The Cloud

Social is the Plural of Personal

2012-11-03T10:02:38-07:00

In my previous post on the subject, I said:

“Social” is not a layer. “Social” is not a feature. “Social” isn’t a product.

Social is about bringing being human back into business. About how we conduct business. About why we conduct business. Social is something in people’s hearts, in people’s beings, in their DNA.

Man is born social.

Many companies were not.

Why weren’t the companies social? After all, business used to be social. People always bought from people, sold to people. They knew each other, knew where they lived, what they did. People were in relationship.

So what changed? I can’t be sure, but I can surmise.

People wanted to grow their businesses, to “scale”. And, using the technology of the day, ostensibly built around assembly-line thinking, scaling began with standardised identification and nomenclature, then probably went through some form of homogenisation to reduce standard deviation, and finally process optimisation to elongate the mean time between failures.

So I guess customers had to resemble parts in a manufacturing process. Everyone was allocated a number. And since customers did business with many businesses, everyone was allocated lots of numbers. It didn’t matter what the number was called: customer number, account number, roll number, ledger number. Customers were numbers. Lots of numbers.

The dehumanisation had begun. Next step was to optimise the workload by making it switchable. So, as many of us experienced in many retail environments, particularly in banking, we saw traditional relationships sundered, as the people with the relationships were themselves standardised and moved around, as they became standardised, transferable, exchangeable, replaceable. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they were promoted to cover a range of outlets, and your outlet was one of them. But for the most part, the people you knew were moved around until you didn’t know them any more.

Now that we’d all been made into homogeneous numbers, and now that the historical relationships were systematically torn up and thrown away, there was still one more thing to do before the dehumanisation could be completed. And that was to remove all discretion from the people you actually dealt with at the till, at the counter, at the coalface. To make everything so systematic that the person you dealt with might as well have been an ATM. All rules and no relationship.

The dehumanisation was complete. Now, finally, the “real” customer looked and felt like the “model” customers that were researched, sampled, broadcast-advertised to, channelled, influenced, controlled. Any colour you like, any car you like, as long as it was a black Model T. And the “real” staff acted and behaved exactly like the machines that were being designed to replace them. And business grew and nobody complained. Nothing was wrong with that picture.

Until the Cluetrain guys came along and suggested that perhaps that was not the case. That perhaps there was something a teensy bit wrong with the picture. [Obviously they were not the only ones doing the pointing out. Howard Rheingold, Eric Raymond, Karim Lakhani, Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson et al on communities and emergent behaviour; John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Don Tapscott, Chris Meyer et al on how the digital context was changing business; Carlota Perez, Yochai Benkler, Eric Beinhocker on the implications of all this in markets and in finance; Tom Malone, Andrew McAfee, Andrew Abbott et al on how work was changing as a result of all this; Albert-Lazslo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, Clay Spinuzzi on the connectedness and networks aspects of all this; Esther Dyson and Tim O'Reilly, both personally as well as professionally, in what they said and what they enabled the publication of. The list is by no means exhaustive, and I am sure I've left a pile of key people/readings out. But what I was trying to show was that change was afoot, that something big was happening. And it all revolved around networks not hierarchies, empowerment at the edge, community-based value creation and the continued dance of Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law and Gilder's Lemma.

Something big was happening. With the customer moving to the front and centre of the stage.

Demanding that things become personal. Again.

Walmart had figured out that if you could aggregate distribution points virtually, you could deliver economies of scale over a wider area. Amazon took that learning, and made every home the edge of the distribution network. Facebook went further, and made every person the centre of the distribution network.

Business was becoming personal. Again.

There may be a million reasons why business had stopped being personal; my explanations above should not be taken as gospel, just as one possible set of reasons. There may be a million reasons why business may become personal again; I've tried to explain that there was a whole zeitgeist driving towards that change, and that the change is happening now. Again, don't take this as a conclusive analysis, just as a set of possibilities. These are not things I want to imbue with cloaks of certainty.

What is important is that change is happening, and that change is happening now. That business is becoming personal again.

What does that mean? Is it just a sound-bite? Or, as Shakespeare may have preferred to describe it, is it just a tale?

"a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing"

I guess some companies hoped that customers would behave like terracotta warriors. Standardised, standing in line. Spoken to and unable to speak back. [Unable to listen either, but who cared?}

The more enlightened companies probably realised that customers would prefer to retain part of their humanity, so they didn't think terracotta warrior, they probably imagined "calm and anaesthetic labour ward, with everything in its place":

Doesn't that picture amaze you? Where and how did they find a labour ward that looked like that? [The picture is taken from a Practical Parenting series in New Zealand].

Instead, customers were human. Distinctive in their differences. Strengthened by their socialness. More like this photo from Steve Snedeker:

Some businesses are happy not to scale, but to focus on quality of service within a boutique market. Some are happy not to have any relationships with customers, working strictly on a pile-them-high-sell-them-cheap model, cost leadership being their aim.

And then you have the rest. Businesses that have woken up, that would like to have personal relationships with customers, and somehow to make those personal relationships scale.

Can such businesses exist? Is it possible to scale while remaining personal? I think yes. Provided.

Provided people understand the plural of personal is social.

I buy regularly from Abebooks, a collection of small bookshops that allied to use a common digital infrastructure in order to scale and achieve geographic reach. They were bought by Amazon some years ago. And then apparently left alone by Amazon, for some strange reason….. my accounts remain separate, the Amazon recommendation engine does not work on my Abebook purchases, the Amazon review process has not yet made its way into Abebook world. But I’m happy. Because I get the simplicity and convenience of a very large inventory across thousands of bookshops, a built-in price comparator, one-click fulfilment processes…. and personal service.

Most of the time, when I get something from an Abebooks shop, the person who ships the book (often the seller) leaves a personal note. Usually signed. Usually saying thank you for your purchase. And over the years I’ve gotten to know some of those people. We have a relationship, we know each other by name, know something about each other, enjoy doing business with each other. And guess what? I’ve never had a problem with Abebooks. Never had to worry about damaged goods or returns or faulty or anything like that.

How can Abebooks do this? I think there are four reasons. One, it’s an aggregation of individual shops, a network rather than a hierarchy. Two, that network retains empowerment at the edge, the people in each shop still remember what a customer looks like and why a customer is important. [As Peter Drucker said "The purpose of business is to create a customer". We should never never forget that]. Three, they use digital infrastructure to do the mundane repeatable things that digital infrastructures are good at: reducing search costs, taking fulfilment and billing friction away allowing for two-way communications, connecting the participants up. And four, because they care.

Because. They. Care.

When personal is scaled up, we need to ensure that the ability to care is retained and enhanced.

It’s not just about Abebooks. I shop regularly at Etsy. Again the same thing, personal service from individuals whom I dealt with by name, people who remembered my name, people who signed their names to the missives and thank-you notes. People who were polite and courteous. People who appeared to care for my business. For Abebooks read Etsy. For Etsy read Discogs. The list could go on and on. Places where I could deal with real people and have real conversations. Places that had the same characteristics as Abebooks.

Social is the plural of personal. It starts with caring. Something that has to be in the DNA of the firm.

That caring mentality leads to a relationship where people know each other, their names, what they do, what they like, what they don’t like.

That caring mentality leads to the willingness to invest in the relationship, to spend time, to build trust.

The digital infrastructure is only there to enable and enhance all this, by making it easier to connect with each other, to converse, to remember likes and dislikes. That digital infrastructure is there to help ensure that analog errors can be reduced: forgetfulness, name and address errors, mistakes made in hearing what was said. That digital infrastructure is there to reduce friction and to simplify discovery, inventory searching, price comparison, order entry, fulfilment and billing.

But it all begins and ends with the person, and being personal.

What does all this have to do with social? Well, when you try and scale up personal, think of what happens to the customer. More choices. More inventory. More selections. More advertising. More More More.

So customers need help. Help to find what they’re looking for. Advice on what is good and what is not. Signals on whom to trust and whom not to trust. How do customers do this? They turn to their friends.

Hello social.

Social. Not a layer. Not a feature. Not an app.

Social is the plural of personal.

[I intend to write at least two more posts, one on how scaling up personal to social helps build community and community action, and one on how this then enables the creation of real and sustainable social value. I may write a third, about choice, about anonymity, about B2B contexts, whatever.]

It all depends on what you say about this post. Whether you found it helpful or not. What you’d like to see in my next post. What you didn’t like. What I got wrong. What you think I should watch or listen to or read in order to learn more.

Editor's note. This was cross-posted from confusedofcalcutta, JP's blog - @jtaschek)

The Plural of Personal is Social

2012-11-03T09:56:26-07:00

There was a time in my life when everything I would consider “business” was also personal.

As many of you may know, I was born in Calcutta nigh on fifty-five years ago. I stayed there till 1980. There were no supermarkets in Calcutta in those days. For most things you walked down to your local provisions store, where you knew everyone and everyone knew you. By name. They didn’t just know you, they knew your family, where you lived, when you moved there, what you did. They knew when and if to offer help, advice, credit, whatever. Not everything was available at that friendly neighbourhood provisions store; so sometimes the Mountain came to Mahomet. Milk and newspapers were delivered home; new cooking vessels were bartered for old newspapers and saris, or at least that’s what I remember, in some variant of rag-and-bone-man. And occasionally we went to New Market to buy something more exotic, unavailable in the normal shops.

We always appeared to do business with people we knew well, and who knew us well. As a family we were probably satisficers rather than maximisers (to use Barry Schwartz’s parlance in The Paradox of Choice); we didn’t shop around, we looked for an exchange of value within a stable relationship.

So my haircuts were at A.N. John on Park St, when we were well off, and 003b Short St, when we weren’t. Sports equipment was always bought at Castlewood, next to A.N.John. Books at Oxford Book Emporium on the other side of the street. Second-hand books and comics and magazines came via Mr Mallick of Free School Street, round the corner. When times were good, meals were at Firpo’s and Sky Room and tea at Flury’s. Indian food was at Amber. Shoes were bought round the corner from Amber, usually from the same shop. Clothes used to be tailored to fit at K.C.Jakkimull’s, next to Sky Room.

It wasn’t just that we went to the same shops. Or that the shops were so close to each other you could have covered them under a large blanket. Those things were important.

What was far more important was that they knew us by name, knew everything about us, knew what we wanted and knew what we needed. And we knew them, knew them by name, knew what they were good at and what they weren’t good at.

It was personal.

It was a relationship.

The relationship tended to be sustained over time and over generations. I can’t remember the number of times someone has told me that my father had sat in that very seat and been provided a shave/a meal/ a suit/whatever. Sometimes it went beyond that, and my grandfather was brought into the conversation.

Relationships. Where both sides invested. Where, after a while, you couldn’t see that there used to be two sides. No haggling over price or bargaining, that was reserved for the forays into the exotica of Hogg’s New Market.

And then, in 1980, after my father died, I came to the UK.

It took me years before I went into a supermarket, they scared me. I wanted personal. So I went for personal: the corner shop, the local newsagent, the local pub, places I could walk to, people who knew my name and whose names I knew. People I saw regularly. During those days you went to your bank branch to get many things done, and the staff there knew you. Your bank manager knew you. When you got a letter from someone you did business with, often enclosing a bill, you recognised the signature.

You knew the person who sent that letter. And they knew you.

You had a relationship. It was something in your DNA. A part of what proclaimed you to belong to the human race.

Then, as the Eighties progressed, we began to lose something of our humanity in how we did business with each other. Bigger became bigger and better than Better.

And during the 17-year sleigh-ride bull market that followed, a part of our humanity was lost in how we did business. The foundation for that loss was set in the broadcast age, in how firms communicated with people, how people couldn’t communicate back, aided and abetted by the one-directional technology that was television, occasionally exacerbated by those in the advertising business.

That’s what Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, Rick Levine and David Weinberger rebelled against in the Cluetrain Manifesto. How business had become not-personal. How companies had built walls between them and their customers, how much damage was being done by those walls, why that situation could not be sustained and how the internet and the Web was going to change all that. That’s what evoked Chris’s memorable words:

We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings—and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.

Those very emotions were what drove Doc to work on Vendor Relationship Management and then to write The Intention Economy. Those very emotions were what drove Chris to write Gonzo Marketing; you can see them at work when you read David’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything is Miscellaneous and Too Big To Know, as he looks through the lens of Cluetrain on how information is organised, accessed, labelled, enriched, made into useful knowledge and imparted as wisdom.

Those very emotions were probably responsible for making Rick into a great chocolatier.

[Disclosure: I have the privilege of being able to call the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto my friends. To have broken bread with them in different continents over the years, to have broken sweat with them in different escapades. We know each other by name. We know a bit of what makes each of us tick, the little bit we can know. I had the honour of writing a chapter in the tenth anniversary edition of that book, something that thrilled me and humbled me.]

Business is personal. It’s about relationships. It has always been so. Until we tried to forget it and concentrated on making money, not shoes. [As Peter Drucker said, people make shoes, not money]. Then, for a short while, business became not-personal.

As the Cluetrain guys signalled way back in 1999, the web was changing all that. Business was becoming personal again.

It comes as no surprise to me that salesforce.com was born during those heady times, as business started becoming personal again. It comes as no surprise to me that Marc Benioff understood that the plural of personal is social, and that it’s in the DNA of the company that he and Parker Harris founded. That’s why I went to work for them.

“Social” is not a layer. “Social” is not a feature. “Social” isn’t a product.

Social is about bringing being human back into business. About how we conduct business. About why we conduct business.

Social is something in people’s hearts, in people’s beings, in their DNA.

Man is born social.

Many companies were not.

And the companies that weren’t, they can’t just become social by buying layers or features or even products. Porcine unguents, nothing more.

You need to be reborn social.

You need to start thinking of the customer as someone to have a relationship with, to get to know, to invest in, to trust, to respect.

And you need to get everyone in the company to think that way, to act that way, in everything they do.

And you need to do this everywhere, not just with your customers. Not just with your supply web or your trading partners. Not just with your staff and your consultants.

Everyone. Everywhere.

The plural of personal is social.

(Ed. Note - this was cross-posted from JP's blog: confusedofcalcutta - @jtaschek)

What is Marc Benioff Reading

2012-09-21T11:32:25-07:00

If you caught Marc’s keynote at Dreamforce this week, you might have noticed him refer to an IBM study that has been influencing his thinking. I thought I’d drill down into some of the study’s insights.

The study of 1700 executives finds that CEOs are creating more open and collaborative cultures to drive innovation. The study makes three areas to drive outperformance: empowering employees through values, engaging customers as individuals, and amplifying innovation through partnerships.

“Empowering employees through values

For CEOs, organizational openness offers tremendous upside potential— empowered employees, free-flowing ideas, more creativity and innovation, happier customers, better results. But openness also comes with more risk. As rigid controls loosen, organizations need a strong sense of purpose and shared beliefs to guide decision making. Teams will need processes and tools that inspire collaboration on a massive scale. Perhaps most important, organizations must help employees develop traits to excel in this type of environment.

Engaging customers as individuals

The pursuit of customer knowledge is as old as business itself, but where and how those insights are found and used are radically changing. To effectively engage an individual consumer, client or citizen, organizations must weave together insights about the whole person — from sources they likely haven’t consulted in the past. They will need stronger analytics capabilities to uncover patterns and answer questions they never thought to ask. Client-facing staff and channels must be equipped to act on those insights. And since customers are increasingly mobile, organizations must be active there too, ready to engage in the context of the moment.

Amplifying innovation with partnerships

Rising complexity and escalating competition have made partnering a core innovation strategy for many organizations. But to enable sustained, fruitful innovation partnerships, organizations will need deeper, more integrated relationships. Partnering organizations will have to share collaborative environments, share data — and share control. And even when the organization is performing well, CEOs must occasionally break from the status quo and introduce new external catalysts, unexpected partners and some intentionally disruptive thinking.”

According to the study, “Of all the external forces that could impact their organizations over the next three to five years, CEOs now see technology change as most critical.”

“More than half of all CEOs see human capital, customer relationships and innovation as key sources of sustained economic value.”

“To draw out the best in their workforces, CEOs are most focused on three organizational attributes.”

“CEOs are implementing extensive changes to enable faster, more relevant responses to markets and individuals.’

There are many more great insights from the the report. I encouraged you to check it out here.

Did you join us in San Francisco? What did you think?

iPhone 5 and the Enterprise

2012-09-17T14:53:13-07:00

The iPhone 5 debuted last week to mixed reviews. A sleeker, lighter, more powerful design, and an extra row of icons added up to what could be called an iteration rather than a revolution. For example, critics complained of the lack of an NFC chip for digital wallet apps. But overall, this evolutionary device seems to be destined to continue the iPhone momentum.

And according to Nucleus Research, that momentum will include the enterprise:

“As companies consider the iPhone in the enterprise environment, especially the iPhone 5, they must remember to consider the following cost components.
Companies seeking to provide new iPhone 5s for employees must consider whether to purchase them internally or to allow employee-purchased devices. The tax implications, corporate discounting, and sourcing issues, and the question of device ownership must all be included. Companies must incorporate these costs into all enterprise technology projects because mobility is now a core enterprise technology.
As companies increasingly use both the iPhone 5 and the new iOS 6, they should expect to use additional data and incur additional costs as a result. Although throttling or eliminating data usage would be counterproductive to gaining value from mobility, companies should explore whether their current and intended enterprise technology investments will use data in a prudent manner or whether there will be a hidden cost of mobility from using high-quality pictures and videos, backing up information repeatedly, or using LTE to download large amounts of information.
To manage and support the iPhone 5, companies must consider the security of both the device and the data. The iPhone 5 makes it easier to share information than ever before, which is fantastic for consumers, but anathema to highly regulated industries. Any enterprise technology that can be accessed by the iPhone 5 must have an answer for the iPhone's improved sharing capabilities to enforce needed security and compliance concerns. If the specific application or technology in question lacks the ability to control the iPhone, companies should use the native iOS mobile device management solution or a third-party device and application management solution that can provide the necessary oversight that the enterprise demands without forcing employees to actively configure and change their devices manually. This centralized oversight supports both breadth and repeatability of support, which Nucleus has found to be the keys to obtaining ROI from a project.”

The iPhone momentum is the tip of the spear on another trend reshaping enterprise IT, Bring Your Own Technology or BYOT. Mobile apps also get swept up in this trend, and some recent numbers further deomnstarte the influence of smart phones.

Smart phone users love their apps, according to new research from Gartner. Downloads have increased 75% to more than 45 billion.

Apple, Google and Microsoft dominate the global app market, with Apple accounting for the largest portion of app downloads in 2012. Gartner projects that there will be about 21 billion apps downloaded from Apple's App Store this year, a 74 per cent increase from the previous year. Going forward though, Gartner predicts that these companies will see growing competition in the app market from Facebook and Amazon.

But that same report has some bad news for companies trying to monetize this trend: the vast majority of the apps are free:

The research doesn’t call out a third big category: free apps that are backed by subscriptions, like Chatter.

Cloud and ROI

2012-09-17T14:37:59-07:00

A new report from Nucleus Research finds that cloud computing delivers more than just fast deployment and low upfront costs. Nucleus says that on average, companies find 1.7 times greater ROI than on-premise deployments. The research firm looked at 70 cases studies ranging from $30,000 to $10 million.

Overall companies spent 40% less on consulting fees and 25% less on application support personnel. Application changes can often be carried out by business analysts versus developers, and the cloud vendor takes over much of traditional application support and maintenance.

Apparently the biggest benefit of all is that cloud ROI improves over time. Nucleus points out three major differences with cloud computing:

Because of the iterative nature of cloud projects, and the fact that business users can expand and adapt their use over time (often without additional consulting investment), companies are more likely to expand the footprint or workflows of cloud applications without additional consulting costs.
Because new users can easily be added over time, companies are more likely to expand the user footprint as they identify opportunities for more value.
Because most cloud upgrades are relatively transparent to end users, companies can take advantage of incremental upgrades to drive greater productivity in areas such as mobile access, integrated analytics, improved workflows, and a more intuitive user interface.

In all, four out of five cloud deployments found an incremental increase in benefit without a corresponding increase in costs. Nucleus concludes with a stinging assessment of on-premise benefits: “Only organizations that plan to never grow, change, or upgrade their application after its initial deployment are likely to achieve better ROI from on-premise applications than cloud ones.

BYOT - Taking Flight

2012-09-07T13:06:10-07:00

A great report issued by Forrester recently provides some interesting details on the most fascinating trend in the enterprise: Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT). In “Charting the Rise of Bring-Your-Own-Technology” Connie Moore identifies three big takeaways:

“Workers use a Range of self-provisioned devices, software, and services To do Their Jobs

Fifty-three percent of information workers have leveraged their own personal devices, installed unsupported software, or used unsupported Internet-based services to help them do their jobs. This trend is largely universal across geographic regions, company size, and industry sector.

CIOs Cannot afford To ignore BYOT

New technologies will be self-provisioned by employees — most aggressively by senior executives. Even if the IT organization wants to put its head in the sand and avoid the issue, it can’t because senior execs are leading the BYOT parade. Our research shows that 77% of executives buy their own hardware and 45% self- provision software.

A Paradigm Shift Will Occur Over The Next Three Years as BYOT Becomes Innate

BYOT is a voluntary, spontaneous groundswell. But within 36 months, companies will reverse their negativity and encourage workers to bring their own technology. Get ready now — when the paradigm shifts, BYOT will become standard policy and a requirement for new hires.”

One aspect of the report that caught my eye was thefact that the trend is broad-based in IT—it’s not just Apple fanboys and girls dragging their iPhones into the office. Moore says that many respondents had purchased software themselves and gotten reimbursed by their companies. In all, more than half of the nearly 10,000 workers surveyed by Forrester around the world had used a personal device or non-supported software:

Google’s Multi-Screen Mantra

2012-08-31T10:43:05-07:00

Google is out with a new study “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior.” It describes how we use multiple screens for the completion of a single task. It’s oriented towards consumers, but I’d bet there are implications for the enterprise.

Google says that it comes down to two multi-screen modes:

“Sequential screening where we move from one device to another to complete a single goal

Simultaneous screening where we use multiple devices at the same time”

Here’s how it works:

“We found that nine out of ten people use multiple screens sequentially and that smartphones are by far the most common starting point for sequential activity. So completing a task like booking a flight online or managing personal finances doesn’t just happen in one sitting on one device. In fact, 98% of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task.

With simultaneous usage, we found that TV no longer commands our undivided attention, with 77% of viewers watching TV with another device in hand. In many cases people search on their devices, inspired by what they see on TV.”

For marketers, this means that cross platforms are key and spur of the moment opportunities should be offered. Search is a key pull-though app (this is Goggle after all).

What about you? Which business app/function do you begin on you mobile device and finish on a laptop? How should our apps change to keep up with this trend? Which app vendors “get” it? Looking forward to seeing your comments and suggestions below.

If We'd Had Connections First

2012-08-28T00:24:01-07:00

The following is based on a guest blog originally invited by the editors of SlashCloud. Thanks for their permission to share those ideas here.

Is it only an accident of history that the microprocessor came before the Internet? And if the sequence had been reversed, would we have different ideas today about what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘disruptive’ in the ways we live and work?

It takes a real effort of will to reset our thinking, and re-invent whole ecosystems (such as health care and education) for a massively connected, sensor-rich, API-infused world – but the effort will pay off with huge improvements in the sustainable performance of these functions.

Intel’s 4004 was first advertised in November 1971, while the word ‘Internet’ wasn’t coined until three years later; the TCP/IP stack was not standardized until 1982.

That gap provided a long, long time—seven Moore's-Law cycles—for isolated nodes of computation to swarm across the planet, with connectivity considered an extra-cost option and at most an intermittent convenience. We're still carrying the resulting baggage, in the form of ziggurats of middleware that simulate what we might have much more simply built for real – if we'd had ubiquitous connection before we'd gotten cheap CPUs.

From a purely technical point of view, we can understand and rage at the perversity. If you want to enable simultaneous editing of a document by many contributors, for example, the obvious way is to have a shared data structure and a simple means of concurrent access and conflict resolution. The worst possible way is to give every editor a separate copy of the document, and to build a complex mechanism of replication and combination that tries to approximate what could be more simply made real. The former is something like Google Docs, the latter something like Microsoft Office. In a connected-first world, wouldn't Google Docs have long been considered the norm? instead of being seen as an innovation?

Technical elegance, though, is much too narrow a frame of reference. Let's think big. Let's think about global, crucial, currently unsustainable institutions like the way we practice medicine. Too many people crowd into too few doctors' offices to take too many tests at too much cost to deliver too many null results – that say, in effect, "OK, you didn't need to come into the office today after all."

In a world of 'connection first,' we'd put radio nodes in medicine bottles to confirm that the patient is taking pills on schedule. We'd put network-connected sensors in toilets to do basic urinalysis. We'd let people opt-in to connect their grocery store frequent-buyer accounts to their primary care providers, so information on what we're eating and drinking could be accurately recorded instead of optimistically self-reported.

Likewise higher education: instead of diverting huge fractions of tuition and fees to housing and recreation, we'd make campus a place that's occasionally visited for seminars and feedback sessions – while most learning takes place in apprentice- or intern-style engagements, and faculty members tailor sequence of content to match the student's assignments in those practical settings.

This is the way we need to think about the cloud: not merely as new connective tissue for the institutions and processes that we already have, but as a new environment in which we can re-think what those processes should be and how those instutitions should do their jobs. That's the difference between accident and design – and the difference between being a leader, and being a victim of disruption.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0.

Focus on Mobile Strategy, Not Devices

2012-08-25T09:20:35-07:00

[Ed. Note: As the Samsung-Apple verdict shakes up (and shapes) the industry, @bcfrancis observes that it is a sound plan to get the architecture and strategy right to embrace the mobile imperative. - @jtaschek]

It’s easy to get focused on the battle for supremacy in mobile devices, but this week I am focusing on some interesting thoughts bubbling up from the Gartner Catalyst conference in San Diego. In particular, this headline on ZD Net caught my eye: “Mobility; it’s not a device, it’s an IT architecture”:

“Mobility has quickly become a focal point for IT, but while BYOD is the issue getting the ink, the true challenge is developing an architecture that can lead enterprises into this new era of computing.

That was the message Monday when Gartner opened its annual Catalyst Conference, with the theme: Any device, Any service, Any source.

‘Enterprises must approach mobility as an architecture problem,” said Paul DeBeasi, a research vice president at Gartner. ‘Mobility effects legal, HR, policy, security, support, identity, business infrastructure and application decisions.’”

That’s a heckuva footprint, and in my opinion, the right way to ook at mobility in today’s IT.

In fact, Gartner has introduced what it calls “The Gartner Mobile Reference Architecture” for IT:

The Mobile Reference Architecture is an integrated set of research that helps IT organizations make technology, infrastructure and policy decisions that support their mobile initiatives. The Mobile Reference Architecture will help IT organizations:

Accelerate mobile solution deployment

Satisfy a broad set of mobile requirements

Facilitate iterative decision making

Adapt to changing requirements

Increase institutional mobility knowledge

Still, there are plenty of potential pitfalls ahead:

“Wireless networks are not prepared for mobility,” said DeBeasi. “What happens in the building when hearing aids are Bluetooth, when there are network connected heart monitors? What does that do to the network? What risks are there to the employees who have those devices?”

ZD Net’s Larry Dignan reports that Forrester is seeing some lurking gotchas as well:

“It's hard to coordinate multiple channels. Apps can be built for shopping and flop on customer service.

Processes are designed for transactions, not engagement. Customers want mobile chores to be quick and easy. Forrester likened today's mobile apps to ATMs decades ago. They don't need to do everything, but need to excel at the basics.

Servers and IT infrastructure can't handle the activity surges. Networks, databases and middleware will be taxed by mobile volume.

Application and security models need a do-over. The so-called atomization of business processes will require architecture to be reworked. IT will also need layered security as mobile traffic swells.”

What about your organization? Does your IT team view mobility the same way? What are the roadblocks to embracing this thinking?

I’d love to see your comments.

Apple-Samsung Battling for Market Share

2012-08-17T11:28:56-07:00

Android is leading the smartphone pack in the latest survey from Gartner. Worldwide, there were 419 million phones sold in Q2, which is actually down slightly from the year-ago period. About a third of them were smart phones. Gartner says that mature markets in the US and Western Europe were hurt by the economic slowdown and consumers’ unwillingness to buy ahead of hoped-for launches in the second half of the year.

Samsung continues to distance itself from the competition, according to Gartner.

“Samsung and Apple continued to dominate the open OS market, together taking about half the market share, and widening the gap with other manufacturers. No other smartphone vendors had share close to 10%. In the race to be top open OS manufacturer in 2012, Samsung has consistently increased its lead over Apple, and its open OS market share increased to one-and-a-half times that of Apple in 2Q12.

Apple's market share in open OS slid from 22.5% to 18.8% in 2Q12, with users postponing their upgrade decisions in most markets ahead of the upcoming launch of the iPhone 5. This is likely to be the biggest iPhone upgrade yet.

On the other hand, Samsung's brand strength and wide device portfolio has allowed it to take advantage of the high growth opportunities in emerging markets. Samsung's dominance is so strong in some markets that it is increasingly difficult for other manufacturers to make any move in the open OS market. For example, in India, Samsung's share has risen from 15% in 1Q11 to 49.8% in 2Q12, and with its current strategies, it may end 2012 with over 60% — exactly where Nokia was at the start of 2011. By swapping position with Nokia in just two years, and with a mammoth open OS market share, Samsung can make the market dance to its tune.

It’s worth noting that Samsung widened its share in all markets except North America.

As flagged by CEO Tim Cook in a recent conference call, Apple’s iPhone sales declined 12.6% from Q1—that’s a big blow, since 46% of Apple’s revenue comes from sales of the smartphone. But watch out for iPhone 5 coming in September or October:

The arrival of the iPhone 5 should provide the greatest upgrade opportunity yet as the expected new design with a larger screen and likely other stylistic changes to the form factor will certainly make a strong case for iPhone 4 users to upgrade. The lower sell-in number in 2Q12 might also signal that Apple may discontinue the 3GS model and could have already reduced supply. We could see Apple drive down the price of the iPhone 4 to free, the 4S to $99, and have the new iPhone priced the same as the current 4S model.

Of course no word from Apple about when the iPhone 5 might debut. What about you? Are you holding off on buying a new phone until iPhone 5 comes out? Is your company delaying purchases?