Rob Lamb

From my conversations with customers it is evident that CIO’s are continuing to strive to be at the heart of value creation. Generally speaking the top three goals for CIO’s in 2013 are: -

1. Protecting corporate data
2. Improving business productivity  – and giving business stakeholders transparency as to the cost of the IT services they are consuming
3. Lowering the cost to serve of IT services – and moving spend from CAPEX to OPEX

With Cloud Computing firmly ticking numbers two and three on the CIO “to do” list, is it just fear of failure around the first point that is preventing much wider cloud adoption than is currently occurring? Inevitably, as with all things “IT”, it isn’t quite that straight forward. Clearly, having confidence as to the protection afforded a corporations most precious asset (its data) is a potential barrier Continue Reading

There is a well known quote – originally from author Rita Mae Brown, but often incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.”

So given the notoriety of this quote, why do so many organisations choose to ignore it when it comes to their approach to IT technology and how they go about sourcing it? Time and time again I get asked to meet customers to talk about their “Transformation” or we receive Requests for Proposal (RFP’s) that focus solely on a technology refresh without consideration of  business outcomes . Their focus is all about the technology being cheaper and faster and not about business benefits; the closest thing they get to a business outcome is a desire for the technology to be “greener”. Often when exploring their desired outcomes I find they haven’t included the business in the process – either in the definition of success or the decision-making and don’t appreciate the value of doing so.

Continuing to just buy some technology and expect it to make a material difference to the company is exactly what I think Rita Mae Brown would have defined as insanity. Technology alone won’t transform an organisation. Process changes need to be made to reflect the benefits the technology can bring; the server build Continue Reading

In my last article I suggested that regulation of the financial sector should be looking beyond the balance sheets of organisations and ensuring that their IT is being run in line with good practice and that undue risk isn’t being taken. Clearly I am not the only one with this train of thought. Just days after that post we have Continue Reading

The financial services sector continues to be headline news for all the wrong reasons. We’ve had the banking crisis, government bailouts, rate fixing allegations and huge outages of IT systems impacting customers, some of which have rumbled on for days or even weeks.

While all this has been going on the regulators have been encouraging the banks to increase their capital holdings, while also increasing their lending to try and stimulate the economy. The Governor of the Bank of England went so far as to suggest organisations increase their capital holdings by not paying dividends Continue Reading

LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) have, not surprisingly, been the subject of increasing media coverage as the start of the London 2012 Olympics draws ever closer. Hidden amongst the news of security concerns, transport problems and allegations of over zealous protection of the Olympic brand was the headline “LOCOG CIO pans cloud!” Speaking at a BT press event this week Gerry Pennell, CIO for LOCOG, had apparently said that although the Olympic Games were likely to make greater use of cloud computing in the future, “it was certainly not Continue Reading

In the last two weeks of June two power interruptions in one of Amazon’s US data centres resulted in outages for some of its AWS customers. The internet and in particular Twitter were awash with people passing comment or, in the case of some of those affected, bemoaning the impact.  Post mortems followed – and discussions on the web continue. Some customers moved their services back Continue Reading

Last week I found myself doing some analysis around how I spend my time and established that I spend over 70% of my time on customer related topics – either direct customer meetings or preparing for them or doing follow ups based on the conversations. So, that was the good news, but the data also showed that I am not a prolific blogger – although I didn’t need to look at data to know that: My absence from the Thought Feast site since January says it all! So I apologise for that. I’d make a New Year’s Continue Reading

Back in December I posed the question “Is data nationalisation a challenge to Cloud?”. A number of European Union (EU) governments had reacted negatively to the US Patriot Act and were starting to insist that their data couldn’t be stored with any Cloud provider located in the US, or in the facilities of any provider owned by a US company. My view at the time was that it wasn’t an issue as long as companies considering moving to a Cloud delivery model approached the move in the right way and assessed the risks and the functionality, financial and trust requirements to determine which services are best served by a Cloud approach. My opinion hasn’t changed despite the publication this week of the EU’s new data privacy proposals to amend the 1995 Data Protection Directive. As expected, the new legislation is at odds in some areas with the US Patriot Act. The EU update includes the so-called “right to be forgotten”, allowing people to insist that their data is deleted once no longer required – while the US Act enables the US authorities to search telephone, email, and financial records without a court order and expects retention of data. The updated EU legislation doesn’t, in my opinion, create any problems for business embarking on a Cloud strategy as long as you undertake the sort of assessment of workloads I’ve recommended. In fact the new legislation could actually remove some of the challenges around data privacy that have previously existed in Europe.

While the new EU legislation has some tough clauses, such as Companies suffering data breaches only having 24 hours to tell the relevant authorities or risk legal action Continue Reading

Only 10 days into the New Year and this week I found myself talking to a customer about the challenge of Shadow IT spend within his company. We were broadly aligned around what Shadow IT is – namely people spending time, and money, obtaining and supporting IT services that the IT organisation doesn’t provide. I also add the caveat of “….that IT doesn’t provide quickly enough” to the description as it is often at the heart of the matter – more on this later. Where we had different opinions was around whether Shadow IT is a symptom of a wider problem or the cause of issues facing the IT team. The Customer’s view was that his IT folk were “spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with Shadow IT.” When pressed as to what he meant by “dealing with” he said, “Making it go away!”  He clearly felt that Shadow IT was the cause of some, if not all, of the challenges he is facing.

Understandable though it is I don’t agree with his opinion. I see Shadow IT as a symptom of the problem and of the need for IT organisations to transform. If IT isn’t meeting business needs then folk will find other ways of achieving their desired outcome. Businesses today are full of bright, tech savvy people who are used to getting access to IT quickly and easily – that is their experience in their personal consumption of IT and they expect the same at work. If someone tells them they can’t have it or it will take 6 months to deliver they won’t be satisfied with that and will use the power of the Internet and their corporate credit card Continue Reading

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