User Needs...

I have just finished reading the autobiography of Steve Jobs.  Very interesting and it got me thinking.

The Steve Jobs mantra is that customers and users do not know what they want until you give it to them.  Who of us knew we needed an iPad until we saw one and then purchased one.

Remember the famous Henry Ford quote of "If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said 'a faster horse' "

There is also a school of thought that we need to develop user centred design so that we develop IT systems that users want and need.  

Do these two schools of thought contradict each other?  

I think not.  The important thing in user centred design is to as soon as possible show users what an IT system will and could look like and get them to touch it, feel it and use it.  They may ask for things to be added and changed.  You can also add things that they didn't know they wanted and see if they do really want them and need them.

Using this approach will avoid the age old trap of users specifying lots of requirements and what they think they want in their heads and then IT going away and translating this into an IT system that misses the mark.  Try getting five people to describe a car in words and then getting someone to build it from the words.  You will get some interesting results.

User centred design and delivery will allow users to quickly be able to touch, feel and see stuff and then say "nah maybe not" or "wow that is good how about adding this".  All before too much time and money is spent building stuff.

Humans like to see and touch and play with things.

IT Strategy - does it need to die and be reborn?

Once upon a time there was a business that mowed peoples lawns – LawnMo Inc. One day the technology arm of LawnMo Inc came up with the strategy for IT for the business. The vision of this strategy was technology that would perform mathematical calculations very fast with 100% accuracy. The technology people thought this was brilliant and would transform the business. In simple terms it was the calculator.

The technology arm went to the LawnMo Inc board and presented the strategy. With calculators you could do calculations faster, smarter and cheaper. It would enable you to quickly calculator the size of the lawn that needed to be cut and thus what the right lawnmower to use needed to be. It was a very impressive presentation.

The board listened to the presentation and at the end there was silence for 1 minute. Then one of the board of LawnMo Inc said.

“That is indeed a very interesting strategy by the technology arm. Very interesting indeed. One question. How is it going to help us achieve what we want to do next with LawnMo Inc?”

“What is that?”, said the technology person.

“Well”, said the board member, “It is to reduce the cost of cutting peoples lawns. We want to be able to make our lawnmowers more fuel efficient. How will your calculator IT strategy help us to achieve that?”

“Well it won't directly. It will help our finance department though”, said the technology person.

“Well, your IT strategy has no value to LawnMo Inc at this present time”, said the board member. “You can build your calculator but it will just sit on the floor and no one will use it. It will have no value to us. We could have used it in our finance department but our strategy is to outsource that.”

“Oh dear”, said the technology person. “I think we had better go back and ensure that the LawnMo Inc IT Strategy helps you achieve your vision”

“Better than that”, said the board member. “Why don't you work with the people putting together LawnMo Inc's strategy and where relevant add in any IT that can help us achieve what we want to do”

And so that is what the technology person did. So LawnMo Inc had the LawnMo Inc Strategy, and where relevant the required IT to help them achieve it was detailed.

So why do organisation still have IT strategies? There is no need for businesses to have an IT strategy. IT strategy is dead. What a business needs is a strategy for it's business. Within this strategy, where relevant, will be strategies for IT required to enable the overall strategy for the business.

So if your organisation creates business strategies and IT strategies ask yourself is this the right thing to do? Should you not just have one strategy for the business covering all the relevant functions that make up the business? All aligned to the overall vision and goals of the business.

Is the iPad a glimpse of what future computing will be like?

I just got an iPad and I have to admit this is what computing should be like. I know there will be those who despise Apple products. However it is not because the iPad is made by Apple that makes me think this. It is because of how it performs and functions.

In simple terms I think this because

• it turns on instantly. None of this MS Windows or Mac booting and sitting around twiddling your thumbs with the iPad;
• you don't have to get into the bowls of it and be an amateur techie to get things working or fixed
• using the applications is intuitive and you can work it out without fear of crashing your machine or getting some technical configuration dialog up;
• using touch to get things done is fast and again intuitive;
• it is a good size and weight. Not too big, not too small and not too heavy.

What convinced me even more of this is that my wife uses it and likes to use it. My wife is not a technology fan and hates PCs and electronic gadgets in general. She thinks the iPad is quick and convenient as she can use it whenever and wherever she wants and needs it. If we fancy seeing a movie we can just turn it on and check the cinema listings in the kitchen. Just like picking up the listings from the paper.

Another incident that convinced me was when I was using my laptop and my youngest wanted to do things by touching the screen. To this two year old it was the obvious thing to do and the keyboard was not.

So these are some of the reasons I think, and hope, the iPad is the future of what computing will look like and perform like.

I haven't yet tried to use it to read a book yet so it may not replace everything just yet.

One final point is that I wrote this blog on the iPad at a time convenient to me and it was a breeze.

Footnote (Nothing is perfect)
(1) iTunes needs sorting though. Having all you iPhone and iPad apps in one list is not user friendly. Maybe this is due it being an PC/Mac application ;-)
(2) I have to admit that I had to post the blog from my laptop as the Blogger editor doesn't yet appear to work on the iPad Safari browser.

Open Business

I have entitled this post Open Business. It could quite easily be titled Open Government, Government 2.0, Open Insurance, Open Retail, Open any business for that matter. So for the purposes of my thoughts here today I have made it generic and called it Open Business.

I was thinking of actually calling it Open Enterprise which then got me thinking. If I was going to call this Open Enterprise and now I am calling it Open Business should we bite the bullet and get rid of the term Enterprise Architecture and call it Business Architecture. It is the architecture of a business after all. Let it encompass all the layers of an Enterprise Architecture that we have today – business, application and technology. Maybe call the layers something like operation, application and technology layers of an organisations Business Architecture? Operation may not be the best term but hopefully you understanding what I am trying to saying. It may help to get rid of the stigma of IT not being part of a business when it is. Something I have written about previously in you never here of business/finance alignment. Anyway that is maybe for another discussion.

The purpose of this posting is around opening up an organisations knowledge capital to allow others to create innovative and exciting value from it. The United States Government has an initiative on-going at present, data.gov, to provide access to government data for others to use and create innovative and exciting applications. The UK Government is doing a similar thing with data.gov.uk as part of Smarter Government. We all know how google maps is changing the way we find out where places are and how to get to them both on the Internet and on smart devices such as the iPhone. Is there a website with a location service on it anywhere that doesn't use Google Maps these days?

This is all good stuff and there are some really innovative and exciting opportunities being created. I love Google Maps on the iPhone with the overlay of traffic data hot spots. Information is important, see Wisdom Hierarchy. However the one thing that strikes me about this is it just providing information.

For me the real opportunities are in governments and organizations that not only provide access to the information that they hold, they also provide access to core business services and functions that they perform. In simple IT terms a set of business application programming interfaces (APIs). This, coupled with access to an organizations information, will provide really ground breaking innovative applications for consumers.

Imagine a world where you can go to book a holiday from a site called YourPerfectHoliday.com (I made this up and the domain is for sale...). It takes in your personal information of where you have been, what you like to read and watch, integrates that with information from travel companies on what destinations may match what you like and then offers a set of option. You select an option and it makes the booking direct from the site with the company offering the holiday. It also books any transfers and train ticket. This is because that company has not only provide access to its data it has provided an API for others to use. So have the train companies to book train tickets and airline companies for flights. You don't have to book them individually and you don't need an administrative person doing the bookings in the background manually.

This is only a simple example but the possibilities for consumers are immense. More choice and value. For the organizations that provide the information and APIs it offers many more avenues for access to the services they provide rather than people having to go to them directly.

Imagine the possibilities if government not only offered access to its information but also provide APIs to allow you to claim benefits, tax your car and renew your passport. The opportunities seem endless.

So to me Open Business is not just opening up access to information but also to core business services and functions to provide innovative transactional opportunities. Roll on Open Business

Low Tech Crowd Sourcing

It is strange but this week both my world of internet information in the form of blogs, social networks, RSS feeds etc. and my world of work seem to have been dominated by a focus on Enterprise 2.0. It got me really excited about the possibilities in a business organisation.

But is this all something new or is it just good ways of working that have been around before repacked for the 21^st Century?

There are times when we have an idea, vision or thought of what could be done. However we don't quite know the outcome in exact detail. We have a feeling and unclear image of the outcome. It just feels like a good outcome. People call it intuition, application of experience and knowledge or just plain luck. So what to do?

One approach I use in these situations is get together a group of people who have an interest or stake in this area and others who don't but are innovative thinkers. I then put forward my unclear thoughts and open it up to the group of people. Is it mad, does it feel right, what do people think? The group then verify and build on the thought. This can result in my initial unclear outcome image being shot down in flames (and I learn something), becoming a clear outcome, an even better outcome or an outcome I didn't even think about. The group also feel ownership and empowerment as they helped to create the outcome.

This is what I am now going to call low-tech crowd sourcing. I may even patent it and call it LoweTech© Crowd Sourcing after my surname! It is getting a group of people together for a 30 minute discussion on an initial thought (I am a big fan of 30 minute meetings as they are focused and get results) using low tech tools such as the telephone or just meeting face to face. And most importantly it works.

So maybe crowd sourcing is LoweTech© crowd sourcing for the 21^st Century

2010 Predictions

Pretty much everyone is making predictions for 2010 in all walks of life. So I thought I would throw my hat into the ring with some of my predictions for 2010 from the world of IT. Some are consumer based predictions, whilst others are what I class as enterprise based for large organisations.

In no particular order.

1. Bits of Cloud (Fluff) - In 2009 there has been lots of talk about this new silver bullet called Cloud Computing. To me it looks like the old Application Service Provider (ASP) models that were the rage in the early 90's but that is another story. For me Cloud Computing is just the bringing together of lots of different existing technologies and tools and creating new opportunities and value. In 2010 I see some of these technologies taking off and becoming more common rather than Cloud Computing in its purest form. The main one of these is virtualisation. It will become the common default configuration at all levels of an architecture from servers to clients. Gone will be the days of dedicated hardware for a specific task. This will not only be in the computing arena but also the storage arena.

For me there are still some areas around security, information ownership and quality of service that will need to be resolved before public Cloud Computing becomes the norm. There will many private Cloud Computing instances out there. There are even some today that I have been involved in.

2. Touch - I have an iPhone and the interface is a dream. For Christmas I got a Nintendo Wii with a unique and intuitive interface. The kids love it. 2010 will be the year of touch and movement becoming the interfaces of choice. This will be true for consumer based technology products such as phones, televisions and home appliances. In the enterprise we will start to see enterprise based applications start to embrace this new form of interface.

Until we have a faster way of inputing data, which will probably be speech, I don't however see the death of the keyboard. They will be smaller and lighter and maybe projected onto existing surfaces to use. But not yet replaced.

3 - Location, Location, Location - Location based services and augmented reality will take off in 2010. We have so much information available to us these days that we need to ensure that we get the information we want, when we want it, with the minimum of input from ourselves. Location based services will provide that to us. It could be in the form of reviews of restaurants we are looking at in the street, to having immediate travel information and guides when we are standing next to a famous artefact. We can do this now using searches and entering postcodes but in this day of wanting things faster and easier why have the wasted step of us having to know where we are, let technology do that for us. These services can be augmented with additional information on other areas of that may also be of interest helping us to experience new things.

4 - Video - Building on the Touch point how we receive information will start to change in 2010. Text will start to be overtaken by video. Images and video are more easily digested and understood then pages of text and diagrams. 2010 will be the year that video starts to become more common for providing information. The age of the video blog is coming. A good example I like to refer to is a video explanation of what architecture is. This to me gets the point over better than any slide deck or text

5 - The sum of the parts is bigger than each individual piece - 2010 will be the year that we start to see innovation taking off. Not by creating new technology but by packaging up existing technology, services, tools to create new opportunities and products. For example the iPhone doesn't contain any breakthrough technology. It is the way that existing technology has been packaged together to create a new product. This will be the innovation in enterprise IT in 2010. A good overview of this can be found in http://www.cio.com.au/article/330587/no_1_cause_it_failure_complexity

2010 will hopefully see the UK Government open up some of its information as part of Digital Britain providing the perfect opportunity and platform for this to be packaged up innovatively to create new applications for us all to use. What they are I do not know, but that is the beauty of opening up this information.

So that's it. A quick dump from me of predications for 2010. I am already wondering what my review of this will be like in December 2010.

Interested to know what your predications are for 2010

Why will no one implement my IT Strategy?

I was talking to a friend who works in a large private sector organisation recently and he was moaning about how he couldn't get anyone to implement his IT Strategy. I asked him what the problem was. He said “...I have a vision for IT in the company that will add great value” after which he started to tell me about how the strategy would but in a flexible and agile framework to allow the creation of new business opportunities better, smarter and faster.

“It all sounds good” I said “So how are you looking at putting this IT Strategy in place?”

He replied “Well we have written the IT Strategy and what the vision looks like now I just need people to invest in it and deliver it. But they don't seem to be interested”

“What business benefits are you delivering as you start to put the IT Strategy in place?”, I asked.

“Oh those come when we have but the IT Strategy in place” he replied

“Hmm”, I said. “So you want people to invest in some IT that could give them benefits in the future? A platform for the future?”

“Exactly” he replied confidently.

“Well as you are not an IT company such as Microsoft or Apple it may be difficult to invest in IT for the sake of it” I said “I have adi fferent approach that may help you”

“What's that” he replied curiously.

“Having an IT Strategy / Vision is a good thing. However trying to implement it in isolation of the rest of your company is difficult. What you need to do is work with the rest of the your company to understand what their business visions and objectives are. From this you can then identify opportunities that will help them to deliver their objectives but also help you to start to slowly build you IT Strategy and platform of the future. So over time you will start to deliver your IT Strategy but will also be delivering value to your company”

“That sounds like a plan”, he replied, “but it feels hard and slow”

“Delivering strategy is hard. Coming up with the vision is the easy bit. Working out how, what and when to deliver it is the hard bit” I replied “It is also not slow as you are delivering value across your company both from an IT and non-IT point of view. So it is a win win for everyone”

“It's worth a try” he said as he gazed at the ceiling thinking of how to start to make this happen.

This is one of the reasons why IT Strategy never gets implemented and it ends up as a dusty document on a shelf somewhere. The IT department come up with these grand visions but then don't do the hard graft of working with the rest of the organisation to understand and identify opportunities to deliver business objectives whilst starting to delivery parts of the IT strategy.

Innovation Speed Dating

Recently I was traveling on a train reading some papers for an innovation workshop I was attending. In the papers there was a press release, from a leading newspaper website, taking about a recent new service that had been implemented. It even included quotes from satisfied users of the service and people within the organization. I thought things have been moving fast in the last couple of months because I don't recall this being implemented or even being discussed. Had I lost my finger on the pulse. I then glanced to the top of the page and noticed the date of the press release was 2011! Ah I thought this is a mock up of the possibilities the innovation workshop could achieve. It got my attention.

So the innovation workshop commenced following a short intro of the objectives it was straight into the first of three themes to brainstorm. We brainstormed and threw out ideas that stimulated other ideas for 20 minutes then it was over. We agreed as a group our top 3 ideas and fed this back in 5 minutes. Then onto the next theme in the same format. At the end all the ideas where collated and we are going to vote on the top three to take forward.

It was like Innovation Speed Dating.

However it got result and some really interesting ideas were discussed. You could see the passion in people as an idea took hold and the possibilities became apparent. Some of the ideas I had never thought of myself. But when but forward were inspirational, inspiring and sometimes so obvious. Some of these may have been missed if we had gone down the traditional waterfall approach of requirements produced and then IT respond with a solution.

This was also innovation brainstorming as an organization not as the business or IT we were working as a group of individuals adding value to the organization as a whole. Something I am passionate about and talked about in my post on you never hear of business and finance alignment.

Technology is pervasive these days. Most people have a hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail personal email account. They use facebook, online banking, shopping etc. They can see what IT can do and with a little nudge, through innovation speed dating, are able to find new business value enabling services using some of the IT approaches and services they use everyday in their daily lives.

IT solutions are no longer the domain of a few geeks talking a foreign language in white coats in a basement. This workshop reinforces why I believe my vision of Real End User Computing is achievable

The workshop was inspiring.

However before I get carried away I am not advocating this is all you need to do to generate new ideas and make them a reality. You still to need to ensure that they produce a coherent whole, create enabling capabilities that could be used elsewhere in other ideas, for example process management capabilities. You don't want to end up building vertical silo ideas, services and capabilities. Who wants to end up with three process management capabilities with 3 times the implementation and operating/maintenance costs. Not good.

So you need to ensure all this is underpinned by good old Enterprise Architecture models, frameworks and governance. These will help to turn prototypes into pilots into full scale services. If we don't do this there will be anarchy. A good post by The Enterprising Architect on Is Architecture the Enemy of Innovation shows how the two can and should work together

This workshop was simple to setup and execute but was exciting, interesting and inspiring. I am really looking forward to seeing some of the ideas being taken forward and to the next innovation speed dating workshop.

My Vision - Real End User Computing

I have a vision of what IT in the future will look like that I like to call “Real End User Computing” REUC. This is not End User Computing or Shadow IT done by a sub-set of an organization and sometimes embraced by IT or blocked. No it is much more than that.

“Real End User Computing” is in a world where the suppliers of IT provide reusable business services that consumers can mashup to provide any number of solutions to meet their business needs. IT simply just keeps the lights on.

It is the evolution of the APIs we now see. For example in GoogleMaps , FaceBook and the iPhone. However in this world these are not technical APIs for technically savvy people to use. They are business APIs where business knowledge and understanding is what you really need to know. The interface to use these and create new capabilities is simple and non-technical. These types of platform exist today in one form or another – Microsoft Silverliight, Force.com, etc. This is the evolution of what is current.

It is the evolution of the operating system up the technology stack. REUC resides in a world where we will have a financial operating system with financial business services to use, government operating systems, retail operating systems. All providing business services, not technical services, and the ability to join them up in any number of ways. For example you can add information created in one business services to another. A user can orchestrate business services and at decision points raise tasks in the task service for management in the task management service which is displayed in the business portal service.

Putting the power of creation in the hands of the consumers of IT. Allowing them to experiment and create new, often unthought of, capabilities adding value to an organization. The suppliers of IT keep the lights on and add more business services for the consumers of IT, if required. So no longer do IT create solutions they create services for consumers of IT to use to create solutions.

You will need to ensure you publish and have the right business services at the right level, not too big or too granular. This will require the disciplined usage of Enterprise Architecture to ensure coverage. consistency, re-use and interoperability of the services. Get this right and REUC can become a reality

REUC is my vision of the future of IT and I believe it is achievable.

What's your vision of the future of IT?

Why do organizations have an innovation function?

I was at an event this week and where there was lots of talk about needing to be innovative. This phrase sometimes confuses and other times irritates me. People seem to use it as a nirvana for doing things better. It is as though what they have been doing previously was not doing things better or innovative.

To try and understand what others thought of innovation I did a couple of tweets on Twitter on this very subject. What came back was to me a very good definition of innovation

“Not business as usual that adds value”

Now call be old fashioned but isn't that what the human race has been doing since the dawn of time? It is what makes us what we are. The invention of the wheel was innovative, Newton's laws were innovative, the PC was innovative. In fact finding a better way to get to work maybe faster, more economical, less stressful is innovative.

To me innovation is what we all do everyday. Doing things better, smarter or in a more interesting way.

So when organizations say the need to be innovative or embrace innovation it really confuses me. Surely you must have been innovative to get to where you are today? Even if that was copying someone else's idea. That is also innovative.

From a technology perspective you see many organizations that have a function that covers strategy, architecture and innovation. My view is that the art of doing strategy and architecture is innovative so why do you actually need a function dedicated to it?

As I said innovation is part of being human. It is part of life. We are all innovative so why do we need to try and seek it?

Does Technology actually matter?

I recently read an article entitled “When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine” and had a discussion on whether the actual technology products used to satisfy a technology service in our Enterprise Architecture really mattered? It made me wonder if the two are actually complementary. Do actual technology products really matter or is a good enough technology service just fine?

There was a time when you analysed the market place, looked at reference papers, such as Gartner Magic Quadrants, brought in the technology suppliers, did an evaluation against your requirements, maybe did some pilots and then selected a technology product.

However in today's technology market many technology products are basically the same at their core. They have some “bells and whistles” around the edges to distinguish them from their rivals but are at their core the same.

So do we need to worry about technology products? Are the way these technology products interact with other technology products of greater importance?

In our Enterprise Architecture the Enterprise Business Architecture has business objectives linking to business services which contains business processes. These link to our application service domains and application services contained in our Enterprise Application Architecture. These in turn to our technology services and ultimately to technology products and how to interface with them in our Enterprise Technical Architecture. As long as the technology product satisfies the requirements of the technology service and the business services and business objectives they enable and you can interface with it in the prescribed way does it matter if it is widget x, y or z?

When you use electricity at home you interface with the standard plug of your country. The technology product that supplies the electricity could be a nuclear power station, coal fired power station or 1,000 guinea pigs running around in wheels. The product is of no importance as long as it meets your requirements of providing electricity 24x7x365 and you can interface with it via your standard plug.

So do technology products really matter today? Is how it interfaces most important? Is good enough just fine? Do technology products actually matter?