Civil War in the Enterprise
“Information technology is no longer under the control of the IT organization,” says Tom Austin, Gartner Group analyst. In fact, Austin describes the relationship between uses and central IT as a “civil war.” That’s an unprecedented situation.
For perhaps the first time in the history of business and large enterprise computing, innovation is in the hands of the users, says Austin. “Control must be balanced with openness.” In fact, of the five chief mutually reinforcing trends now occurring in the world of enterprise applications and computing, all five push architectures in the direction of openness to extra-enterprise forces and change.
Those trends include open source, Web 2.0, software as a service (SaaS), “consumerization” of information technology and global class computing. You might note that three of the five trends deal specifically with software and capabilities accessed using a Web
front end.
That should come as no surprise in an era where workforces are more distributed and virtual; younger workers demand better work-life balance and Internet-based tools and experiences are so pervasive. At some level, there is the “Google-ification” of life: people just expect to find information immediately. The fact that traditional enterprise information is locked up is an impediment to getting work done.
Beyond that, there is a growing recognition that social networks, openness, sharing and user-generated content are effective ways to improve enterprise functioning.
Consider hosted versions of software that otherwise might have to be installed in an enterprise computing center. Buying software often is a capital expenditure exercise, with all that implies for time, approval and spending.
What providers are offering, and users are starting to buy, are applications available as a service for which the payment is a monthly or other recurring fee, not a purchase to own transaction. Quite often, that means no approval process by central IT and no wait for deployment. Rogue users then are users who go around central IT to gain access to applications they determine helpful to their work tasks.
In response, enterprise IT executives promulgate policies governing what SaaS applications can, and cannot, be used. But these rogue end users will circumvent the policies before the ink dries on the new policies, says Austin. “Software vendors are going around IT to gain adoption of their software,” Austin notes.
But there are clear advantages for the enterprise, Austin maintains. When an enterprise buys an application, the enterprise has responsibility for ensuring that the app works. When SaaS bought, the SaaS provider has the responsibility of making it work. Also, the cost of any trial usage is quite small.
| Web 2.0 Tools Used by Large Enterprises | ||
| Software Type | Software Providers | Corporate Adopters |
| Blog an individual’s online journal |
TypePad® Blogger (Google service) WordPress (free software) Movable Type® |
General Motors |
| Wiki users create and edit content |
MediaWiki |
Dresdner Kleinwort Microsoft Nokia SAP |
| RSS really simple syndication |
RSS feed reader |
Amazon Cisco The Wall Street Journal |
| Tagging use of keywords to track content |
ConnectBeam | HoneywellIBMSony-BMG |
| Social Networking use of the internet to build and maintain relationships | Humsubka Jhoom LinkedIn® Minglebox |
Cisco Dresdner Kleinwort Microsoft Nike Salary.com |
| Mashup Web site or Web application that combines content from more than one source |
Greasemonkey | Amazon Dun & Bradstreet E*TradeGoogle IBM JDS Uniphase Siemens Société Générale |
| Prediction Markets speculative markets created to improve forecasting | Google HP Microsoft Yahoo! |
|
| Source: KPMG | ||
That lowers enterprise barriers to trying new things. Communication, collaboration, content, learning, Web conferencing and team collaboration will be ripe for SaaS approaches, says Austin.
Global class computing is another huge potential change. Up to this point, enterprises have run their own data centers. But new options are emerging. Austin rhetorically asks whether the world only needs five computer services, whether those storage and computing networks are provided by Google, Amazon or others.
In 2010, Google alone will consume 30 percent of all the world’s servers, says Austin, commenting on the huge scale Google’s network will feature.
Enterprise scale might not be good enough in a world where work is so distributed. “Now you might need global class architectures” of the sort Google and others provide. “Maybe you don’t need to own your own compute resources,” Austin provocatively suggests.
The other unusual trend is the consumerization of computing. Gartner researchers say 43 percent of enterprise associates will use non-company equipment on company networks by 2008. But that’s almost incidental. The big change is that innovation in enterprise tools is coming from the consumer segments of the market.
The result is that computing is now “people” centered. Work time and personal time is blending, says Austin. So computing now has to be person-centered.
Consumers now spend more money on displays than enterprises or the military does, Austin notes. “The tail is wagging the dog.”
The consumer also is the driver of innovation around hardware and Web 2.0 applications, because talented developers are not much interested in working for enterprise software or hardware companies.
So Gartner analysts now recommend that enterprise IT managers be more permissive about letting users experiment with SaaS and other ways of doing things.
“Failure breeds success,” says Austin. “You have to let your users go; Let them experiment anywhere except on banned sites,” says Austin.
Then there is the matter of social software. “Messy, unstructured and informal is good for people, says Anthony Bradley, Gartner analyst. “You can’t engineer social processes in formal ways.”
Give people freedom and let people figure out how to do things so the best things emerge, Bradley suggests. “How much value is there in meeting at the water cooler?”
How do social interactions drive the way work gets done? There are invisible elements and visible structured elements to work, Bradley notes. So the idea is to use new social processes based on the Web that create a richer form of that environment.
That isn’t to say no authority structure is needed; it simply is to say that some sorts of tasks are best served by social mechanisms. When associates need to identify complementary skills very quickly; when enterprises need broad understanding of trends; when enterprises need to know what are people thinking; when enterprises need to ascertain facts and separate facts from opinion, social mechanisms can be quite helpful.
“The more intimate you are with your customers, the better you will be at recrafting and creating new services for them,” says Bradley. The issue for enterprises is that enterprise cultures do not inherently reward people for sharing. “That isn’t realistic,” says Bradley. “People want to hoard what their value is to their company.”
“Maximum innovation occurs at the edges,” says Mitchell Smith, Gartner analyst. That includes the Internet, mashups, consumer technologies and communities.” Consider the range of enterprise tools that came into the enterprise from the consumer world: PCs, GUIs, Internet, Windows 95, IM, SMS, mobile phones, PDAs, wireless, desktop search, home networking, rich media, P2P, VoIP, Skype, social networks, IP videoconferencing, podcasts, large displays, rich media, Web sites as platforms, Internet-based storage and 3D graphics.
“Control must be balanced with openness,” says Austin. Work and play boundaries are porous to the extent that by 2011 people will access their information, including enterprise email, from Gmail or other in-the-cloud mechanisms.
The Internet will provide storage and users will federate personal with enterprise resources. “The walled garden model of enterprise will go away,” says Austin.
That doesn’t mean all enterprise data and resources simply will be available to all users, all the time. “You have to control some users all of the time,” says Austin. Examples include nuclear power plant engineers and cashiers. Users can’t muck with the payroll system. But in many cases data access can be segmented by roles within the organization.
“What IT did was lock everything down with rigid standards, heavy architectures and over-engineered solutions,” says Austin. All that makes IT appear to be an inhibitor of change.
Fewer than five percent of enterprises lock down all computers, and most IT professionals tend to believe they should be locking down machines, says Austin. “But they realize they can’t recruit and retain good people if they do that.”
“The trend is that in the future, companies will be able to expose and combine business processes, enabling them to buy and sell each other’s core competencies,” says David Mitchell Smith, Gartner analyst.
As consumers increasingly shape enterprise computing, information and communicating strategies, one thing is quite clear, says Jack Barnett, Chief Architect for the Network Business Consulting, Alcatel-Lucent Professional Services: “Value is shifting from connectivity to personalized services.”
That doesn’t mean a direct, one-for-one correspondence between “consumer” tools and behavior, and enterprise tools and behavior. It does mean quality of experience now becomes a decisive factor in consumer—and hence enterprise—services and applications, says Chris Kapuscinski, Program Manager for Services Transformation, Alcatel-Lucent.
It remains true that enterprise executives value communications that increase productivity, improve efficiency and reduce cost. But that’s not what consumers value, and those values will translate over on in their work lives as well. Consumers want communications experiences that are personalized for their lifestyles.
And Web 2.0 is more important than many might think, argues Eric Burger, BEA Systems Deputy CTO, Where Web 1.0 was based on transaction, information sharing and dynamic content, Web 2.0 is based on high interaction, high amounts of user-directed presentation, user-integrated apps and user-generated applications, Burger says.
That’s where the personalization comes in. In a Web 2.0 application or experience, users often themselves create applications or the presentation of applications themselves, at each end user device.
In other words, enterprise services are going to shift in the direction of becoming more personalized and accessible. Accessible in the sense of retrieving some important types of enterprise information from consumer appliances, on non-company-owned devices and connections; personalized in the sense of making it really easy for any associate to create, retrieve, distribute and share information across more boundaries.
That, in turn, is going to require massive use of Web front ends and Web style programming architectures, argues Robert Beaumont, Director of Partner Management, jNetX Inc. The reason is that so many of the new applications will recreate and combine enterprise applications with Web apps and service provider capabilities.
Indeed it is hard to imagine how that can happen without some fluid ability to combine call control, call notification, presence, location, messaging, billing, support, order management and customer care on the one hand with third party capabilities living “outside” the enterprise or carrier environment.
That’s one reason why Microsoft has launched its Connected Services Framework, for example. It allows service providers to create manage and aggregate Web services across networks and devices.
To be sure, neither enterprise information technology managers nor telecom technology managers are likely to be completely comfortable with loosely-coupled services. But that’s simply the way the architectures are headed.
Of course, there are clear implications in all of this for service providers. Might Web applications marginalize some telco-provided applications. “Maybe,” says David Croslin, Chief Technologist of Communications, Media and Entertainment, Hewlett-Packard. Will Web 2.0 applications marginalize IP Multimedia Subsystem? “No,” says Croslin, so long as IMS is viewed as a session management infrastructure based on the Session Initiation Protocol.
And keep in mind that IMS is about streamlining overhead such as billing, provisioning and testing. IMS is not itself a service users can consume. It simply makes the creation process faster and easier.
Telcos fit into the broader applications space in some pretty straightforward ways, according to Richard Bensen, CGI lead enterprise architect. They “ensure high quality access, simplify access and mobility and can provide superior customer service,” for example. Furthermore, “telcos can aggregate services developed by third parties, provide robust content distribution and provide key communication services that are more robust than any Web application itself can provide,” adds Rene Sotola, CGI strategist. IP
