The research stresses that while management fads deliver no long-term benefits, IT fashions deliver an advantage to the organization after a bedding-in period. Most significantly there is positive correlation between the salary of CEOs and the number of fashionable IT items the organization is wearing. Wang postulates that the benefits probably derive from alignment with the wider business environment. Whether the economy as a whole is benefiting from IT fashions is a more contentious issue, and debate over the productivity paradox (computers are seen everywhere except in the productivity statistics) continues.

Perhaps the most important idea is the notion that cloud resources are actually the same as traditional in-house resources – but they are remote. The same issues of management, design, customisation, integration, security and support present themselves, and if anything are more involved. An architectural approach is needed, separating out functions such as applications, networking, data management, disaster recovery, messaging and so on. From such a blueprint it then becomes possible to consider which items are candidates for cloud deployment. The firm we are working with has a very useful methodology in this respect – something we think is absolutely essential.

Technology is moving on to embrace the cloud. VMware for example is introducing virtualisation that will stretch over both in-house and cloud resources – very powerful. In fact a solid virtualisation strategy is an essential component in all of this.

Only by breaking down the IT environment into architectural components will it be possible to make appropriate use of the cloud. Some components deployed into the cloud will deliver cost and flexibility benefits, while others will be totally unsuitable.

While IT management in large organisations may see the cloud as a partial nemesis, the reality is quite different. Appropriate use of cloud resources will need higher skill levels and an architectural approach. Expect to see a surge in the demand for all kinds of skills to meet the demands for customisation, integration, design, and strategy. The cloud may be the best thing that has happened to IT people for a very long time.

Glovia is part of Fujitsu, and so it shouldn’t come as any surprise to learn that real-time, lean manufacturing is their forte. Products and production sit at the centre of the Glovia suite of applications, instead of the general ledger. I’ve worked with many manufacturing companies and this emphasis is exactly what they want.

The seventy or so modules within Glovia provide very broad functionality and include:

• Product management – bills of materials, costings etc.
• Manufacturing management – inventory control, manufacturing process management.
• Financial control – multi location and multi currency.
• Customer management – customer self service and real time order promising.
• Supplier management – purchase order management, supplier contracts, shipment coordination.
• Projects management – cost accounting and complex project management.
• Service management – post sales service, field service management and warranty management.
• Supply chain management – constraint based planning and real-time order promising.
• Connectivity and Business Intelligence – collaboration and business intelligence.

This is a very brief overview of the capabilities of the Glovia solution set – but you get the picture.

What is often less tangible than the actual technology is the company itself, and its culture. Having dealt with Glovia a number of times, I can say that the overwhelming impression is one of people who know what they are doing and just get on with the job. There isn’t much of the pretension that plagues many suppliers in this domain, and I found this very refreshing.

If you are in manufacturing you should have a look at Glovia – it may be just what you are looking for.

A black swan is a rare event, the timing of which cannot be predicted, and with a potentially devastating outcome. Read ‘The Black Swan’ by Taleb if you want to understand this more fully. In the world of IT these events happen all the time. Few of them are reported. However organisations do fail because of IT trauma and the current understanding of the phenomenon is very poor – mostly because of an unawareness of the issues. Contingency planning focuses on the physical operating environment – but this is just a small part of the problem.

Black swans are particularly prevalent in non-linear dynamic systems. Sorry about the lingo. IT systems are very often non-linear in their behaviour. Just a single line of code can totally alter the characteristics of a system. Unexpected loading on a system can turn adequate performance into crippling performance. The addition of just a small amount of extra functionality can result in the functionality of the overall system being compromised. More often than not these adverse reactions can be sorted out without even getting near to catastrophic failure – but sometimes they cannot.

I’ve personally witnessed the catastrophic failure of systems several times. An application that simply could not accommodate a higher transaction rate because of the database design – no amount of extra hardware could rescue it – the company failed. A single line of code that rendered a system inoperable at exactly the same time more users needed access to the system – the operation was closed down. A supplier that could only exist because its production costs were unknown to customers – a lapse in security meant a customer got access to online pricing data and its market was destroyed.

Contingency planning is the easy stuff – most other black swans are the stuff of nightmares. Is there a way to deal with these issues? Yes there is, and it requires an activity that typically isn’t considered in most organisations. Someone needs to look for single points of failure that would spell catastrophe. These are failures in system design mainly, and not hardware failures. Non-linearity is key to determining where these points of failure might be. A simple example might be a database that has a table that all users need to access to do their job – if this became corrupted the whole show would close down. Someone in your organisation needs to looking for these non-lineariies and find ways to reduce dependencies. Obviously they need to have a great deal of technical knowledge, and also understand how a system is used. Without such a person (or people) your organisation will be prone to black swans – and no doubt you will have already experienced some.

Areas of investigation should focus on high levels of dependency and might include:

• Data dependencies – where are the data hot spots in your systems.
• Functional dependencies – items of functionality that are widely used.
• Use dependencies – parts of a system that heavily used.
• Security dependencies – the data and functionality security that is key to operational integrity.

These are just some of the areas. There will also be combinations of these that might create critical conditions – these have to be investigated too.

As far as I am aware no one is talking about this. As a result we play Russian roulette with non- linearities and just hope they don’t rear their ugly head. They will – just when you least expect it.

Finally we should all be aware of the dangers associated with the concentration of computing resources and specifically ‘the cloud’. We are creating the potential for massive disruption should the software/hardware resources of a major cloud supplier be compromised. The European Network and Information Security Agency has raised such concerns in one of its reports (freely downloadable).

I may try and start some initiative to deal with these issues. If you are interested please let me know.

Has cloud computing got a big future? Yes it has, for one very good reason. The industrial age was built largely on division of labour (specialisation) and economies of scale. Cloud computing benefits from both of these – specialists can look after the running of computer hardware and software, and because they will be doing it on an industrial scale, the cost should be less than you can do it yourself. Commodity applications (the stuff everyone does) will be the first to be hosted in the cloud. Salesforce.com is the classic example, providing customer relationship management (CRM) that is priced on a use basis. If the internet dies for an hour or two it doesn’t mean that your organisation dies if the CRM system can’t be accessed. The same can’t be said of online retailing – if your systems die, the sales stop.

Current concerns around cloud computing focus on integration with in-house applications, availability, performance and security. Service level agreements (SLA) should address these issues, but they can be very complex, with much small print – so be careful. Expect to roll some of your more mundane applications out into the cloud over the next ten years. Don’t rush – let others make the mistakes.

Cloud computing has taken off in a big way in the consumer market. Facebook is a social networking site that allows people to share as much information as they wish (photos of the cat, an mp3 of little Jimmy’s first attempt at playing the drums, or a video of your wedding in the Seychelles). All of this is held in the cloud. It seems that most people have few fears about their information sitting out in the ether. Businesses and other organisations may have rather more to consider. Moving your UK held in-house customer database to a cloud facility in the USA may contravene the data protection act. There is some ambiguity surrounding this.

The decision to use cloud resources will boil down to cost and the SLA. It seems unlikely that bespoke, business critical applications will be moved out into the cloud any time soon (if you are considering this, please wait a few years).

That is pretty much all there is to it. Cloud computing will not transform an ineffective organisation into an effective one, and it will make no difference to company growth and al most no difference to its profitability. Local or the cloud – that’s all there is to it. If it is cheap and reliable do it.

Obvious functionality such as messaging between production, sales, finance and other activities adds a dimension of intelligence and transparency that has to be seen to be appreciated. Many of the collaboration platforms we have seen sit outside the core operational activity of the firm and are much less potent. Chatter (a name that underplays the significance of the offering in our opinion) is delivered as SaaS and for existing Salesforce users is simply a switch that enables the application.

From our perspective it is good to see social networking (a term many suppliers of technology do not like – they prefer collaboration) maturing into something that is practical and productive.

All of this became clear during conversations with a company called Panopticon (the ‘optic’ part of the name gives the game away). This company mainly operates in the financial services industry where the need for very rapid assimilation of complex information is paramount. The visual representations it provides are numerous and novel and have found good use in many firms. Tree maps, heat maps, heat matrices, bullet graphs and several other visual formats are available. Coupled with very fast database technology from Sybase Panopticon offers a fairly unique real-time representation of complex data.

Everyday sayings such as ‘every picture tells a story’ and ‘a picture paints a thousand word’ are much truer that we think. We think that visual (and audio) representations of data will become indespensible as data volumes and complexity increase.

Millions of people are spending a good deal of their time building up followings on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Followers are doing the very same thing, and the act of following someone carries an implied request for a reciprocal following. It is not uncommon to see individuals with tens of thousands of followers who in turn follow tens of thousands of other people. What drives such actions is unclear – apart from maybe a desperate need for an audience, or maybe it’s a competitive thing. Either way it’s fairly pointless. If we arrive at the logical conclusion of this activity then every person will be following every other person and will in turn be followed by everyone else – and then what? Well disillusionment is bound to set in when people realise that everyone is playing exactly the same game they are, and that hundreds of fairly pointless daily postings counts for nothing.

We’ve spoken to social networking platform suppliers who believe the collapse of the social bubble is imminent, and do not want their products to be exposed to the bad smell that will be inevitable when the whole thing goes belly-up. And so they are using other terms such as collaboration platforms or whatever.

The irony in all of this is that despite the musings of commentators and academics that social media is wholly different to industrial media (TV, newspapers etc) of the bad old days, in reality social media will become another form of industrial media. Only large organisations will have the resources to make social media work for them (through advertising, the creation of self supporting communities etc.) and it will be driven by some basic economics called barrier to entry. If you can do something that the average person cannot simply because you have the resources then you have an advantage. Despite predictions of a brave new world social stuff will be just the same as the old stuff.

Advisory: This is a high end enterprise solution to collaboration and social networking needs. Features such as rules-based policy management, fully integrated video and document management integration put this offering ahead of the market. Even voice mail can be accessed from the Quad environment.

Strengths: Very broad capability and real productivity benefits.

Weaknesses: Technology lead marketing with poor communication of business benefits.

The functionality is what you would expect from a ESN – blogs, wikis, calendars, communities, profiles and file sharing. The free version supports up to 50 users and much greater functionality is provided in the paid versions of the service.

For organisations wanting to dip their toes into ESN Clearvale is a very good starting point.