hungry logs in our own.

P.S. No, the guy from M.A.S.H didn’t really invent the hard disk, it was in fact named after a rifle. Who says there is no humour in storage.

The one thing I didn’t expect to be doing this morning was agreeing with Tory MP John Redwood on the plight of the postal workers in the currently still-ongoing postal dispute in the UK. For one, I am full of admiration for the merry fellows who, come rain or shine, ensure the message gets through - people like our very own post man, Andy, who always has a smile and a friendly word.

In John Redwood’s own words however, “The country is not grinding to a halt.” Here’s perhaps the nub of the real crisis that faces one of Britain’s last public industries - that technology has it doomed. Not only is email providing an unthought-of transport for many of our communications, but also, any attempts to bump up the relevance of the post by (for example) not delivering it for a few days are not only falling on deaf ears, but are counterproductive in the extreme. ”Give me your bank details,” someone said to me a couple of days ago, “I won’t send you a cheque, I’ll pay you online instead.”

It’s a tough one. The post is like the messaging equivalent of the book: if one is old-style data in motion, the other is data at rest. Just as we don’t want to replace books with electronic equivalents for oh, so many reasons, neither do we really want to lose the sound of envelope on mat. Even such junk as catalogues has some merit, judging by the amount my kids pore over them as they spend their pocket money many times over. And the thought of a birthday mantelpiece being reduced to a bunch of printouts… don’t even go there.

Meanwhile, there are, oh, so many items of post that really don’t need to be sent. Junk - of course (apart from the catalogues maybe); utility bills; bank statements; cheques to cover bill payments; the list goes on. Why are they still posted? Because (a) that’s the way its always been and (b) not everybody yet has the email and Web alternative. To catalyse both requires significant effort, or a limitation on supply, which is exactly what the postal unions are providing.

Where will it all end? In 5, 10, 20 years time I have no doubt there will still be a postal service. It’s not just about the postie: Post Office Counters provide a wide number of services themselves, many of which are relied upon by a great many people - benefit payments, car registrations and the like. From an economic standpoint however, the counters are propped up by the numbers of stamps on envelopes and packages. As postage revenues fall, so will the numbers of post offices, and (hence) the quality of service. I don’t want to see that - but neither am I likely to send letters for the sake of it, particularly in times when there’s no guarantee of when they will arrive.

As someone who lives in the country, the absolute last thing I want to see is that postal workers go the same way as the post offices that are already closed - I do understand that for many, in remoter places, the arriving post can be one of the rare contacts. These things are important, and an intrinsic part of sustaining rural communities. All the same, I can’t believe that retaining the status quo for the sake of it is the right approach. Email and the Web are here to stay, for better or worse - and we need to face up to how they impact on even our most loved of institutions.

There are undoubtedly a number of services that we need, that we don’t want to put into the hands of a private company, and (most importantly) which we are prepared to pay for. Perhaps some of these are listed here; there will be others. If we want them, let’s think about how to ensure they continue to happen; the alternative is to stand by and watch as they crumble.  

For anyone who’s in London this week and wants to meet up, I shall be at Olympia Wednesday and Thursday for the jointly held conferences of Documation and Storage Expo. Indeed, I’ll be presenting at both, specifically at the following sessions:

- Information Lifecycle Risk Management, 17 Oct at 1145 (Storage Expo)

- Using Content Management to Power Business Intelligence, 17 Oct at 1600 (Documation)

- Governance, Liability and Responsibility: Getting rid of information, 18 Oct at 1015 (Storage Expo)

In case I haven’t banged on about it enough, I don’t really see the above as anything other than facets of the broader picture of information management, indeed I’ve had some good chats with the guys at Reed Exhibitions about the way things are going. From our research there’s a clear desire to link BI and CM for example, and good governance and risk management cannot exist without a firm understanding of your information assets. But I’m telling you the plot

Should be a lot of fun - see you there!