From speeds and feeds to per user per month IT in the public sector is changing in a big way.  The era of a single huge prime contractor is coming to an end.  Clients and suppliers have had 20 years of it, some good, some bad, some doubtlessly terrible.  I’m not sure, though, that either party is quite ready for the IT transformation that is coming.

Public sector bodies, both big and small, have been accustomed to year-long procurements, beating down the suppliers on price, seemingly never ending transition periods, costs in the tens and hundreds of millions per year. What do they have to show for it? PCs that take an hour to boot in the morning, downtime that is easier to measure than uptime and a desktop setup that they had at home more than 5 or even 10 years ago.

Now they’re going to be buying in a different way and expecting radically different results. Signs of this new approach are already evident. For instance, over 150 staff in the cabinet office , the very heart of government ,already uses macs, gmail and open office tools. Skeptics will say 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

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

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 September the Dutch government announced that US Cloud based providers were being excluded from all Dutch government contracts amid concerns around the US Patriot Act.  In essence the Patriot Act requires a US based company or its subsidiaries, irrespective of where they are located in the world, to comply with US law. This can mean disclosure of European data in the US without the consent of the data owner as any data which is housed, stored or processed by a US based company, or its wholly owned subsidiaries, is vulnerable to interception and inspection by US authorities. This is contrary to current privacy laws in Europe and many other countries.

There are growing concerns about the US approach to data privacy and the potential impact on European data.  These concerns started some years ago with traditional outsourcing agreements and the concept of European data residing in third party data centres outside the EU. Model Contracts are already required for any data processing by non-EU companies or affiliates and some countries insist Continue Reading

Lady Backup has taken a particular interest in manufacturing lately.  If you’ve been following my blogs, you know my childhood memories related to manufacturing . But I’m also keen on trends in the manufacturing industry because I think it’s an overlooked industry.  I hear often “There is no manufacturing in the UK.”  But then I read the business press and in fact manufacturing remains a key sector for the UK economy.

What I find so interesting is that the manufacturing industry is on the brink of a significant revolution – one fueled by IT transformation.  Traditionally manufacturers looked at process improvements as the key to their survival and perhaps even a competitive differentiation.   In this view, IT probably wasn’t all that improvement.  And reports generated give manufacturers a rear view mirror to what’s already happened.

Don’t get me wrong – process improvement is important.  But the next generation of manufacturer has the opportunity to go much farther with both IT and leveraging data.  Think about the masses of data collected by all of the various Continue Reading

In my first blog piece for Thoughtfeast, I wanted to point the way to some of the manufacturing issues that have caught my interest and shaken it around like a dog with a rabbit. I think these things are important and will have a massive effect on the way we manufacture, how we do business, the supply chain – pretty much the whole doughnut, and the hole in the middle. Here’s my two penn’orth (as we say in Lancashire) – I’d love to know what you think:

UK Manufacturing – The devastating recent floods in Thailand have exposed many of the risks and vulnerabilities of high volume offshore production, but they have also highlighted the forgotten (by some) advantages of UK production.  Are we about to see a renaissance in thinking about the benefits of keeping and instigating manufacturiung in the UK? I don’t buy the story that the UK doesn’t make anything anymore – this is lazy thinking. Look around at the amazing advances in biotech, production techniques, fabrication, composite materials. Perhaps we don’t make ships anymore – but look at what we do make. I am unashamed to be a massive cheerleader for UK manufacturing – I’ll be Continue Reading

Last week I was fortunate to be asked to take part in a panel discussion at the annual customer event of one of our partners. The discussions were less about what Cloud Computing is or how to build one and more about some of the challenges to be considered when looking to exploit Cloud services. I would categorise the questions in to the following three menu items:

- Can we really save money with Cloud? -
- If we use Public Cloud environments why do we have to worry about the migration to a new provider at the end of the term? Can’t we just rely on the contractual T’s and C’s?-
- How do we prevent proliferation of Cloud environments? -

So, can you really save money with a Cloud implementation?  

The answer is an unequivocal yes. It takes planning and careful analysis of the workloads you are thinking of delivering via Cloud as not all applications are suitable for Cloud deployment; but if you categorise your applications appropriately and don’t try to move everything, you can definitely save money. EMC’s own Cloud journey has saved over a hundred million dollars since we Continue Reading

OK, so I know that sounds like a strange title for an IT Transformation post but hopefully it caught your eye and I want to use it as an analogy to illustrate a scenario I encountered this week.

A customer couldn’t understand why they were suffering performance issues on some arrays and even some outages of key applications.  The EMC team were somewhat confused not only by the outages themselves but also by some of the statements the customers was making about provisioning being so labour intensive and moves of data taking ages and recovery being onerous. The automated tiering capability, thin provisioning and the virtualisation integration of the tools supplied to the customer should have meant that manual moves weren’t required. It was at this point that the bombshell came………. “oh we haven’t enabled any of that functionality as we haven’t tested it or seen the details of your algorithms so we can Continue Reading