Seldom in the history of IT marketing has there been such a tornado of hype as that which is currently to be found billowing around the term “cloud computing”. It appears as if every vendor with any product or solution to market is compelled to employ one of the terms “cloud”, “IaaS” (infrastructure as a service), “PaaS” (platform as a service) or plain, simple “SaaS” somewhere in the stories they promote.
With so much energy being expended marketing the term, it is worthwhile looking at what is actually happening in the real world. Several studies have shown us that actual deployment of any form of cloud solution is still confined to a relatively small number of organisations, with usage being higher in larger organisations rather than in small business. This is a matter of some concern to those calling themselves “cloud service providers”.
If everything to do with cloud computing is as wonderful as many vendors believe, what are the inhibitors holding back the active utilisation of such solutions in main stream organisations? Beyond the lack of clarity surrounding the term “cloud computing” and the normal fear, uncertainty and doubt attached to any new offering, I believe that potential customer concerns fall into four main areas. To be specific these are questions regarding security, quality of service, the question of data / vendor lock-in and, finally, the long term cost of such services.
Security of information, and potentially of the structure of business processes, will always be matters that merit acute study even when services are run in house. When organisations consider moving to services that reside entirely outside of their computer rooms and data centres they need significant reassurance that not only their staff will be able to access and change corporate data, but also that such data will be adequately backed up and otherwise protected.
There is also the question or where, geographically and geo-politically, corporate data will be held. Many nation states have strong restrictions on how and where certain data types must be held. Until cloud providers are able to demonstrate that their offerings more than adequately satisfy such legislative requirements there will be significant hurdles to overcome.
Another factor to consider, especially when looking at PaaS and IaaS offerings, concerns the nature of software licensing, who is responsible for what from a licensing perspective, and how any licensing issues can be monitored and managed effectively.
The concerns surrounding data and IP “escrow” are matters that merit serious consideration by anyone looking to use any form of cloud service. It is essential that client organisations have agreements that detail the processes to be used to return all corporate data and any embedded intellectual property held at the end of life of the service, whatever the cause. This is an area where few cloud suppliers have taken any pains to explain how these situations are handled and how any guarantees are to be enforced.
The next question, that few cloud service providers do much to publicise, concerns what, if any, guarantees they will meet when it comes to the quality of service they will deliver to customers. It can be difficult to get anything beyond a “best effort” agreement to be put into contracts and many questions asked by potential customers are met with references to past performance without offering any assurance of future service delivery. Such an approach is likely to clash with enterprise and smaller company demands for service quality, visibility and the corresponding drive for continuous improvement.
This just leaves the matter of cost. One of the great arguments put forward by cloud suppliers is that the have the benefits of 'economy of scale' on their side and can therefore deliver services more cheaply than can often be achieved by in-house IT. However,our research highlights that the long term cost of service question is a major inhibitor to cloud adoption amongst both existing users of cloud services, frequently SaaS offerings, and those yet to take the leap. There is clearly a perception that cloud services have some way yet to go to be priced at levels acceptable to many organisations, for anything more than one-off engagements.
There are clearly many factors for cloud service providers and potential customers to address, both technically, in contract production and in market education. For what it is worth, I have stated on many occasions over the course of the last decade that I believe that slowly organisations will utilise an ever-expanding range of services that are sourced from outside the organisation itself. I still believe this to be so, but it is equally clear that cloud will not “take over” the market overnight. Instead usage will grow slowly, perhaps in many instances almost without being visible. Yes, there are process and technical challenges to be addressed but there is nothing insuperable to be overcome, perhaps apart from inertia and understanding. All the same, I would advise companies to move forward with their eyes wide open when it comes to what remains currently a relatively immature space.
By Tony Lock, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.
I do take my hat off to the people who first put together the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which (like the end of the cold war) celebrates its 20-year anniversary this year. It’s one thing to learn, both on the job and with little support, the ‘golden rules’ and best practice principles of any discipline. It’s quite another to have both the gumption and skill to document them in a way that makes them usable by others. And I should know – the time I spent working in the methodology group at a large corporate was a fair illustration of how tough this can be.
So, when the books that made up what we now refer to as ITIL were first released, they must really have hit the nail. First adopted by public organisations in the UK, they have since become one of the de facto standards for large-scale systems management. Their authors can feel rightly proud; as indeed can the authors of other best practice frameworks that have, through force of adoption, been proven to hit the spot.
However, there could be a fly in the ointment, and its name is dynamic IT – the latest term being applied to more automated approaches for managing the resources offered by our datacentres. I know, I know, this is one of those things that people have been banging on about for years – indeed, for at least as long as ITIL has been around, if not longer. So, what’s different this time around?
There are a number of answers, the first of which is virtualisation. While it is early days for this technology area (particularly around storage, desktops and non-x86 server environments), it does look set to become rather pervasive. As much as anything, the ‘game changer’ is the principle of virtualisation – the general idea of an abstraction layer between physical and logical IT does indeed open the door to be more flexible about how IT is delivered, as many of our recent studies have illustrated.
The second answer has to be the delivery of software functionality using a hosted model (software-as-a-service, or SaaS for short). No, we don’t believe that everything is going to move into the cloud. However, it is clear that for certain workloads, an organisation can get up and running with hosted applications faster than they could have done if they’d built them from scratch.
I’m not going to make any predictions, but if we are to believe at least some of the rhetoric about where technology is going right now, as well as looking at some early adopter experiences, the suggestion is that such things as virtualisation and SaaS might indeed give us the basis for more flexible allocation, delivery and management of IT. We are told how overheads will be slashed, allocation times will be reduced to a fraction, and the amount of wasted resource will tend to zero.
We all know that reality is often a long way from the hype. If it is even partly true however, the result could be that the way we constitute and deliver IT service becomes much slicker. IT could therefore become more responsive to change – that is, deal with more requests within the time available. In these cash-strapped times, this has to be seen as something worth batting for.
But according to the adage, the blessing might also be a curse, which brings us back to the best practice frameworks such as ITIL and what is seen as its main competitor, COBIT. In the ‘old world’, systems development and deployment used to take years (and in some cases, still does) – and it is against this background that such frameworks were devised.
My concern is how well they will cope should the rate of change increase beyond a certain point. Let’s be honest - few organisations today can claim to have mastered best practice and arrived at an optimal level of maturity when it comes to systems management. Repeatedly when we ask, we find that ‘knowing what’s out there’ remains a huge challenge, as do disciplines around configuration management, fault management and the like. But in general, things function well enough – IT delivery is not broken.
The issue however is that as the rate of change goes up, our ability to stick to the standards will go down. Change management – that is, everything that ITIL, COBIT and so on help us with - has an overhead associated with each change. As the time taken to change decreases, if the overhead stays the same, it will become more of a burden – or worse, it might be less likely to happen - increasing the risks on service delivery.
To be fair, methodologies aren’t standing still either – indeed, ITIL V3 now builds on the principle of the service management lifecycle. But my concern about the level of overhead remains the same: ITIL for example remains a monolithic set of practices (and yes, I know, nobody should be trying to implement all of them at once). There’s part of the framework called ITIL Lite, designed for smaller organisations, but to be clear, the ‘gap’ is for an “ITIL Dynamic” for all sizes of company. In methodological terms, the difference would be similar to DSDM and its offspring, compared to SSADM in the software development world – fundamentally it’s the difference between to-down centralisation, and bottom-up enablement.
Perhaps the pundits will be proved wrong, and we’ve still got a good decade or so before we really start getting good at IT service delivery. But if not the question I have therefore is, how exactly should we be re-thinking systems management to deal with the impending dynamism? We could always wait for the inevitable crises that would result, should the dynamic IT evangelists be proved right this time around. But perhaps it's time for the best practice experts to once again put quills to a clean sheet of paper, and document how IT resources should be managed in the face of reducing service lifetimes. If you know of any efforts in this area, I’d love to hear about them.
By Jon Collins, managing director at Freeform Dynamics.
Hats off to Newsweek for its green rankings of the 500 largest US corporations. And congratulations to HP for coming first.
Hang on... HP came out top? Surely a software company or some other organisation that is inherently more environmentally friendly should have topped the list? Yet four of the top five are computer companies. (The other was Johnson & Johnson.) Making computer equipment is known to be environmentally damaging. In fact, when Newsweek considered the environmental impact of the supply chain up to the point of delivery, it ranked these same four computer companies at 115th (IBM), 160th (Dell), 175th (HP) and 268th (Intel). Discrepancy or what?
The environmental assessments were done by a company called Trucost, maintains a research database of more than 4,500 companies that takes into account over 700 environmental impact measures.
The results are not good showings at all for the IT companies but they are in line with what you might expect. However, their ratings rocketed because the Newsweek team decided to give 'green policies' equal weighting with 'environmental impact'. And it chucked in 'reputation' as well, for a further 10 per cent of the overall assessment.
The main elements of the green policies score were, "climate change policies and performance, pollution policies and performance, product impacts, environmental stewardship and environmental management". The reputation scores were derived from, "an opinion survey of corporate social responsibility (CSR) professionals, academics and other environmental experts who subscribe to CorporateRegister.com and CEOs or high-ranking officials in all companies on the Newsweek 500 list". Weightings were applied: 3x for CEOs, 2x for professionals and 1x for others.
You can see that the elements of the survey make sense individually and the outcomes can, no doubt, be argued mathematically. But the weighting of the scores, especially the importance given to the three major elements, has to be questioned.
Also, was it wise for the research to try to assess vastly different sectors against each other and come up with a common measure? If a company knows it is not damaging the environment too much, then why should it spend fortunes on PR and CSR to influence external perceptions and, hopefully, internal realities? At this point, one can almost feel sorry for Newsweek for having taken on such a challenge.
So is the report of any value to you? Well, yes. It does allow you to look at rankings by sector and this has the potential to be helpful, but only if you consider each contributing factor separately. You might be wondering (if you've read this far) how your potential suppliers stack up in environmental performance or in green policies. Whether you care about reputation as seen through the eyes of C-level executives of the target organisations and several thousand CSR professionals is another matter.
What you clearly don't want to do is take the overall results too seriously. Treat them as a guide. Perhaps think of them as a cake that contains all the right ingredients but which didn't quite make the grade because inappropriate measures were used.
And this doesn't just apply to the Newsweek story. If you are being told something that jars with your reality, see if you can dig around a bit for the underlying assumptions.
By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.
Once upon a time, the boundaries of IT management were fairly straightforward. All your customers were inside the company and exchanging digital information with the outside world was highly controlled, if it happened at all. Not only that, but you sat down and figured out the business needs and then bought or developed the appropriate software which you then ran in-house. The users were obliged to take what they were given. Not quite easy-peasy, but close.
Nowadays, users have their own views. They want to collaborate electronically with each other and with the outside worlds of business partners, suppliers and customers. They want to hold webinars, share screens, instant message each other, maybe even work on wikis together and comment on each others' blogs. You have to decide whether to allow these things to happen formally or informally. If formal, at least you have some control over what holes you allow in the firewall. If informal, you've probably given them web access and told them to behave themselves. Although the social media brigade will say, "Trust everyone," only you will know if that's going to work in your organisation.
If you do try to restrict what users can do, you'll be surprised at how inventively they'll sidestep your controls. Research suggests that if they can, they will. You are driven by the need to keep the enterprise system secure. They are driven, usually, by achieving results in the most effective way. These two drivers are not usually compatible.
Knowing that 'collaboration without travel' is at the heart of their needs, you start looking around at what's available. Broadly speaking, the bottom line is a choice between an externally hosted service and one you look after yourself. The externally hosted approach is a bit nerve-wracking because all your company's digital collaborations will be stored on someone else's servers. What if something goes wrong? The service provider could fold or you could simply fall out with it. Can you get all your records back? Will they be in a usable form? This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Some very major vendors are beginning to offer such hosted services. Perhaps you'd feel more comfortable entrusting your data to an IBM, a Citrix Online or a Microsoft, for example.
But the alternative, hosting it all yourself, brings its own problems. Scaling is one, but that's probably fairly easy to address. What about your own users, who are now merrily collaborating with each other, being able to collaborate with external partners of various kinds? Your lock down could end up as a lock-out. And, in these days of close collaboration between organisations, this could be greatly to your detriment.
If partners, suppliers or customers are running different collaboration systems to you (as many will), be wary of the glib salesperson who assures you that interoperability is a piece of cake. Ask to talk to real users with similar needs to your own. Find out if your licence terms allow you to extend membership of your collaboration systems beyond the firewall. Ask a few of your business partners if they would be happy to work in this way. After all, they may be just as nervous about engaging beyond their own firewall.
It's so easy to find private systems that satisfy internal collaboration and security needs. The danger lies in forgetting that, over time, the constituency you serve is increasingly likely to involve ever larger numbers of outsiders.
By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.
With the prospect of a conference call with Lotus today, I thought I'd better try (yet again) to get my head around the extensive and, as a non-user, confusing product set.
First stop was the IBM/Lotus product pages. Quite a bit of enlightenment, but you sometimes have to drill down unnecessarily to dig out the information. For example, once you get to 'Alloy by IBM and SAP', why doesn't it have a short explanation like the next item, 'Lotus Connector for SAP Solutions', has? I knocked up my own outline so I could see all the information in one place. Sad or what?
Anyway, having kind of refreshed my memory on the product side, I turned my attention to a recent IBM Lotus event called an 'IdeaJam'. This one bore the theme of the company's latest marketing campaign called 'Lotus knows'. The purpose was to get a lot of people from the Lotus community to come up with, and comment on, ideas for getting the brand better known. The discussion was broken into four categories:
Lotus knows working smarter depends on great technology… Lotus knows marketing is key to technology adoption… Lotus knows technology is only great with client success… Lotus knows the world is getting smaller, flatter and smarter...
A terrific idea, except it's a bit like asking a church choir what songs they should be singing. They're going to choose the easy ones, the catchy ones, the ones that appeal to the choir itself. At least, after such an exercise, the vicar will know how to motivate the choir. But whether the choir's choices match the vicar's or the parishioners' needs is another matter.
Still, Lotus' event was very successful by its own standards. More than 20,000 votes were cast on 928 ideas and 2246 comments were made. Ideas could be voted for or against. The top vote (302 net votes) went to putting Notes in more schools worldwide. Second top (209 net) was raising awareness of Lotus among the rest of IBM sales staff. This is astonishing when you consider that IBM bought Lotus 14 years ago. Talk about hiding its light under a bushel.
Maybe, just maybe, Lotus would have benefitted much more and been able to direct its marketing efforts much more successfully if it were to have run ideajams with IBM mainstream staff and non-Lotus users out there in the real world. The danger is that they might say "Lotus who?" and refuse to participate.
By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.
I had an interesting chat with the application performance management (APM) team at CA recently about performance with respect to service-oriented architecture (SOA). We were comparing notes on the way in which it is easy for SOA initiatives to descend into confusion as services proliferate and knowledge of the dependencies between them gradually degrades.
From a performance and troubleshooting perspective, this can be pretty bad news as when an application slows down or breaks, it can be difficult to pinpoint where the bottleneck or fault has occurred. This is one of those nitty-gritty practical issues that SOA advocates often neglect, but is a real risk for those who are upping their commitment to this distributed computing model.
While this may not be new for more experienced adopters, it is not so simple to know where to start. In an ideal world, good SOA governance would minimise the degree to which such problems occur and, for example, prevent surprises from a service being hammered into failure because a developer decided to call it from a particularly demanding application without telling anyone.
Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in an ideal world, so generating some kind of visibility of what’s going on at execution time is a requirement. Inspection of raw logs from various components in the system coupled with cleverly placed debug code are some of the more common ways of troubleshooting, but this can be tedious and time consuming.
Against this background, I had read about CA’s extension of the APM capability it acquired with Wily into the SOA domain, but hadn’t had a chance to check it out properly. I got that chance recently at CA’s analyst conference in Ottawa.
For those who don’t know the Wily solution set, it grew out of the need for tools to monitor and troubleshoot complex Java applications in high-end application server environments, then evolved into more of an end-to-end APM system. The basic idea is to drop agents in at key points in your network to monitor transaction calls, for example between the web server and the application server, the application server and the database management system, and so on.
Data accumulated in this way can be used for real time monitoring and alerting, and for analysis of history for both troubleshooting and planning purposes. While a picture of end-to-end performance can be derived at an application or individual user level (something that can also be done with solutions that monitor response times "at the glass"), the approach adopted for the CA APM solution goes further by providing visibility into the performance of individual transaction steps behind the scenes.
As the solution has become increasingly well proven, CA has enjoyed significant growth in demand for the Wily technology, even though it is still not that widely known in the mainstream. As the solution has evolved, however, it moved on from the concept of "see to" to "see through" monitoring, and this is the key to helping unravel what’s going on in a complex SOA environment.
As an example, if the application being monitored makes a call to a service elsewhere on the network, it has always been possible to capture response times at that step along with diagnostic information when things go wrong. This is the "see to" approach. But what if that service calls another one behind the scenes? This is where "see through" visibility comes in, which can be achieved by distributing coordinated agents to equipment running relevant services, and/or by plugging an agent into the enterprise service bus (ESB).
Of course CA is not the only game in town when it comes to performance management, whether in an SOA or traditional application environment, and anyone investigating this field should check out players such as HP, IBM, Quest and Compuware too. I thought the insights from the CA guys were worth sharing, however, hopefully to stimulate some thought among IT shops who have taken a more tactical approach to SOA and have had visibility and performance issues sneak up on them over time.
It’s an interesting area that we will continue to investigate, so if you have any experience or insights yourself that you are willing to share, feel free to ping me with your thoughts.
By Dale Vile, research director at Freeform Dynamics.
In crude terms, the computer industry sees itself as the saviour of the planet and all who inhabit it. Take a briefing from any major IT company and it will tell you: a) how it's cleaning up its own act; and b) how, by buying more IT stuff, we and the developing world can create a bright and sustainable future for ourselves.
The mathematics are fairly simple, if a computer system can run more efficiently and help companies optimise their manufacturing, mining, transport, power generation, power consumption and so on, then it's a win all round. This is built on the assumption that the developing world is doing exactly that (developing) and that the West should help it, providing there's a buck to be turned in the long term.
God, that sounds depressing. But it's certainly the case that IT can help. Problems start when trying to make things happen. Politicians waver this way and that, according to whether they're trying to be statesmen or representatives of their communities. (Think about wind farms and NIMBYs.) As a long-time sounding board for my rants and self-confessed "Eco Worrier" (sic) Al Tepper says: "The political layer is where things won't happen." Indeed, individuals also waver hither and thither, according to what authority they've most recently read/heard from. It's hard for them to know which way to turn because of messages emanating from the proliferation of vested interests and fanatics. Exhortation and fanatical evangelism take the place of reason for many of them.
We've been here before, many times. The early days of PCs and the web are good examples. Those who could see value then were a tiny minority trying to persuade a slightly larger minority of the revolution that would affect everyone's lives. In the mid to late 1970s, the editor of Computing didn't want to know about "microcomputers". Eventually, PCs and the web went mainstream, but the evangelists were at their most shrill five to 10 years before everyone else cottoned on.
Greens go back 30 years, sustainability 22 years and the public web about 16 years and, related to this, social networking has been growing rapidly over the past six years. We ought to know what's going on in the sustainability/green space and we ought to have the means to share our discoveries (especially for web sites and for bloggers that make sense) with others. In this way, we could create a momentum for change based on genuine understanding. It would be based on us as individuals pursuing what we feel to be right, quite independently of the organisations to which we are beholden (like our employers). Through social software, independent and informed communities could coalesce around relevant topics: energy, pollution, water, food or whatever.
This personal mobilisation is in no way a replacement of the predominant top-down systems. Energy suppliers, governments, the United Nations, newspapers and so on, will continue to exert their influence, but upon an increasingly knowledgeable constituency. Change will increasingly start at the bottom and work up, just as some of it will continue to start at the top and work down. As individuals, we each have the potential to separate the good from the bad and the authentic from the greenwash, through our online community connections. This isn't about exploiting the herd instinct (as much of social media does), it's about reason and establishing or finding 'reasonable' social venues to hang out and sharing your discoveries with similarly motivated others.
None of this could happen without the IT industry. In fact, this could end up being one of the best strings it could add to its collective bow.
By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.
With mobile service providers offering more and more, in their bid to keep subscribers hooked and move them up the value chain, mobile users really do seem to have it all – high speed networks, sophisticated devices and a myriad of services and content. All of which suggests a win-win scenario if ever there was one. Reality, however, paints a somewhat different picture. Despite this wealth of mobile richness, uptake of mobile services beyond standard telephony and SMS is still pretty patchy.
True, mobile email for business use is gaining a lot of ground, and advanced devices are taking hold in the market, no small thanks to the advent of the iPhone, and the numerous ‘me too’ devices it has generated. However, beyond voice communications and SMS, a lot of mobile use resides around listening to music or playing games, and has yet to move on to more advanced services such as information search, navigation and social networking.
In spite of this limited use of more advanced services, recent research from Freeform Dynamics has highlighted several scenarios or ‘moments of need’ – working away from home or an evening out, to name but two - that users often experience and where such services are seen as valuable. The degree to which a particular service will be of interest will depend upon the context. For example, someone out for the evening may want to look up information about restaurants, show availability, etc.
Unsurprisingly, the most common ‘moment of need’ is when people have time on their hands. This may be when travelling, waiting for transport, waiting to meet friends for coffee etc. It is at such times that interest in information and entertainment services, as well as services that enable interaction with others, is at its highest.
What this points to is the prevalence of ad hoc or opportunistic use.
If the mobile service provider is able to take this casual use, where users dip lightly into a broad range of services and turn it into deeper, more consistent usage around one or two specific services, the benefits could be significant. Freeform Dynamics research shows that users who form a deep habit around one particular service are much more likely to extend their use to other services in a more committed manner.
This shift in user behaviour is driven by a number of factors, however, a significant one of which is device capability. This spans ease of navigation, as well as physical input and display characteristics. Those with more capable and accessible devices are more likely to use services at a deeper level. They also take more advantage of advanced services today, and, looking ahead, have a higher affinity for new service adoption in the future.
So what does this mean for the mobile service provider and the market in general? Simply put, encouraging more advanced service use leads to a win/win for both service providers and subscribers. Achieving this requires focus on a number of threads. At one level, a shift in emphasis from individual services to service portfolios and customer level profitability is needed, to create a more targeted, customer-centric approach.
Beyond this, however, the focus sits firmly on the device. Making sure subscribers have advanced devices that are easy to navigate, with a good user interface will make the transition up the value chain much easier.
For more in-depth analysis on this area, take a look at our recently published report, Moments of need: Factors affecting mobile service uptake.
By Josie Sephton, principle analyst at Freeform Dynamics,
Before Monday 6 July, did you know that Google and Microsoft had services for storing health records? Thanks to an article in The Times and some related hysteria in other media, just about the whole country discovered that, "David Cameron was going to replace the bloated and expensive NHS computer system with a free one from Google. Or maybe Microsoft."
Except, of course, someone got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Let's face it, whatever we think of the NHS and its evolving computer system, it's not going to be replaced by a packaged service from anyone. Never mind that Google and Microsoft (and maybe BUPA) are supposedly the front runners.
No-one likes overspends on computer projects. And the NHS one due for delivery in 2014 - four years late and at a cost of £12.4bn - presents a wonderful target for the Tories. This seems to have been what caused all the excitement. From £14.2bn to 'free' at the stroke of a pen. Wow!
Who on earth thinks that commercial organisations like Google, Microsoft or BUPA will do anything for free? And who but the most naive will think that moving shedloads of detailed health records from one system to another is going to happen without horrendous cost and risk?
Still, it was a great headline and it, rather unexpectedly, put 'Google Health' in the frame. Whether involved or not, Rachel Whetstone, Google's Vice President, Public Policy and Communications, must be feeling jolly pleased with the outcome. (Incidentally, she's married to Steve Hilton, one of David Cameron's closest advisors. She dropped out of politics after a spell as Michael Howard's chief of staff during his failed election campaign. Oops, wrong horse.)
So what's the reality? The Google (Health) and Microsoft (HealthVault) systems both manage personal health records, or PHRs. They provide somewhere to create, store and share your personal health information and allow you to find related infomation, engage with health professionals and manage your medications. Both put the user in control of content and both are free to the user. This has little to do with the £14.2bn NHS system. At best it would take care of one element of it, the so-called 'Spine' Care Record Service (CRS) but with less information and more restricted access. Medical professionals need access to all manner of detailed information if they're to do their jobs properly and they're simply not going to get that from the personally-filtered subset of a person's medical information that the PHRs represent.
What's on offer smacks of a, "let's get to know your medical issues so we can fire appropriate ads at you". If not, one has to ask what the commercial motivations of Microsoft and Google are. Maybe it's to flog extra services: "Monitor your blood pressure, madam?" or "Remind you to take your pills, sir?"
With the baby boomers reaching retirement age, the market for health-related products and services is exploding. An increasing proportion are computer literate and have their own PCs and internet connections. And nothing is on their minds more than their health. (Okay, maybe their grandchildren and their pets.)
But let's not get carried away by recent newspaper reports. This is not David Cameron single-handedly demolishing the NHS IT budget. Sure, we'd love to enter what the Tories call a "post bureaucratic age", but let's start by getting rid of all the deeply intrusive information that the government already stores about us first.
By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.
The IT or, to give it it's full name, the ICT industry has led a pretty charmed life. After being a participant for over forty three years, it amazes me that it still manages to buck trends; from ever more power at ever lower prices to the potential ability to steer the planet and its occupants from environmental disaster.
At least, that's the hope and the intention of the green IT industry. Manufacturers are gleefully chomping out and selling more and more ICT equipment, while claiming that the environmental savings accruing from its use will mightily offset the environmental harm caused by its manufacture, operation and the disposal of whatever it's replacing.
Of course, IT isn't the only game in town. Cleantech industries are working hard on coming up with new things (with their embedded environmental harm) to reduce our overall environmental impact. It's paradoxical and uncomfortable, but it seems we have to do some more harm in order to do even more good.
One company that has an interesting environmental programme is BT Global Services. It also wants to be seen as "the IT provider of choice". It plans to do this by raising the level at which it consults with businesses by using sustainability as a lens. It has the IT in the form of data centres, software and services. And it has the C, because its core business is communications.
Global Services has posted some ghastly results recently and is in the middle of a restructuring. Perhaps it sees 'sustainability' as an opportunity to improve matters for itself and for the environment.
Anyway, if pretty charts are anything to go by, its Sustainability Practice has a comprehensive approach to helping its customers build sustainable organisations. Like many large companies (IBM, Cisco, CA and HP are just four examples), it has drawn heavily on its own experience to formulate its guidance for customers. For example, an early step in the process is a carbon assessment. This focuses on people, power and procurement.
People commute and travel on business and they use laptops, personal printers and mobile devices, for example. Power is used in office devices and data centre equipment, as well as heating, lighting and cooling. Procurement includes third party services, hosted equipment, print services, transport and so on. These three elements are analysed according to the three 'Scopes' of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. (Scope I is the direct burning of fossil fuels. Scope II is electricity and the carbon created in using it. Scope III is indirect activity such as staff commuting.)
When you look at it this way, it seems obvious, but that's the deceptive thing about a simple framework.
Of course BT has a range of service offerings to match sustainability needs. And, as you might expect, substituting travel with communications looms large. And 'Homeshoring' is offered as a solution for UK contact centres. (With dog-cancelling microphones, perhaps?) The data centre hosting story is the usual one of greater carbon efficiency than a DIY approach.
The individual elements of the BT story aren't particularly original, but its telephony and networking pedigree hint at good service and security levels. It has many years of implementing sustainability initiatives with resulting business benefits. The savings it boasts sound huge, but these have to be considered in the context of BT's size (£21.4bn turnover last year). It saves £37m per year in travel costs and it saved £238m in one year through conferencing. It also reports a 20 percent productivity improvement from flexible working arrangements.
BT has spent years trying to muscle in on IT's turf. Now the industry really is ICT, perhaps this is the best chance it has. And, with the inevitable build up to December's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, now seems to be a very good time for BTGS to set out its sustainability stall.
By David Tebbutt, programme director at Freeform Dynamics.