While doing my regular trawl of the computing media, research feeds and news articles this week I came across some seemingly contradictory headlines relating to how much impact Cloud Computing will have in the IT sector in 2012. The headlines included: -

G-Cloud adoption will be ‘mandatory’

Cloud has ‘no relevance’ say three-quarters of IT managers

Cloud computing is ‘picking up steam’

Cloud Computing is becoming a reality

An interesting, balanced, mix of headlines – a 50:50 split of positive and negative perspectives.

The first two headlines are the most interesting and highlight the organizational challenges associated with Cloud. The head of the UK governments G-Cloud initiative is taking an aggressive stance on Cloud adoption and is quoted as saying “We know some departments will have to be dragged kicking and screaming, and they probably will.” The second headline demonstrates that the reluctance to adopt Cloud isn’t constrained to the Public Sector. A survey conducted by risk consultancy Protiviti found only eight per cent of UK based companies are using cloud for one or two services, while just three per cent have adopted it more widely.  The apparent scepticism of the benefits of Cloud services isn’t just about data privacy (see my last post on data nationalisation) or security concerns, it is clear that some of the resistance is actually coming from within the IT organisation.

Now, it could be argued that resistance is perfectly understandable, some people see Cloud as akin to turkeys voting for Christmas, Continue Reading

At this time of year, cynics and sceptics pour scorn on Santa and his faithful reindeer, the prancers and dancers of this festive time.  The gauntlet is often laid down as follows.  Santa will visit all those children who want presents from him – in about one billion homes – which he has to visit on Christmas Eve. 

Thankfully, Fermilabs published the calculations some years ago and proved that Santa, travelling at close to the speed of light, would have no problems covering the ground, in 500 seconds, leaving a generous but fleeting 0.15 milliseconds per dwelling to wolf down some sherry and mince pies.  We are of course assuming there is just one Santa, but please note that in Iceland they have 13 Santa Clauses, sons of a horrible mountain hag called Grýla (we leave the re-calculation as an exercise for the reader!).

So what about data?  Let’s think not about boring networks and bandwidth, but something more fantastic: the whole of our digital universe.

The Guardian reported back in 2009 that “At 487bn gigabytes (GB), if the world’s rapidly Continue Reading

Data visualisation is all the rage at the moment, and the mobile device should be a natural haven for it. On mobile, users expect immediate access to their information – and the ability to understand and absorb it in an instant. In the Windows Phone 7 world they call this ‘glanceability’ – the Tiles UI is designed to render key data at a glance, while on the move, without disctraction.

Combine the need for glanceability with the rich, powerful UI mobile can now deliver and the high impact screens devices are shipping with, data visualisation should be a shoe-in for mobile delivery. Yet, most mobile apps and websites fall far short of this – offering little more than lists of data. Little instant access, poor glanceability, and few meaningful interpretations.

This is where visualisations can create real advantage, if done well. The hard part is doing it well.

Really, they shouldn’t be called ‘data visualisation’ at all. ‘Inference visualisation’ would be more accurate. The aim is to offer compelling, useful interpretations that can be read at a glance, by analysing and aggregating the raw data.

Your bank statement, for instance, provides data around your spending history. Simple raw facts. A visualisation shouldn’t just show you what you spent and when, that’s what the data itself does. Rather, should allow you to infer where you spend most of your money, or why you are nearly bankrupt this month, or when you should worry about a payrise, or when you can actually buy that new Imprezza.

And this is hard. Even most of the highly praised data visualisations in the wild don’t do this – they are often hard to interpret and frequently completely misleading. People may love them, but not because they are useful – rather, because they are pretty. Giving real meaning through visualisation means doing some hard work:

Understand what concerns the user actually has. This isn’t done by guesswork, it’s done by understanding the user.  Personas, interviews, research – the standard UCD approach – all drive this. It’s part of what we do.
Work out how to extract this meaning from the data available. This is the maths part. This needs knowledge of statistics, analysis and data interpretation. It may be a simple as an average, or a percentage – but combined with understanding of which is appropriate, and when. Knowing what data points are comparable, the difference between scalar and vector values, and so on. Maths can take you a long way.

Choose an easily interpretable representation. In the wild, the pie chart is the answer to everything. Everyone loves a pie chart. But they are notoriously hard to interpret, and frequently misleading.The problem here is most popular visualisations are actually hard to read – and ones which are readable, frequently dull. This is the time for some imagination.  Try new vehicles, new shapes. Also teach the users – any visualisations may be hard to read at first. Extra contextual information can help.

All this, using the power of the small screen, can greatly increase communicability of a mobile app.  It’s time to drop the data, and start to visualise.

Adam Sherwin, writing in The Independent (7^th December 2011), posed the question “The Death Of Email?” regarding the decision of Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, to phase out the use of email within Atos, and to replace it with instant messaging (IM), a corporate Wiki, and other social media tools.  I doubt that anyone will mourn the demise of email.  He is not the first to see email as a scourge.  Bob Geldof, back in 2005, said that the ‘doing’ part of the job was proportionate to the number of emails you don’t answer!

We all experience the tendency of some colleagues to say “sorry for the wide distribution”, which is often followed by a reply-all, “take me off this distribution”, or even more bizarrely, a reply-all that commands “STOP replying to all!”, which then Continue Reading

What is the biggest IT challenge facing businesses today? 

Is it the continual flux in the IT market, and the future of Microsoft?  Is it the move to On Demand and how this will create tectonic shifts in IT organisations? What about the increasing virtualisation and distribution of business and the threats and opportunities this creates for changing business processes?

These are all big questions, but for me, as I look at what happens when business and IT get together to try to develop a strategy for IT in business, the biggest single issue that is faced in every sector, in every market and for organisations be they large or small, is the sheer disconnect Continue Reading

I’ve previously spoken about Converged Infrastructure and its readiness for hosting business critical systems which were previously the domain of Mainframe and Open Systems (UNIX), I’ve also spoken about Cloud Reference Architectures and how these can ease the adoption of Cloud Computing within your organisation. In this article I want to talk a little about deciding which workloads or applications can easily be migrated to Cloud Architectures, based on Converged Infrastructures, and why this will benefit your organisation.

Many IT departments are struggling to deliver increased benefits to their businesses whilst reducing their budgets and maintaining or improving service. I see this everyday when talking to senior IT leaders in both the UK and wider EMEA countries. Everybody is struggling and given the current economic climate, this really isn’t surprising.

Migrating UNIX to Linux in the Cloud…

One of the strategies I advocate and I’m happy to say one which is being adopted by organisations both small and large from all sectors is the migration of expensive proprietary UNIX systems to cost-effective x86 (Intel) based Continue Reading

In my last posting, I talked about our propensity for keeping all electronic data; commonly referred to as ESI or Electronically Stored Information.  I also talked about having to change our habits that we cannot go on this way forever and ever as there is too much data being created.  Ok, fine.  What do we do about it and why should we?  We have great technology today that virtualizes, shrinks, and de-dups data.  Lady Backup talks a great game in convincing everyone that they need a great backup strategy and talks about very, very impressive technology to achieve this.  And yes, we do all need a good backup strategy.  However, the story as told, still is, “go ahead, keep everything.”  No.  We need a different story.  The amount of data growth is outpacing the rate at which the cost of hardware and technology is reduced each year.  It is also outpacing the rate at which we can use clever technology to reduce the net data size and foot print within the data centre and the environment.  Again I reference Lady Backup and one of her postings as an example of the latter: Google consumed the same amount of power as 200,000 American homes last year to support their data centres.

Ok, not every company is a Google undoubtedly.  However, virtually all organisations are faced with similar challenges.  Organisations cannot continue to throw hardware at this data problem.  They need to throw Continue Reading