Role of IT in a Community College

With the advent of social networking and Web 2.0, the role of information technology is no longer restricted to transacting business operations of an enterprise. Customers demand and expect instantaneous information to be made available to them. In the case of a community college with a typically young and energetic student body, registration information, course material, course schedules, wait lists, facilities management, etc. all need to be inter-connected and available to the them by demand. “Distance learning” was an innovative concept fifteen years ago and a “nice to have” supplement to traditional methods of lecture delivery. With today’s rapid proliferation of network bandwidth, “online learning” is a necessity which an educational institution cannot do without. In light of these contexts, it is important that the CIO recognizes the need for an easily accessible, highly available and yet highly secure environment.



The essential paradigm of knowledge assimilation has changed from traditional note-taking and a one-sided lecture emanating from the podium to a more dynamic and vibrant environment even inside a live classroom. As long as it not disruptive, students ought to be encouraged to participate actively in class using laptops, iPads and other “gizmo-de-jour” that are connected to the internet. This way, they can contribute meaningfully to the discussions by carrying parallel research using powerful search engines that were all but non-existent even fifteen years ago. The student body of today has essentially mastered the art of multi-tasking and it may be unreasonable to expect them to be disconnected during the period of the lecture. Given the need for constant connectivity, it is imperative that such an ambience is provided by the college. If not, you can expect to see dwindling numbers in new registrants.



The enriched learning experience that technology providers comes at a cost. Projects, presentations and other requirements of a typical class are now more creative demanding the need for more resources in terms of network bandwidth, storage, computer power, etc. Unfortunately, this demand is not uniform but certainly peaks during “finals” week every semester/quarter. Should the college then look for a dynamic need-based solution as opposed to investing scarce resources in information technology that may otherwise lie unutilized? The answer is a resounding yes. Cloud computing and service oriented architectures today are able to provide a need-based dynamic provisioning essentially optimizing the demand-supply curve.



Another factor that works in the favor of a cloud computing architecture (or more specifically, software as a service - SAAS) in learning institutions is "technology obsolescence.” With the rising cost of education coupled with an uncertain employment prospects, it is fair to expect students to demand that the latest versions in software and operating systems are made available to them. In this situation, it is unwise for the administration to invest heavily in licenses for software/hardware when they are likely to become obsolete by the time it is fully deployed.



Added to all of this is the ubiquitous need for IT to be constantly aligned with the business. In this case, it is the business of education. As administrators devise new strategies to increase enrollment and keep pace with the competition, it is not enough for IT to merely provide a supporting role. On the contrary, IT needs to be an enabler for newer ideas and promote both disruptive and non-disruptive paradigm shifts in the education field.

Applications 2020: Social, Mobile, Gaming and Collaboration Impact on Your Portfolio

In this session, the presenters attempted to look at two key issues:




1. What is the user perspective of software applications in the year 2020 and what actions are necessary to deliver on these expectations?

2. How must application strategy and governance change to move to the world of applications in 2020?



In this day and age of heavy consumerization and multiple device ownership, having an ensemble experience in that all devices need to work seamlessly together is a critical requirement of applications.



Given the proliferation of multiple devices, it is but natural that users would have a short attention span. Hence, the presenters suggest using "gamification" as a strategy to build interactive game features that will encourage participation and challenge.



But mainly, they caution that the next breed of developers need to be trained in human factor design and hybrid thinking. The developers need to expect additional interaction types an be prepared to offer "on the fly" analytics to change user experience dynamically.

The business impact of social, management and technology trends

This morning session by Jackie Flynn at the Gartner IT Expo on the major societal management and technical disruptive trends and its impact on organizations was a pretty interesting and useful indeed. She began by talking about the current hot trends that occupy our attention. These are, for example, F-commerce, enterprise app stores, big data, 802.11ad, gamification, group buying, cloud bursting, natural language question answering, behavioral gestural analytics, social TV, micro insurance, image recognition, personal cloud, 3-D bio printing, etc. She did a very good job of separating these disruptive trends into three major groups: societal, management, and technical.

At the outset, she talked about megatrends that are pervading these three areas. At a high-level, these are global and distributed, open and transparent, always on and instantly accessible, contextual and right sized and finally social and mobile themes. Corresponding to these megatrends were mega-capabilities that were discussed. These were in the area of capturing new info, exposing new patterns, and delivering just in time insight and access.

She looked at each of these trends from three perspectives: the factors driving the trend, the social impact and the business opportunities generated as a result.

I do not want to give you the complete discussion of each of these trends as a simply do not have the bandwidth to talk about it at length. However I will say this: businesses need to look at the information that they have and use it to identify trends way before the market does. They need to re-evaluate the role that information plays in their current corporate strategy.

Ten Steps to Building Private Cloud Services - II

As promised, here are the ten steps to an effective private cloud strategy:

Effective Leadership: From vision to execution, getting buy-in from various stakeholders and alignment with the business, clearing hurdles and driving cultural change.
Definition of Services: What are the services that are provided, their required SLAs and the current SLAs. Determine service costs and their required skills.
Evaluation of Alternatives: Is moving to the cloud the right approach? Generally speaking, non-standard and customized systems are not suitable in the cloud.
Creation of Metrics: Metrics of economics, quality and agility of service need to be created both from an IT operations as well as a service user's perspective.
Development of business case: In a recent survey at the Gartner DC conference, 55% of respondents thought agility/speed is the main driver to move into a private cloud. Only 21% responded that cost was a main driver.
Development of people plan: Communications, organizational structure, career paths, performance evaluations are necessary components of the people plan.
Development of business management plan: Strategy and planning of the move, funding model, service development, reporting etc. are main components of the business management plan.
Development of technology plan: Investment protection, fabric selection (compute, storage, network, etc.), vendor partnerships, interoperability aspects need to be addressed in this plan.
Development of operational process plan: DevOps and cloud computing model, dynamic operations, customized services are major components of this plan.
Start small, think big: Build-in learning and proactive expansion into the equation.

As I mentioned earlier, these are nothing new. But nevertheless, it serves as a good checklist when developing a private cloud migration strategy.

Ten Steps to Building Private Cloud Services I

Thomas Bittman presents a decent view on the steps required to build private cloud services. However, it is just that. For those who have been "in the cloud" for a while, it is nothing new or earth shattering.

While the ten steps are nothing new (presented in the following blog post), he does present an interesting approach to migration to the cloud. He presents a five staged approach:

Stage 1 begins with Server Virtualization where the primary advantages lie in consolidation and reduction of capital expense.

Stage 2 is distributed virtualization where flexibility and speed of operations with reduced downtime are touted as main advantages.

Stage 3 is the migration to a Private cloud where the concepts of self-serve agility, standardization, usage metering and "IT as a business" are emphasized.

Stage 4 is the migration to the Hybrid cloud which is useful in reducing costs and increasing flexibility for peak loads. Think "annual benefits enrollment" of HR as an example.

Stage 5 is the ultimate move to Public cloud with the eventual elimination of capital expense and total flexibility. However, not all enterprises are suitable to move into a public cloud.

While I agree with the first three stages and maybe stage 4, I am not sure stage 5 is right for all enterprises. Not withstanding compliance or regulatory constraints, assuming all enterprises are suitable to move into a public cloud is a mistake.

The next blog on this topic will detail the ten steps to building private cloud services

Creative Destruction...Huh?

The most common interpretation of this phrase is in the domain of economics through innovation and progress. For example, pruning a company's assets to remain nimble and agile in an ever-competitive marketplace.

I will attempt to put a different spin to this phrase. It is another form of the "Survival of the Fittest" mantra. A herd of antelopes survive in the wild by naturally pruning the weak and the infirm. By doing this, they ensure the continued existence of the species while sacrificing a few for the "greater good" of the herd. So also in business (I suppose in life as well), the "greater good" must trump the immediate but short-lived positives one expects as a result of any premeditated action.

While most businesses today lock in 70% of their resources in ensuring reliability, they find themselves easy target for competition. Business solutions need not be predictive and staid all the time just to avoid risk. At the same time, you should not have a totally innovative and dynamic solution that is not grounded in any reality. One way of ensuring an innovative and dynamic enterprise is for the organization to look at creative ways of keping the organization nimble at a manageable level of risk. Embedded therein is the concept of "creative destruction".
In explaining creative destruction, Gartner analyst Tina Nunno speaks about not thinking in a binary world but more in an analog terms. Think about it. It does make sense. When was the last time that a decision of any significance that you made was a pure black or white decision? Most likely, you agonized over several alternatives each with its own shade of grey. Examples of constrained binary thinking typically found in business are:

IT vs Business
Control vs Chaos
Leader vs Follower
Supply vs Demand
Build vs Buy

Following along similar lines, she goes on to say that creative destruction can be achieved by using a "Pace layered application strategy" wherein systems are categorized into:
Systems of innovation: Systems driving innovation
Systems of differentiation: Systems that help the organization differentiate in the marketplace
Systems of Record: Record-keeping systems

Separating the organization's systems into these areas enables simplistic systems through creative destruction. In the end, it essentially boils down to the organization's "Appetite for Risk".

Top Technology Trends of 2012

At one of the gartner sessions, here are the top technology trends identified for 2012:

1. Media Tablets and Beyond
2. Mobile-centric apps and interfaces
3. Contextual and social user experience
4. Internet of things
5. App stores and market places
6. Next generation analytics
7. Big data
8. In memory computing
9. Extreme low-energy servers
10. Cloud computing

Microsoft vs. Google vs. Apple

Interesting session this morning comparing Microsoft, Google and Apple on their philosophy and approach to business.

The thoughts reproduced below are entirely that of the presenters and not my own. I wanted to present an unadulterated version of their version. When colored with my commentary, I indicated it as such.

If you were to hear the presentation live, one gets the perception that the presenters are trying hard to make the impression that Apple is the company "to be" in today's competitive market.

Nevertheless, the presenters make some interesting comparisons on these three organizations:

First of all, Apple is presented as a vertically integrated high margin hardware provider whose emphasis is more on elegant design rather than low cost.

Google is presented as essentially an advertising company to all the world's people which uses the power of engineering to develop geeky applications with mass following.

Microsoft, on the other hand is presented as a software and platform system developer which has its own ecosystem to help thrive the Microsoft brand.

An interesting comparison that was made between Google and Microsoft in their sustainability models. Google was painted as a cowboy who believes in the democratization of information. Google believes in capturing the next 2 billion users and lacks little or no enterprise focus. They are considered as radical innovators who deny anyone the opportunity to control their destiny.

Microsoft was painted as a steady entity that believes in the democratization of technology. On the other hand, Microsoft has a strategy of an orderly enterprise growth which defines and develops programming platforms. Microsoft is persistent who is no longer the innovator but believes in leap-frogging and making better the innovations of others.

More on this later….

Opening Keynote at Gartner Symposium

The focus of the opening keynote was themed along the key aspects of Cloud, Social, Information and Mobile computing.

These four key areas together form a nexus of forces which makes any and all recent architectures immediately obsolete. The information technology paradigm is easily overshadowed by Information Ecology.
However, all of this comes at a great risk. In fact, most disruptive technologies come with significant risks that needs to be appropriately harnessed into a risk adjusted value management. It belies the oft-held belief that risk management in the face of constant disruption is a waste of time.

The keynote was structured around 3 themes:
Post-Modern Business
Simplicity
Creative Destruction

Peter Sonnengard clearly outlined that companies that use leading risk indicators clearly outperform their competitors. The reality, of course, is that in today's dire economic climate, it is easier said than done. The forecast for overall IT spend is predicted to be just under 4% through 2015. This outlook is made by Gartner after factoring the continued sluggish growth of the economy.

Daryl Plummer went on to talk about post-modern Business. So what really is post-modern business? It is an "anything goes" approach that focuses on deeper relationship with customers, suppliers and partners. It is a business "with no walls" mantra where you rely on delighting customers, garnering the interest of disengaged customers and combating their short attention span.

Hung Lehong talked about simplicity as a paradigm in today's way of doing business. By 2015, four mobile apps will be deployed for every single traditional PC based application. This necessitates a basic "rethink" in developing systems that are context aware and people centric resulting in a rich user experience.

Tina Nunno closed out the keynote by speaking about creative destruction. For those of us not in the know, it is a controlled rationalization of existing IT and Business assets in the hopes of a leaner and meaner organizational system. Therefore, every IT and business executive should evaluate their own appetite for risk. This will facilitate that technology does not create limits but actually facilitates the lowering of barriers.

All good points which made for an effective keynote.

Gartner IT Symposium 2011 at Orlando

First blog in a while. Wasnt sure what the policy of the new company that I joined. Excellent company BTW. Made a good choice. Now on to bigger and better topics.

This week, I am at the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando. Between sessions, I will be trying to report on the day's events as seen through my lens. If you want me to cover a particular topic, please tweet @sree_sundaram. I will do my best to accomodate your request.

Waiting for the keynote to commence.

More to come later. Ciao