But Operations still needs to operate right?  Taxes and NI still must be collected.  So are the systems merely going to be allowed to decay?  How can Operations adapt to challenging new requirements?

Public sector operations will need a new response and I think Business Led Computing may be coming of age.  Technologies that enable business operations to self serve some of their IT and process automation requirements, can release 20-30% of operational cost savings, with minimal impact on the IT cost base.

Otherwise the only solution is to increase staff, and that increases costs.  Hmmm….

“By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets”.  This is a stunner.  On closer inspection Gartner means hardware assets, not software, but even so, can we really believe this?

I will be happy to stand corrected.  I think that, supported by a very compelling business case, most enterprises are likely to head towards delegating responsibility for application development and support, and hardware procurement, configuration and management to external organisations.  But haven’t we seen all this hype before?  Consolidation of end user computing resources within the enterprise never really took off, did it?  Enterprises have so much invested in existing hardware and systems that I can’t see any, large ones at least, making so much headway in such a short space of time.

I expect the vast majority of larger enterprises, even the ones trying to aggressively adopt Cloud et al, to be living with legacy on-premise systems for at least another 10 years.  Am I a Luddite?

Well, Citi have contributed to the debate by offering a sticking plaster solution, both virtually and literally.  A sliver that adheres to the back of your mobile phone and enables contactless payments of up to $50 at Master Card PayPass readers.  This is a proper workaround but hopefully it is proving the need for something more strategic.

Hopefully within my lifetime, we will all have a unique identity held (securely) within our mobile phone.  Every time we buy a new device like a laptop or car, every time we are permitted access to a new office, club or country, every time we want to make a small or large payment, the infrastructure around us will adapt to us.

At the moment the supplier of the service or product grants us a single unique interface (for example a key).  The future will be citizen-centric.

Here is my take.  If IT departments started listening more to what their businesses need to succeed in their own competitive environment, and less to vendor promoted architectural trends, then people would stop talking about whether SOA/Cloud/SaaS/Private Cloud/WTF is successful and move on to the much more important issue of whether businesses thrive irrespective of their choice of architecture.

In those days, if your organisation was lucky enough to have a website, you were starting to gain competitive advantage.  Especially if you could keep it up to date more quickly than your competitors.

However, that depended on your IT dept and an army of HTML programmers, who wanted a specification, a design document, a test environment, methodology, design authority, sign off procedures etc etc.

Then someone invented Content Management Systems.  The purpose of a CMS was to enable the business to make their own website changes in real time but, and this is a crucial but, within a corridor of governance enabled by the IT dept.  So it was possible to change the text, but not corrupt customer data.  It was possible to change pictures, but not corporate design rules.  It was possible to change the database contents, but not the database itself.  So business users can do a whole load of useful stuff without the risk of bringing down the site.

Of course, other governance is required.  Someone still needs to take responsibility for the content that, in an instant, is representing your organisation around the globe.  But without this level of flexibility how can your company compete with the speed of business today?

This type of flexibility (I prefer to think of it as agility) is now finding its way into the operational world.  Giving business ops a way of doing their own process integration, orchestration and execution for example is freeing the business to react to the daily challenges of the changing world.  At Blue Prism we call it Business Led Computing.  It is a growing movement.  People are used to being able to do their own computing at home.  The next big thing in corporate computing might just be self serve.

British Gas reported having to recruit “thousands” of staff at a cost of more than £180M.  Blue Prism works with a number of customers using its Operational Agility Software to help with projects that are de-scoped, re-scoped at short notice or where implementations are painful and require manual workarounds for periods of time.  Whether this be a conversion or migration issue, fulfilling incomplete scope, or coping with unforeseen last minute changes, Blue Prism customers have a back up plan.

I am interested in hearing other ways of insuring against major IT program implementation difficulties.

My understanding of Agile (which I admit is limited) is that the twin objectives are to increase the speed of delivery and to improve the match between business requirements and delivered functionality.  Anything that does that has to be applauded.

However, this is not enough for this energy company.  Extending the concept of IT delivery further leads inevitably to business self serve, and why not?  Almost everyone has a self serve capability in their private lives.  We can do our own bank transactions, make purchases, publish a website (like this one), engage in conversations and much more, all using software that is designed for ease of use and personal autonomy.

Yet in our business lives, to make the tiniest change in our working practice requires a Change Request, supported by a business case, submitted to change control, considered, categorised and prioritised, designed (if you are lucky), and finally built and delivered.

The energy co’s vision is to empower the business operation to build its own IT, quickly, cost effectively and tested to meet their exact specification.  The solution may stand the test of time, or it may be replaced, or it may be rolled into a later IT project.  But the operations teams get the chance to do something with incredible speed and negligible cost.

In one sense this should fill us with horror due to the lack of governance and control.  But if these things can be reconciled in the enterprise, imagine the organisational power that is released.

Most service organisations are trying to push decision making control, authority and execution out to end customers.  Whether you call it Straight Through Processing, Customer Self Serve, or Customer Empowerment the objective is to improve customer convenience whilst simultaneously reducing processing costs.

Aren’t we missing the guys in the middle here?  What about business operations?  What about their agility?

The old domain will redirect to this new one for a few months but you may wish to update your RSS feed now.

I don’t think this will confuse too many people since the weblog was idle for some time during which the traffic dissipated greatly.

This is not just another vendor CEO selling his wares.  I am more interested in exploring related, tangential and broader industry ideas.  I am interested in hearing from people with similar (or opposing) views.

If you want to read about Blue Prism you can do so at www.blueprism.com.

Joe is bang on the money that enterprise IT has become so complex that startups are disincentivised.  With my CEO of Blue Prism hat on (we are not one of Joe’s big five), I thought I would add my thoughts to the debate.

Large enterprises like buying IT from large vendors.  Minimise the number of suppliers, and negotiate hard.  Reduce management and procurement costs.  Nobody really wants tangential relationships with small suppliers that might go out of business (or get bought by Computer Associates).

So enterprise activity, driven by corporate IT, has created rules and procedures.  A frustrated startup might think of them as guard dogs, fences, sentries and barbed wire, with the sole objective of keeping new vendors at bay.  IT calls this a supplier consolidation strategy and you can see why it makes sense on the face of it.

Even when a small vendor gets some limelight in a corporate account, they have to fund increasingly long and expensive sales cycles.  Free Proofs of Concept, deferred licence fees, an intricate (and near infinite) maze of decision makers to negotiate, and pressure from enterprise procurement to “recognise the reputational gain of working for us” – in other words drop price.

This is all bad for innovation because large vendors are not innovators.  They are not incentivised to innovate, nor agile enough to do so.  Quite the reverse.  So the enterprise actually loses out.  The lost opportunity of delivering real benefits by simply acting and delivering change quickly. Acting in this way may produce a small number of failures, but I believe that the overall benefit to the enterprise from increased agility and speed to deployment for the successful projects will more than compensate.

Nonetheless, startups need to acknowledge and accept that selling to the enterprise is much harder, much slower, and much more expensive than it used to be.  Investors have already realised this and diverted their funds towards companies in the Cloud, SaaS and virtualisation spaces because there is an apparent shortening of the sales cycle, partly by bypassing IT and selling straight to the business.  This leaves “traditional” enterprise IT startups struggling for funds, struggling for sales and struggling for recognition.

The good news for enterprise IT startups is, that it is now an underinvested space.  This, I believe, will create fewer but more exciting, and less competition bound, innovation opportunities.  In the end the economic case wins out.  If startups can find the most compelling of propositions, then corporate IT will ultimately adopt the innovation or have to find an alternative.  If I was investing right now, I would be looking for enterprise IT innovation.

Joe argues that most enterprises don’t have “anywhere near” the agility promised by SOA, cloud and Enterprise 2.0.  I agree that there is plenty of room for innovation and smart startups are the sparks that will create new fires in this space.