EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Reducing Paper…Increasing Information

I was reading through the recent blog entry on reducing paper, and it reminded me of an article about "digital shadows" that I read in the Singapore Straights Times. Even though we are now in a Green IT wave with a focus on reducing paper, power consumption, and CO₂ emissions, there is an increase in another area: digital information.

As the digital shadow article indicates, the amount of digital information generated by Singaporeans amounts to a stack of books that would cover all of Singapore to a height of 24 inches!

So, that raises an interesting dilemma: on the one hand we are actively pursuing technologies and services that reduce the creation of physical information, whereas we are increasing the amount of digital information that we create, store, and replicate. This digital information-stored on disk, tape, and other types of media-requires power to be accessed and maintained, thereby increasing the very thing that we were trying to reduce: CO₂ emissions!

Maybe it is time to more aggressively pursue a "greening" in the information and data space, not just from an enterprise perspective, but also in our personal lives. This approach will not only contribute to the green movement, but will also make our digital lives more livable!

Reducing Paper

My city has recently moved to mandatory recycling. So, every week I have to remember if it is a normal week or a recycling week. While this is difficult enough, we have all had to change our habits and start putting paper, cardboard, cans, bottles and batteries in different containers for the recycling week. All this sorting has led me to make a few changes to our regular routine.

First, we have moved away from as many paper bills as possible using direct debit, electronic bill notification and eliminating itemised bills for things like our mobile phones. It is impressive how much of this we get every week. We also started cancelling our catalogues and asking for either an electronic version or agree we can find what we need on the Internet.

Next, I installed a PDF distiller on all the computers in the house. There are many services out there today that have reasonable alternatives to printing, there are even some like GreenPrint (http://www.printgreener.com/), that reduce the things you have to print.

We are all putting eReaders on our Christmas list to further reduce the paper we use. Once my daughters found out that one ton of recycled paper uses over 60% less energy to produce, 50% less water, 70% less air pollution and saves 17 trees as opposed to one ton of paper products from virgin wood pulp, they were all for these efforts.

Reducing paper at home is one thing, but our office environment also needed to meet new waste management requirements. We have started central recycling points rather than individual waste bins in each office or at each desk. We have long had recycling and secure document destruction services. We use centralised Xerox printers that duplex and energy star rated and deliver a 50% reduction in energy savings too (compared to individual printer, fax and scanners) (http://www.xerox.com/about-xerox/environment/enus.html).

These are simple steps that will make a difference today while we continue as an industry and society to invest in more sustainable solutions that take less energy, use fewer resources and save more time.

2008 The year of thin-client?

Over the last couple of months SUN, Microsoft and HP have all announced hardware and/or software designed to support thin-client computing. Added to this, Gartner analysts have expressed doubts over the future of Microsoft Windows in it's current form. There are lots of buzzwords in all this: thin-client, flexible client, virtualization and so on. So is 2008 the year when thin-client computing finally catches on in the user community?

I personally believe that this is really the wrong question; the answer is to focus more on the application, or data, you need to access, and the contexts you will access it in. In essence, the idea of being able to access the application or data I want, at the time I want to and on the device I want is, I believe, more important than the old school thin vs. thick argument. Blackberrys and PDAs are good enough for people who need mobile email access. The notion that the end-user device is merely a window to the applications means that identity and access need to be separated from the specific hardware; breaking the link to a specific desktop in an office that you have to use to access your work applications and data. Then users will be able to ask whether a user who reads email and accesses the internet really needs a 3GHz Quad Core PC on their desktop, and finally we will be able to select the right hardware for the work and social contexts users actually need to address.

When is personalization of technology going too far?

I received a TomTom GPS device last year and finally spent the weekend playing with it. Like many devices, I could change the startup display to show family members... My wife was happy with that.

When I customized the voice for the device to have my voice instead of one of the canned ones that was too much! She said it felt too much like "big brother". I was being a backseat driver, without even being in the car. Commands like "turn right in 500 yards" and other directions felt more like incessant nagging than help when delivered in the voice of a "loved one".

When organizations look at using opportunistic computing, they need to understand the amount of "help" the organization is willing to stand before they turn it off. It may not even be the amount, but the method (like it was in this case) that needs to be tuned. Just because you can do something, it does not mean you should do it.

Green Data Centres – It’s Easy, Follow the Sun

If you are an advocate of solar energy, then one of the biggest debates that you are likely to get into is around the question of Grid Parity. If you carry out some simple sums, then in terms of the cost to build a new power plant, we are already there.  The supporting evidence is the number of new base load solar plants that are springing up, like this one in Arizona. But the phrase that has captured my interest is that of a Solar Continent. Australia is, like much of the US, very well positioned to capture a great deal of energy from the sun. With the falling prices of PhotoVoltaic (PV) panels, it is very likely that in the next ten to twenty years much of the western world will be powered with some form of distributed energy (DE). So how does this affect our data centres?

The problem our data centres have is that they are unable to tap this energy early enough to shed the large running costs now being experienced. Many of the world's data centres are not on a path to long term reliability or sustainability. With the complex business interactions now necessary to complete transactions, the availability of reliable energy is paramount. Consequently, the state of data centres is now seen by industry observers as being parlous; however, as outlined in this Synnovation article, The Future Looks Green, the path to sustainability is not insurmountable.

From a data centre perspective, the major issue with solar energy is the limited number of effective solar hours in a given year. The shortfall in solar availability is normally compensated for with energy storage devices that are presently expensive and to some extent experimental. In reality, the shortfall in energy demand is often taken up by drawing on the centralised grid supply. However, a novel approach to this problem is to consider moving the processing instead. So, on a cloudy day or at night, rather than switching to the grid or storage, we could just move the processing to another data centre. This way, we build a virtual data that is truly "Following the Sun". There would be, of course, a set of "goodness" metrics or broker that would ensure that processing only went to data centres that could provide sustainable energy.

With today's technology, a Distributed Energy and Processing Balancing System would not be hard to build. Virtualisation in terms of server or application images is well established, and with those images shared between the contributing data centres, a set of pointers could provision a standby image in say the West Cost of the US, (or even Africa) very quickly. But how might we move or share the data? Moving large volumes of data, long distances, is of course not viable, however implementing a distributed peer to peer network is. All data centres that are part of the virtual data centre would share the same data (with perhaps some small local caching). Now this is already being done with many peer to peer systems, using technologies such as Distributed Hash Tables and Scalable Distributed Data Structures for example.

In the future, we may need to re-evaluate our data centres as they transform from lumbering consumers of energy to truly green and agile data centres participating in a dynamic balancing of processing capacity and sustainable energy. So, in the future, it will be not about trying to move the energy to the processing, but moving the processing to the best energy source!

WiMax finally on the move in the US??

I've written before about WiMax and it was good to see this past week that efforts may be taking place in the US in 2008.

The WiMAX Forum states: "WiMAX is deployed in 110 countries and Wednesday's unveiling of Clearwire should ensure the United States joins those ranks. The Asian Pacific region leads in WiMAX adoption. South Korea is considered a "success model" with 150,000 people, most of them in Seoul, subscribing to WiMAX mobile services."

Clearwire is the name for the combined network of Sprint Nextel and the existing Clearwire, with the goal to deploy a nationwide WiMAX network that will "dramatically enhance the speed and manner in which customers access all that the Internet has to offer." The network itself is called XOHM. As they state on their webpage "With XOHM, you no longer need to find a hotspot for a broadband internet experience - the hotspot comes with you." XOHM is launching in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington D.C. in 2008, with more cities following soon. Now that Intel and Google are helping with the rollout, and devices are starting to come on-line in the US with integrated capabilities, it should get interesting.

It makes me wonder about the value of internal corporate networks, once high-speed wireless Internet is available on a wide scale.

The software industry in conflict

I've written a number of times about the SaaS movement and what organizations need to think about when looking at its value to them.

I've also written about open source, the value it can provide and the shift in responsibilities.

I was talking with someone the other day about software product companies and their move to a service based approach. A key point of the discussion is the perception of lock-in and how it differs between service and product markets. It seems clear that we have two trends that are competing for our attention where their foundations seem diametrically opposed.

Open Source is about the free flow of software, defining agreed upon approaches and connection methods, enabling the movement of concepts and code between organizations. SaaS is about exposing the interface and keeping everything else about the solution private.

There are some efforts like the Banking Industry Architecture Network and ECOLEAD that appear to be defining industry standards for the interconnection between services, but I wonder how many of the service providers will view that as necessary. I doubt any who view themselves as a leader will, unless they've internalized the open source "influence vs. ownership" philosophy. Reconciling this conflict may not be that important for services in the small business space. As they move up the food chain, it appears to be an imperative to the success of SaaS.

IT happens

Unfortunately, IT at many companies is an emergent phenomenon - IT emerges more by accident than by design. No one really plans to create the mess, it just happens. There are too many individual decisions; each seemingly logical and defensible, each justified by an apparently well-defined business case, but in reality, each being made using short-sighted, narrowly-focused criteria that ignore the long-term, enterprise-level perspective. Each decision contributes one tile in a mosaic of IT assets with no overall governor to oversee the big, fully-integrated picture.

The result is no masterpiece. This amorphous process is how companies wind up with 10-20% utilization of their infrastructure, underutilized but having expensive, fully-loaded energy footprints. It results in a plethora of overlapping siloed custom (or at best replicated) applications deployed on a multitude of independent application platforms all running on a wide variety of dedicated servers. Worse still, this process fails to deliver the information needed to run the business, and it makes IT complex even when there is no need for it to be complex.

In contrast to this, Charlie Feld, who has made a career out of untangling such "hairballs", and of coaching his fellow CIOs on "the business of IT," has a wonderful article on IT governance in the recent issue of synnovation, entitled "Ready for Take-off: Putting IT governance on your radar drives value to your business" . Based on decades of experience defining what a CIO should be, at companies in industries ranging from consumer products and airlines to financial services and manufacturing, Feld puts IT governance into a simple framework for IT strategy that links a company's Business context, Application portfolio, Technology infrastructure, Organizational capability, and Governance. He shows how to move from IT as a value-eroding burden to IT as a value-producing business enabler. The key is that IT strategy must be aligned with business strategy, and must be governed by a multi-year, business-driven, enterprise-wide, commitment to this alignment.

A Value Chain Modeling Standard?

An Object Management Group Request for Proposals (RFP) has been drafted by Henk de Man of Cordys and myself to develop a standard for enterprise value chain modeling. There is opposition to moving forward on this. There seems to be a concern that there are too many different views on value chain modeling and analysis to develop a standard. At the same time, there seems to be a belief that there would be no value in a standard.

Variations have been proposed and discussed for the past 20 years, ever since Michael Porter published his book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance in 1985. A standard would provide a foundation for moving forward and the ability to develop tools and more robust models that would ultimately reconcile the value chain with other business models. I believe current value chain analysis is limited by a lack of tools to manage the complexity of a detailed value chain.

Porter's value chain describes the creation of customer value through high-level phases of product development and delivery. The Value Chain Group describes creation of value through a dependency network where each "process element" receives inputs that are needed to produce value, and produces value outputs that are input to other process elements to create their value. The cumulative result is value flows leading to customer value. A robust value chain model based on this dependency network would support analysis of the cost, timeliness, quality and risks of value creation.

An enterprise may have different products with different value chain networks that use some of the same business capabilities. These business capabilities and the business activities that manage them can be characterized as service units in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Service units produce value by execution of business processes-business processes define the flow of control while the value chain dependency network defines the flow of work products, in other words, customer value.

Some people think the term value chain implies a single thread of operations-some prefer value network. Others discuss value streams. Stabell and Fjeldstad propose value chains, value shops and value networks as three different enterprise configurations for producing value. I believe there are fundamental concepts that can unify these various approaches and could provide a valuable business modeling capability.

A unified model has the potential to link strategic planning using high-level abstractions for executives with operational details for analysts and product planners.  A model can provide accountability and a basis for targeting performance improvements.  It also has the potential to align business process models and SOA models with the creation of customer value.

A standard can enable the marketplace. It enables users to develop models with one tool and move their models to a new tool when a more advanced capability is offered.  A standard enables small vendors to compete and advance the state of the art.

Should there be a modeling standard for value creation? What should be the essential elements? Issue of an OMG RFP starts the process of developing consensus.

Collaboration 1.0 or 2.0?

I was reading through a very interesting study by the Economist Intelligence Unit about collaboration. We have made tremendous progress on the technology front, as is reflected in the developments in the Web 2.0 space. In spite of all this technology advancement, it seems that face-to-face collaboration still has the greatest success rate.

That begs the question: "What is going on over here?" Corporations all over the world are making tremendous investments in technology, from servers, to storage, and network.  Although technology is used on a day-to-day basis (think about the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) deployments) to enhance productivity and to curb costs, it seems that collaboration is still best performed face-to-face. The study provides a glimpse into the reason: trust.

So while trust can be observed clearly by body language and non-verbal communication in face-to-face meetings, this is much harder to observe in electronic meetings. Is this lack of trust in electronic meetings merely a matter of organizational maturity, or is the timing is right for a Trust 1.0 offering?

Of course, biometrics could be deployed as an add-on to the collaboration technologies to make them 2.0 ready. The question is: will this increase the trust level such that Collaboration 2.0 will be on par (or better) than the traditional face-to-face meetings?

Computer interface that fits like a glove

At the start of the year I mentioned that one of the predictions I had for 2008 was that we’ll see new deliverables in the user interface space. Rallypoint has delivered a new type of interface for the military that uses a glove as the input device.

Technology Review had an article on the device as well. It was interesting that the comments on that article ranged widely from “Why a glove? You should use voice.” to much more positive perspectives. One thing after looking over the comments that’s clear is that people who actually need to use the interface should be involved. Just because it looks impractical from your perspective does not mean it isn’t just want is needed for the situation.

The fourth element of eletrical engineering

This month there is an article on the Memristor in IEEE spectrum. Anyone who knows anything about electronics is familiar with the holy trinity of electrical engineering: the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. In 1971, Leon Chua of UC Berkeley, predicted that there should be a fourth element: a memory resistor, or memristor. But no one knew how to build one. 37 years later, electronics have finally gotten small enough to create this device. Hewlett-Packard researchers revealed in the journal Nature (subscription required) that it was hiding within the electrical characteristics of nano-scale devices.

The device will be useful because it remembers data even when power is no longer applied, which means it works like a computer memory chip but in less surface area, is not limited to binary applications and uses far less power.

They think the new element could pave the way for a wide range of applications from nonvolatile RAM to realistic neural networks. Neural networks have been computer applications to simulate a network of neurons that can be used to perform decision making functions. With the memristor physical circuits could be created that could model complex relationships between inputs and outputs or to find patterns.

It's interesting that we usually see the trend that software emulates hardware, but in this case we have the possibility of a hardware device being able to do something much more difficult in software.

Cloud Computing Forecast

In Network World magazine there was an article that predicted a cloudy future for cloud computing. They listed a number of problems:

1. Data privacy - The article talked about the country border issues for some types of information. Although that's a constraint, I don't know that it is really what I'd call a problem. The people who create those services need to understand the applicable laws.  What may be interesting is the liability if there is a violation. Is it the group that created the software, the group that runs the computer or the group that has the virtualized storage? They could be different and, I'm not sure that the laws have caught up with this reality.
2. Security - The security concern has been addressed by outsourcing entities forever. I don't believe this is new territory related to cloud computing. 
3. Licensing - Not sure how much of an issue this would be either. You're going to be able to put commercial software on just any cloud out there. You are going to put it on a system that can run that software legally, in many cases a service affiliated with the software creator. My concern would be more about the integration issues between systems. A Tower of Babel condition could develop where the various services require different information and the translation and transport issues become a distraction from the actual business value generation. An enterprise architecture should address this kind of concern and this would not be coming from the Cloud/SaaS provider.
4. Applications - It is true that not all applications can make the transition to a Cloud. I've mentioned before that I believe a great deal of the cloud capabilities will be doing new types of work, not traditional application functions.
5. Interoperability - I'd have rephrased this concern as lock in. Organizations typically have concerns about getting locked into a service provider and having no way out. I'm not sure the Cloud and SaaS providers have figured this issue out. They may think of it as a feature not a liability.
6. Compliance - This is also an area the outsourcing market has addressed for years. The question that the SaaS and cloud folks need to address is: How can they support the individual industries needs?
7. SLAs - The Network World article talked about the concern about missing an SLA. I'd have focused more on the issue of end-to-end SLAs. No company cares about the fact that their data is peculating through the data center just fine if they can't get at it. This new market needs to address the end-to-end issue. 
8. Network monitoring - this relates to #7, but rather than network monitoring I'd have focused more on business value monitoring. After all the reason these systems are in place is to generate value for the business.

I think their list is fairly comprehensive. The one area I didn't really see is the conflict between customization and standardization.  The larger the client the more special that feel they are.

We're in an age where everyone wants it all. People want to share their information and yet have it secure. We want mobile as well as fixed access. We want low cost and high quality. The future is full of contradictions and that is why we're entering a time where the service innovation will shine.

The Long Tail

A lot has been written about the Long Tail, a re-cast of the "80-20" rule in business terms. Basically, specific retailers with low distribution and inventory costs can afford to have a large number of low-turnover items on hand, thereby creating a niche market for specific items of interest to specific market segments (or consumer markets).

Now let's take this approach and cast it upon another market segment: the financial services industry. Two of the more prominent systems within a financial institution are (among others) the core banking system and the wealth management system.  The phrase "system" in this context does not refer to a single product, but rather implies a suite of integrated products that provide the service at hand.

In general, these services are focused on consumers with a specific minimum amount of financial resources available for deposit or investment. The minimum is usually dependent on the services required. As an example, wealth management targets the high net-worth individuals.

Now look at these services in the light of the Long Tail: what if we could provide these types of financial services to the "long tail" of consumers that have a (far) less-than-average investment capability than is normally required by the financial institutions.  This approach would provide an Amazon-like approach to financial services: providing services for markets that are normally left untapped by the normal distribution channels.

Granted, this approach will face technical difficulties, in that the systems that run the financial services need to be revamped to allow for a low-volume, high consumer-base solution that provides the financial payback that the financial institutions are looking for, while providing services that are targeted specifically at the consumers in the "long tail.'