This is hilarious or sad, whichever way you look at it. Eyeing the Twitter feed last night, I saw someone had tweeted a question about whether carriers were going to be moving to VaaS – ‘Voice as a Service’. When I asked if this was a joke, the reply was that a couple of telcos in the US were already starting to use this language – so apparently not – which begs the question of what the hell they think they have been delivering to the world for the last few decades.
Seriously, I can only imagine that some bright spark creative marketeers came up with the idea of repositioning hosted PBX and VoIP offerings using trendy new cloud speak. This reminds me of an IBMer trying to convince me a few months ago that some of the traditional Citrix installations they had done for customers were proof of ‘Desktop as a Service’ in action, and Steve Ballmer repositioning Microsoft’s desktop and mobile business lines as now being about intelligent devices to access the cloud, because the cloud, apparently, is now the centre of everything.
Is it just me that thinks this is all totally unhelpful nonsense?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
Business productivity: Talking a more holistic view
The word ‘productivity’ comes up a lot when IT vendors and service providers talk about what they are trying to do for their customers. Whether it’s mobile communications, search technology, the latest version of desktop office tools, or whatever, it is common to hear claims of productivity boosts.
When used in a lot of trendier contexts, the notion of productivity is usually associated with getting more out your workforce, and it often goes together with the whole ‘empowerment’ theme. Looked at from an IT perspective, the focus here is ‘user productivity’, and given the amount of time we all waste wrestling with, let’s just say, ‘suboptimal solutions’, any help in this area is gratefully received.
The problem with user productivity, however, is that it is notoriously hard to assess or measure. A lot of it boils down to trying to figure out how much unproductive time can be ‘reclaimed’ through the use of the latest ideas and offerings, which is OK, but can be a challenge to work into a business case for investment.
Against this background, I have had some interesting conversations with both IBM and Microsoft recently which ended up with us taking a broader view of productivity when trying to put some of their latest marketing activities into perspective. With IBM, I was trying to get my brain around what ‘Smart Work’ (part of the ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative) actually boiled down to in terms of tangible ideas or propositions that could be acted upon. With Microsoft, the challenge was making sense of what’s behind the message: “Because it’s everybody’s business”, which seemed to be getting at productivity in one way or another.
As an aside, I have to say that vendors don’t make it easy for people to figure out what the hell they are going on about when they wrap everything up in what can appear to be abstract and arbitrary concepts. I’m sure a lot this stuff originally made sense in those ‘messaging workshops’ while the flip chart pages with inspiring phrases were being stuck around the walls, but by the time it has all been pulled together into slick looking PowerPoint decks and creative advertising campaigns, the meaning is often as clear as mud to the rest of us.
Anyway, back to the plot. While trying to unpick some of the marketing concepts, it occurred to me that a lot of what the abovementioned vendors and others seem to be driving at is the value of thinking a bit more holistically about things like productivity. Now it could be argued that a lot of us running businesses have always thought in that way, and it’s only when analysts and vendors get stuck in product/technology category ruts that we end up with fragmented and disjointed thinking. However, there is some value in introducing a bit of structure and precision here so we can achieve some clarity on how traditional categories and domains map onto the holistic view.
When Jon Collins and I went through this, we ended up with the following points and principles:
1. Productivity is a function of efficiency and effectiveness. A key notion here is that boosting output is as much about focusing on the right activities as it is about generally reducing overheads and costs.
2. The thing that really matters at the end of the day is business productivity, which is not just about the user level, but how well everything works at the next level up – organisation structures, processes, policies, practices, etc. This is basically about having the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right way.
3. An important principle when looking to improve productivity is visibility and understanding. This might sound obvious, but the point is that it’s not just about whoever is responsible for managing some aspect of business performance being able to see what’s going on, it’s also about making sure users understand the context of their activities and how their individual performance impacts in the greater scheme of things.
On this last point, we are mostly talking about business professionals rather than task workers, though some argue that there are benefits in making the latter more aware of how their jobs relate to the bigger picture.
Circling back to technology, it is clear that if you take this more holistic business productivity view, you need to coordinate your activities across a number of disciplines. The role of desktop and mobile computing doesn’t need much explaining, nor does the potential contribution of collaboration and unified communication solutions. But then we have things like Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow to deal with the over-arching process view, and Business Intelligence (BI), both at a macro and personal level, which is often the key to working out what the right things are to do in the first place to drive that effectiveness dimension.
Of course you could take the cynical view that this all nets out to the question of what you need in place to run an efficient and effective business, which in itself is not particularly original. As IT vendors think more in this manner, however, no matter how they dress it up and obscure it with marketing speak, there is a greater chance that they will actually make sure what they deliver works together a bit more effectively, which is something to be welcomed and encouraged.
When used in a lot of trendier contexts, the notion of productivity is usually associated with getting more out your workforce, and it often goes together with the whole ‘empowerment’ theme. Looked at from an IT perspective, the focus here is ‘user productivity’, and given the amount of time we all waste wrestling with, let’s just say, ‘suboptimal solutions’, any help in this area is gratefully received.
The problem with user productivity, however, is that it is notoriously hard to assess or measure. A lot of it boils down to trying to figure out how much unproductive time can be ‘reclaimed’ through the use of the latest ideas and offerings, which is OK, but can be a challenge to work into a business case for investment.
Against this background, I have had some interesting conversations with both IBM and Microsoft recently which ended up with us taking a broader view of productivity when trying to put some of their latest marketing activities into perspective. With IBM, I was trying to get my brain around what ‘Smart Work’ (part of the ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative) actually boiled down to in terms of tangible ideas or propositions that could be acted upon. With Microsoft, the challenge was making sense of what’s behind the message: “Because it’s everybody’s business”, which seemed to be getting at productivity in one way or another.
As an aside, I have to say that vendors don’t make it easy for people to figure out what the hell they are going on about when they wrap everything up in what can appear to be abstract and arbitrary concepts. I’m sure a lot this stuff originally made sense in those ‘messaging workshops’ while the flip chart pages with inspiring phrases were being stuck around the walls, but by the time it has all been pulled together into slick looking PowerPoint decks and creative advertising campaigns, the meaning is often as clear as mud to the rest of us.
Anyway, back to the plot. While trying to unpick some of the marketing concepts, it occurred to me that a lot of what the abovementioned vendors and others seem to be driving at is the value of thinking a bit more holistically about things like productivity. Now it could be argued that a lot of us running businesses have always thought in that way, and it’s only when analysts and vendors get stuck in product/technology category ruts that we end up with fragmented and disjointed thinking. However, there is some value in introducing a bit of structure and precision here so we can achieve some clarity on how traditional categories and domains map onto the holistic view.
When Jon Collins and I went through this, we ended up with the following points and principles:
1. Productivity is a function of efficiency and effectiveness. A key notion here is that boosting output is as much about focusing on the right activities as it is about generally reducing overheads and costs.
2. The thing that really matters at the end of the day is business productivity, which is not just about the user level, but how well everything works at the next level up – organisation structures, processes, policies, practices, etc. This is basically about having the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right way.
3. An important principle when looking to improve productivity is visibility and understanding. This might sound obvious, but the point is that it’s not just about whoever is responsible for managing some aspect of business performance being able to see what’s going on, it’s also about making sure users understand the context of their activities and how their individual performance impacts in the greater scheme of things.
On this last point, we are mostly talking about business professionals rather than task workers, though some argue that there are benefits in making the latter more aware of how their jobs relate to the bigger picture.
Circling back to technology, it is clear that if you take this more holistic business productivity view, you need to coordinate your activities across a number of disciplines. The role of desktop and mobile computing doesn’t need much explaining, nor does the potential contribution of collaboration and unified communication solutions. But then we have things like Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow to deal with the over-arching process view, and Business Intelligence (BI), both at a macro and personal level, which is often the key to working out what the right things are to do in the first place to drive that effectiveness dimension.
Of course you could take the cynical view that this all nets out to the question of what you need in place to run an efficient and effective business, which in itself is not particularly original. As IT vendors think more in this manner, however, no matter how they dress it up and obscure it with marketing speak, there is a greater chance that they will actually make sure what they deliver works together a bit more effectively, which is something to be welcomed and encouraged.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
IT trends: Don’t get distracted by the spaniel
For better or for worse, we are the owners of a mad Welsh Springer spaniel called Charlie. Buried in there somewhere is a set of gun dog genes reflecting the fact that breeds such as this were designed to sniff out and retrieve game that had been shot down by their owners. All a bit dubious in terms of history, and quite irrelevant in the context of a family pet like ours, apart from the upshot that Welsh Springers are inherently working dogs and need a lot of walking and a regular opportunity to exercise their well developed sense of smell.
The best places to walk a spaniel are where there’s lots of open space and a lot of interesting tracks to sniff out and follow; the forest close to where we live, for example, is ideal. When you go walking in places such as this, it can be quite entertaining to watch Charlie trotting around you with his nose less than an inch in from the ground. When he picks up a scent, it’s just like he’s on a mission, and all of his actions become very intense and purposeful. Every now and again, though, he’ll pick up another scent that he finds more interesting, and there’ll be a sudden change of direction as he follows that instead.
As you are walking, the net effect of all this is basically Charlie rushing around you, sometimes off to the left, then cutting across your path to your right, and so on, but generally moving along the route at the same overall pace as you. I’ve never tried to measure it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if on a 5 mile walk, the actual distance covered by Charlie as he constantly and passionately pursues his various ‘missions’ wasn’t 20 miles or more.
So what’s all this got to do with IT progress and trends?
Well it occurred to me the other day when I was out walking Charlie that we see a lot of similar behaviour in the IT industry. Vendors and pundits tend to latch onto tracks or missions that they pursue intensely and purposefully for a while, almost as if the entire future of the industry and their customers depended on it. Then they come across something more interesting and they’re off in a different direction pursuing a different mission.
A lot of vendors in the software space, for example, latched onto business service management (BSM) as the mission a few years ago, and off they went declaring the need to focus not on IT per se, but on the services delivered by the IT organisation to the business. Then there was a switch in emphasis, and the mission became centred around service oriented architecture (SOA) as a way of achieving ‘IT Business Alignment’. Indeed some declared SOA to represent a ‘paradigm shift’ in terms of the way we think about IT, what it’s for, and how to do it. Now the chasing of the SOA ideal has been dropped and there’s a whole new mission around cloud computing, on the premise that we now have another ‘paradigm shift’ which is going to redefine the way we think about IT delivery yet again by separating the ‘what’ of service delivery from the ‘how’.
This kind of behaviour is all very Charlie like, and the illusion of purpose and progress is reinforced because so many industry analysts, journalists and pundits make a living out of tracking the metaphorical spaniel, and only pay scant attention to the actual progress of the walk.
Meanwhile, just like the person in the dog walking analogy, those in mainstream IT organisations are making steady progress along their route. Some, on occasions, have tried to follow the spaniel, and ended up knee deep in mud or tangled up in thorn bushes; the companies that tried to implement strategic SOA initiatives to ‘transform’ the way they work spring to mind here. Most, however, recognise the grand industry ‘imperatives’ as the spaniel missions they are, and stay focused on making steady progress along a more measured and sensible path.
In the IT industry ‘missions’ I have referred to above, for example, there is a common theme around service centricity, the basic idea being to regard IT as the means to an end rather than an end in itself. Implicit in this is the notion that there can often be many different ways of delivering the same capability or service to business users, with a different set of pros and cons associated with each. The trick is therefore to focus on services and service quality delivered as the pivot point for IT investment prioritisation and decision making.
This idea of service centricity has been gradually increasing in momentum among mainstream IT organisations as a natural part of evolving the role of IT within the business. Along the way, a lot of the spirit and principles that underpin some of the spaniel missions like BSM, SOA and cloud computing have been embraced. But, and here’s the important difference, if you are running an IT shop in the real world, while you obviously want to take new and enhanced ideas on board, you need to do so selectively and in the context of the complex existing environment you are working in, bearing in mind everything else that’s going on in terms of priorities, commitments, constraints and so on. To put it another way, IT leaders and others involved in IT delivery cannot afford the kind of single track obsessive behaviour that is so often advocated by many in the supplier and analyst community.
Thankfully, in most cases, the spaniel mission approach within the industry is recognised for what it is – interesting to watch, but distracting and potentially dangerous to follow. In line with this, people are also wising up to the tricks and spin often employed to create the impression of momentum around spaniel missions by re-classifying historical activity. I have had, for example, classic Citrix deployments with exactly the same architecture put to me over the years as evidence of thin client computing, server-based computing, desktop virtualisation and, most recently, desktop cloud computing. It’s surprising how often you find a lot of old familiar stuff underneath when you scratch the surface of customer stories put forward to substantiate the latest ‘developments’ and ‘imperatives’.
Those of you familiar with the work of Freeform Dynamics will know that unlike most other analyst firms, we track the walk and advise the walker, and don’t confuse the activity of the spaniel rushing around it with meaningful progress.
Not sure if this analogy works for you, but the general principle of evaluating the relevance of industry propositions to your own objectives and activity is the key message here. It’s your progress that matters, not trying to keep up with every supposed trend that emerges at industry level.
The best places to walk a spaniel are where there’s lots of open space and a lot of interesting tracks to sniff out and follow; the forest close to where we live, for example, is ideal. When you go walking in places such as this, it can be quite entertaining to watch Charlie trotting around you with his nose less than an inch in from the ground. When he picks up a scent, it’s just like he’s on a mission, and all of his actions become very intense and purposeful. Every now and again, though, he’ll pick up another scent that he finds more interesting, and there’ll be a sudden change of direction as he follows that instead.
As you are walking, the net effect of all this is basically Charlie rushing around you, sometimes off to the left, then cutting across your path to your right, and so on, but generally moving along the route at the same overall pace as you. I’ve never tried to measure it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if on a 5 mile walk, the actual distance covered by Charlie as he constantly and passionately pursues his various ‘missions’ wasn’t 20 miles or more.
So what’s all this got to do with IT progress and trends?
Well it occurred to me the other day when I was out walking Charlie that we see a lot of similar behaviour in the IT industry. Vendors and pundits tend to latch onto tracks or missions that they pursue intensely and purposefully for a while, almost as if the entire future of the industry and their customers depended on it. Then they come across something more interesting and they’re off in a different direction pursuing a different mission.
A lot of vendors in the software space, for example, latched onto business service management (BSM) as the mission a few years ago, and off they went declaring the need to focus not on IT per se, but on the services delivered by the IT organisation to the business. Then there was a switch in emphasis, and the mission became centred around service oriented architecture (SOA) as a way of achieving ‘IT Business Alignment’. Indeed some declared SOA to represent a ‘paradigm shift’ in terms of the way we think about IT, what it’s for, and how to do it. Now the chasing of the SOA ideal has been dropped and there’s a whole new mission around cloud computing, on the premise that we now have another ‘paradigm shift’ which is going to redefine the way we think about IT delivery yet again by separating the ‘what’ of service delivery from the ‘how’.
This kind of behaviour is all very Charlie like, and the illusion of purpose and progress is reinforced because so many industry analysts, journalists and pundits make a living out of tracking the metaphorical spaniel, and only pay scant attention to the actual progress of the walk.
Meanwhile, just like the person in the dog walking analogy, those in mainstream IT organisations are making steady progress along their route. Some, on occasions, have tried to follow the spaniel, and ended up knee deep in mud or tangled up in thorn bushes; the companies that tried to implement strategic SOA initiatives to ‘transform’ the way they work spring to mind here. Most, however, recognise the grand industry ‘imperatives’ as the spaniel missions they are, and stay focused on making steady progress along a more measured and sensible path.
In the IT industry ‘missions’ I have referred to above, for example, there is a common theme around service centricity, the basic idea being to regard IT as the means to an end rather than an end in itself. Implicit in this is the notion that there can often be many different ways of delivering the same capability or service to business users, with a different set of pros and cons associated with each. The trick is therefore to focus on services and service quality delivered as the pivot point for IT investment prioritisation and decision making.
This idea of service centricity has been gradually increasing in momentum among mainstream IT organisations as a natural part of evolving the role of IT within the business. Along the way, a lot of the spirit and principles that underpin some of the spaniel missions like BSM, SOA and cloud computing have been embraced. But, and here’s the important difference, if you are running an IT shop in the real world, while you obviously want to take new and enhanced ideas on board, you need to do so selectively and in the context of the complex existing environment you are working in, bearing in mind everything else that’s going on in terms of priorities, commitments, constraints and so on. To put it another way, IT leaders and others involved in IT delivery cannot afford the kind of single track obsessive behaviour that is so often advocated by many in the supplier and analyst community.
Thankfully, in most cases, the spaniel mission approach within the industry is recognised for what it is – interesting to watch, but distracting and potentially dangerous to follow. In line with this, people are also wising up to the tricks and spin often employed to create the impression of momentum around spaniel missions by re-classifying historical activity. I have had, for example, classic Citrix deployments with exactly the same architecture put to me over the years as evidence of thin client computing, server-based computing, desktop virtualisation and, most recently, desktop cloud computing. It’s surprising how often you find a lot of old familiar stuff underneath when you scratch the surface of customer stories put forward to substantiate the latest ‘developments’ and ‘imperatives’.
Those of you familiar with the work of Freeform Dynamics will know that unlike most other analyst firms, we track the walk and advise the walker, and don’t confuse the activity of the spaniel rushing around it with meaningful progress.
Not sure if this analogy works for you, but the general principle of evaluating the relevance of industry propositions to your own objectives and activity is the key message here. It’s your progress that matters, not trying to keep up with every supposed trend that emerges at industry level.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Another annoying cloud briefing
I just sat through another cloud consulting services briefing from a major IT vendor. Some of it was under NDA so can’t talk about specifics, but that’s not really relevant to the point that has prompted me to write this.
I guess my big problem is that I have spent the last ten years as an analyst looking at different disciplines and domains across the IT industry, from virtualisation and service oriented architecture (SOA) at the architectural level, through the evolution of provisioning, monitoring and management capability in operations, to Business Service Management (BSM), Business Process Management (BPM) and IT governance at the business delivery end of things. Along the way, I have investigated the relevance of hosted services and other forms of outsourcing in various contexts, and spoken to lots of really bright people from CIOs, through architects, to software engineers and operations specialists, about the interplay between all these things.
Then I hear people talking about the cloud revolution and how it changes everything. I listen to evangelist presentations talking about how [insert vendor/consulting firm name] is going to help customers navigate through this brand new world of possibilities and imperatives. And when you get to the actual detail of what they are talking about, it’s the same virtualisation, provisioning, management, SOA, BSM, BPM and hosting stuff that has been steadily evolving and maturing over the past decade, just talked about under this new ‘cloud strategy’ umbrella. And that’s the best case scenario, from big incumbent vendors and consulting firms who know that piling into enterprise customers with crackpot messages about the whole of their operations moving into the cloud (i.e. someone else’s data centre) is probably not going to be taken that seriously.
Against this background, I really wonder what CIOs, architects and those running data centres out there think of these pitches. Do they just see them for what I think they are (unless I am missing something), as a repackaging of selected elements of IT strategy consulting services? When we got down to the brass tacks slide in today’s presentation, for example, there was nothing on it as a discipline or technology domain that was less than five years old. And talking about it all as cloud doesn’t change the conversation about making it all work together effectively – we figured out a long time ago that if you start with BSM and IT governance and work backwards, you end up embracing all of the aforementioned stuff anyway.
But the evangelists and marketeers come back and point out that the game really has changed. It’s a new philosophy of computing, and IT departments need to run themselves as service providers, etc. But again, while this discussion about styles of IT service delivery might be new to some, it certainly isn’t to anyone who has moved in senior IT and business management circles, and even if cloud brings that discussion to a broader audience (which would be a good thing of it didn’t get so garbled and/or dumbed down), surely claiming that it’s all new and revolutionary risks running into a credibility problem when most of the detail looks all so familiar.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think there have been some great developments in all the areas I mentioned that have been incrementally adding capability to help build more flexible, dynamic and open systems, and break down some of the cross boundary constraints, but all that has been happening anyway over the past 10-15 years. Within this, there have been some specific developments around self service provisioning, metering and billing that support attributes often associated with the cloud bandwagon such as elasticity and pay as you go business models, but that’s only relevant in certain scenarios, and all of the other important stuff to just make IT better and easier is being overshadowed by this.
So let’s keep some perspective guys, and stop confusing the hell out of everyone by pretending it’s all new. The argument that there have been a lot of developments over the past few years means you might benefit from some strategic consulting is fair enough, but trying to sell a service on the premise that customers need to put together a ‘cloud roadmap’ or some other such blinkered and contrived nonsense – come on.
Footnote:
Comment from Jon Collins when reviewing the above: "I think some vendors are being taken by surprise by the fact that Cloud just equates to IT done right. It's a bit like the kid who runs into the bar having just found something out that’s very exciting, only to find everyone in the bar not only already knew it, but also knew it wasn’t that exciting after all. I wonder if, when the dust settles, whether the CIOs and IT managers might well be the guys in the bar, and [the vendor], the kid."
I guess my big problem is that I have spent the last ten years as an analyst looking at different disciplines and domains across the IT industry, from virtualisation and service oriented architecture (SOA) at the architectural level, through the evolution of provisioning, monitoring and management capability in operations, to Business Service Management (BSM), Business Process Management (BPM) and IT governance at the business delivery end of things. Along the way, I have investigated the relevance of hosted services and other forms of outsourcing in various contexts, and spoken to lots of really bright people from CIOs, through architects, to software engineers and operations specialists, about the interplay between all these things.
Then I hear people talking about the cloud revolution and how it changes everything. I listen to evangelist presentations talking about how [insert vendor/consulting firm name] is going to help customers navigate through this brand new world of possibilities and imperatives. And when you get to the actual detail of what they are talking about, it’s the same virtualisation, provisioning, management, SOA, BSM, BPM and hosting stuff that has been steadily evolving and maturing over the past decade, just talked about under this new ‘cloud strategy’ umbrella. And that’s the best case scenario, from big incumbent vendors and consulting firms who know that piling into enterprise customers with crackpot messages about the whole of their operations moving into the cloud (i.e. someone else’s data centre) is probably not going to be taken that seriously.
Against this background, I really wonder what CIOs, architects and those running data centres out there think of these pitches. Do they just see them for what I think they are (unless I am missing something), as a repackaging of selected elements of IT strategy consulting services? When we got down to the brass tacks slide in today’s presentation, for example, there was nothing on it as a discipline or technology domain that was less than five years old. And talking about it all as cloud doesn’t change the conversation about making it all work together effectively – we figured out a long time ago that if you start with BSM and IT governance and work backwards, you end up embracing all of the aforementioned stuff anyway.
But the evangelists and marketeers come back and point out that the game really has changed. It’s a new philosophy of computing, and IT departments need to run themselves as service providers, etc. But again, while this discussion about styles of IT service delivery might be new to some, it certainly isn’t to anyone who has moved in senior IT and business management circles, and even if cloud brings that discussion to a broader audience (which would be a good thing of it didn’t get so garbled and/or dumbed down), surely claiming that it’s all new and revolutionary risks running into a credibility problem when most of the detail looks all so familiar.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think there have been some great developments in all the areas I mentioned that have been incrementally adding capability to help build more flexible, dynamic and open systems, and break down some of the cross boundary constraints, but all that has been happening anyway over the past 10-15 years. Within this, there have been some specific developments around self service provisioning, metering and billing that support attributes often associated with the cloud bandwagon such as elasticity and pay as you go business models, but that’s only relevant in certain scenarios, and all of the other important stuff to just make IT better and easier is being overshadowed by this.
So let’s keep some perspective guys, and stop confusing the hell out of everyone by pretending it’s all new. The argument that there have been a lot of developments over the past few years means you might benefit from some strategic consulting is fair enough, but trying to sell a service on the premise that customers need to put together a ‘cloud roadmap’ or some other such blinkered and contrived nonsense – come on.
Footnote:
Comment from Jon Collins when reviewing the above: "I think some vendors are being taken by surprise by the fact that Cloud just equates to IT done right. It's a bit like the kid who runs into the bar having just found something out that’s very exciting, only to find everyone in the bar not only already knew it, but also knew it wasn’t that exciting after all. I wonder if, when the dust settles, whether the CIOs and IT managers might well be the guys in the bar, and [the vendor], the kid."
Saturday, January 30, 2010
ROI in context
Avoiding analysis paralysis and delusion
The consideration of Return on Investment (ROI) understandably increased during the downturn. In line with this, IT vendors have spent a lot more time talking about it and some even provide financial models to help customers assess it. While all this seems eminently sensible, however, we must be careful not to get too carried away, as coming up with valid and meaningful ROI cases is more difficult than many people acknowledge.
The usual interpretation of ROI revolves around time and money. One way of thinking about it is to consider the amount you will ultimately get back by investing a certain amount now. If you spend £20,000 on an IT system, for example, you might calculate that it will return £60,000 worth of benefit over its anticipated 10 year lifetime in the form of cost savings and/or increased revenue performance.
The first and most obvious problem with this approach is that the majority of organisations don’t have a good enough handle on the current costs and the current contribution of existing systems to feed accurate and precise information into the calculations. Assumptions and estimations therefore need to be made which are difficult to verify. The result is often an unknown level of error in the calculations, but more significant is that the process is open to manipulation to support any pre-existing agenda. Nudge a couple of assumptions in one direction and the investment case can be made; nudge them the other way and the proposal is canned.
The other big problem with basing assessments on the ultimate return is that a lot can happen over the lifetime of an investment. This is especially true of IT systems, as today’s leading edge technology providing competitive advantage or operational efficiency is tomorrow’s legacy holding the business back and sucking in excessive resource to keep it running. The inevitable changing of both the business and IT landscapes over time can render initial assumptions invalid and even core functionality less relevant or appropriate.
One way of tightening things up is to consider a shorter period. You may judge the context and environment to be relatively predictable over the medium term, for example, and therefore look to calculate a return over, say, a three year period. The other common approach is to look at payback time or time to ‘break even’. This is based on considering how long it will be before the amount of money spent is recouped in either cost savings or enabled improvements in revenue/profit generation. Of course both of these approaches, or any combination of measures you choose to use, are still open to manipulation, but assuming the right spirit, discipline and motivation, the impact of inaccuracies in your assumptions and estimations is less if a shorter period is being considered.
Having said all this, though, we still need to be realistic and appreciate the limitations of ROI assessments in the real world. While the creation of comprehensive ROI cases using elaborate models and complex spreadsheets can look very scientific and create the impression of precision and accuracy, the reality is often different. At best, an ROI model is a decision making aid that helps you to lock down as many of the known variables as possible in a structured manner, but it still requires good business sense and value judgements to work around the inevitable gaps, e.g. using ‘what if?’ style analysis. At worst, an ROI model can be a political tool used to create the illusion of rigour, and designed to precipitate a predefined outcome on the basis that no one is likely to come back down the line and check the numbers anyway.
Even if you approach ROI responsibly, however, it is important not to let it get in the way of doing the right thing in some circumstances. Back in the 90’s, for example, the justification for a lot of investment in ERP was simply to prevent business operations from collapsing. With so many organisations reliant on a fragile patchwork of highly customised point solutions, and/or considering the uncertainty of Y2K, they had little choice but to invest. What were they going to do if your financial ROI calculations came out unfavourably, just leave things as they were and wait for the inevitable catastrophe? That’s a bit like taking time out to calculate the cost justification for fixing faulty brakes on your car then questioning the result. Sometimes you just have to spend money to manage risks and keep things viable, and what you need to spend that money on is pretty obvious.
But some go too far the other way, and always just spend money on the obvious. If you are running out of disk space in your IT infrastructure then the obvious thing to do is buy more storage, right? Well not necessarily. You might find that investment in better information management software and/or storage virtualisation means you can free up space through safe deletion, archiving, etc, and make use of orphaned storage that was previously unutilised. Solving the immediate problem in this way might cost more initially, but has a much better payback over time, through cost savings on hardware, reduced administrative overhead, and the freeing up of information so it can be properly exploited for business benefit.
If you look across IT, there are lots of examples like this where the first decision to make is not which product or service to buy, but which approach to take to solving the problem, which brings us back to the question of RIO, and specifically the precision of ROI analyses. While the concept of return in investment in a generic sense is critical to understanding the significance of going down one route or another, because the impact of alternative approaches can be very different, you often don’t need a meticulous detailed analysis to tell you what you need to know. The above storage example is a good indication of this as, for instance, would be considering whether to implement a like for like replacement of an aging telephony system or an IP based alternative that opens the door to full unified communications.
Rough cut analysis is often adequate for this kind of direction setting and as a tip, rather than trying to express all elements of business value in strict monetary equivalents, and use arbitrary assumptions to do this, it is sometimes more meaningful to use more qualitative scoring, rating and ranking mechanisms. Taking our unified communications example, trying to put a monetary value on the benefit of streamlined communications, which in turn (amongst other things) enables more informed and efficient day to day decision making, is actually very hard. One clinched deal or avoided disaster as a result of key people being able to collaborate quickly and effectively and the investment may have paid for itself through a single event, but that is incredibly difficult to predict. What you can do, however, is rate different options as having a high, medium or low impact on operational or commercial decision making efficiency and effectiveness, which might be relatively crude, but at least good enough to give you a steer.
Downstream from this, once you have decided on an approach and are simply considering which product or service to buy, another trick is to focus on the cost element. While you might not have all of the metrics and data necessary for a robust financial ROI calculation, you might have enough for a reasonably accurate assessment of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the solutions being considered. Assuming they are functionally equivalent, this might be an appropriate measure to decide between one product and another.
In conclusion, while assessing the return on significant investments is clearly a part of running IT in a business-like manner, it is important not to be a slave to detailed financial modelling. Good decision making is enabled by the right amount of analysis, conducted at the right level, based on appropriate measures, backed up with an objective spirit and a healthy dose of common business sense.
The consideration of Return on Investment (ROI) understandably increased during the downturn. In line with this, IT vendors have spent a lot more time talking about it and some even provide financial models to help customers assess it. While all this seems eminently sensible, however, we must be careful not to get too carried away, as coming up with valid and meaningful ROI cases is more difficult than many people acknowledge.
The usual interpretation of ROI revolves around time and money. One way of thinking about it is to consider the amount you will ultimately get back by investing a certain amount now. If you spend £20,000 on an IT system, for example, you might calculate that it will return £60,000 worth of benefit over its anticipated 10 year lifetime in the form of cost savings and/or increased revenue performance.
The first and most obvious problem with this approach is that the majority of organisations don’t have a good enough handle on the current costs and the current contribution of existing systems to feed accurate and precise information into the calculations. Assumptions and estimations therefore need to be made which are difficult to verify. The result is often an unknown level of error in the calculations, but more significant is that the process is open to manipulation to support any pre-existing agenda. Nudge a couple of assumptions in one direction and the investment case can be made; nudge them the other way and the proposal is canned.
The other big problem with basing assessments on the ultimate return is that a lot can happen over the lifetime of an investment. This is especially true of IT systems, as today’s leading edge technology providing competitive advantage or operational efficiency is tomorrow’s legacy holding the business back and sucking in excessive resource to keep it running. The inevitable changing of both the business and IT landscapes over time can render initial assumptions invalid and even core functionality less relevant or appropriate.
One way of tightening things up is to consider a shorter period. You may judge the context and environment to be relatively predictable over the medium term, for example, and therefore look to calculate a return over, say, a three year period. The other common approach is to look at payback time or time to ‘break even’. This is based on considering how long it will be before the amount of money spent is recouped in either cost savings or enabled improvements in revenue/profit generation. Of course both of these approaches, or any combination of measures you choose to use, are still open to manipulation, but assuming the right spirit, discipline and motivation, the impact of inaccuracies in your assumptions and estimations is less if a shorter period is being considered.
Having said all this, though, we still need to be realistic and appreciate the limitations of ROI assessments in the real world. While the creation of comprehensive ROI cases using elaborate models and complex spreadsheets can look very scientific and create the impression of precision and accuracy, the reality is often different. At best, an ROI model is a decision making aid that helps you to lock down as many of the known variables as possible in a structured manner, but it still requires good business sense and value judgements to work around the inevitable gaps, e.g. using ‘what if?’ style analysis. At worst, an ROI model can be a political tool used to create the illusion of rigour, and designed to precipitate a predefined outcome on the basis that no one is likely to come back down the line and check the numbers anyway.
Even if you approach ROI responsibly, however, it is important not to let it get in the way of doing the right thing in some circumstances. Back in the 90’s, for example, the justification for a lot of investment in ERP was simply to prevent business operations from collapsing. With so many organisations reliant on a fragile patchwork of highly customised point solutions, and/or considering the uncertainty of Y2K, they had little choice but to invest. What were they going to do if your financial ROI calculations came out unfavourably, just leave things as they were and wait for the inevitable catastrophe? That’s a bit like taking time out to calculate the cost justification for fixing faulty brakes on your car then questioning the result. Sometimes you just have to spend money to manage risks and keep things viable, and what you need to spend that money on is pretty obvious.
But some go too far the other way, and always just spend money on the obvious. If you are running out of disk space in your IT infrastructure then the obvious thing to do is buy more storage, right? Well not necessarily. You might find that investment in better information management software and/or storage virtualisation means you can free up space through safe deletion, archiving, etc, and make use of orphaned storage that was previously unutilised. Solving the immediate problem in this way might cost more initially, but has a much better payback over time, through cost savings on hardware, reduced administrative overhead, and the freeing up of information so it can be properly exploited for business benefit.
If you look across IT, there are lots of examples like this where the first decision to make is not which product or service to buy, but which approach to take to solving the problem, which brings us back to the question of RIO, and specifically the precision of ROI analyses. While the concept of return in investment in a generic sense is critical to understanding the significance of going down one route or another, because the impact of alternative approaches can be very different, you often don’t need a meticulous detailed analysis to tell you what you need to know. The above storage example is a good indication of this as, for instance, would be considering whether to implement a like for like replacement of an aging telephony system or an IP based alternative that opens the door to full unified communications.
Rough cut analysis is often adequate for this kind of direction setting and as a tip, rather than trying to express all elements of business value in strict monetary equivalents, and use arbitrary assumptions to do this, it is sometimes more meaningful to use more qualitative scoring, rating and ranking mechanisms. Taking our unified communications example, trying to put a monetary value on the benefit of streamlined communications, which in turn (amongst other things) enables more informed and efficient day to day decision making, is actually very hard. One clinched deal or avoided disaster as a result of key people being able to collaborate quickly and effectively and the investment may have paid for itself through a single event, but that is incredibly difficult to predict. What you can do, however, is rate different options as having a high, medium or low impact on operational or commercial decision making efficiency and effectiveness, which might be relatively crude, but at least good enough to give you a steer.
Downstream from this, once you have decided on an approach and are simply considering which product or service to buy, another trick is to focus on the cost element. While you might not have all of the metrics and data necessary for a robust financial ROI calculation, you might have enough for a reasonably accurate assessment of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the solutions being considered. Assuming they are functionally equivalent, this might be an appropriate measure to decide between one product and another.
In conclusion, while assessing the return on significant investments is clearly a part of running IT in a business-like manner, it is important not to be a slave to detailed financial modelling. Good decision making is enabled by the right amount of analysis, conducted at the right level, based on appropriate measures, backed up with an objective spirit and a healthy dose of common business sense.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Getting up to speed on desktop virtualisation
Now’s not a bad time to be considering this stuff
I remember reading an analyst prediction at the end of 2008 that 2009 was the year in which desktop virtualisation was going to go mainstream. I challenged this at the time on the basis that we had recently completed a number of studies at Freeform Dynamics suggesting that IT Pros in the mainstream weren’t even clear on what terms like ‘desktop virtualisation’ and ‘virtual desktop infrastructure’ (VDI) actually meant, let alone why they should be investing in this area.
As it turns out, things didn’t take off in any big way in 2009, we simply saw an ongoing creep of early adopter activity as anticipated. The good news is though that the past year has seen quite a bit of real world experience being gained, and both awareness and skills have been building. While we are still in the early market, it’s clear that some of the technologies and specific offerings have reached the status of ‘mainstream readiness’, and there are enough examples of deploying in various real world scenarios to provide a degree of confidence about what can be expected. This all bodes well for the future.
The biggest challenge at the moment is simply confusion, as just like in other areas such as cloud computing, the same or similar terminology is routinely being used to describe some quite different things. I am not going to go into the different flavours of desktop virtualisation here, but if you want a very accessible overview and explanation of the main options, see the paper Tony and I put together last year entitled “Evolution of Dynamic IT”. This was originally intended as a primer for IT pros working in medium sized businesses, but the walkthrough of various desktop delivery architectures is pretty generic.
In the meantime, while you won’t catch me making simplistic predictions about the market, I would say that 2010 is not a bad time for many businesses to start getting up to speed on all of this stuff if they haven’t done already. Here’s why:
- The desktop is integral to IT service delivery. It is the most common point of access for users, and as such, how well it performs has a disproportionately high bearing on user satisfaction and the perception of IT, even without considering productivity impacts. Beyond this, we know from research that allowing the desktop environment to drift and become too out of date has significant cost and risk implications, as well as representing a huge distraction to IT staff. Whichever way you look at it, the way in which the desktop is enabled is something to be taken very seriously.
- From a timing perspective, a combination of the economic downturn and the negative reception to Windows Vista led many organisations to put their normal desktop modernisation and refresh cycles on hold, often for a year or more. However, as economic conditions improve and the positive response to Windows 7 neutralises the Vista effect, it’s only natural that desktop modernisation will find itself back on the agenda. With a whole bunch of new delivery solutions that have been knocking around the edges of IT for a while becoming ‘mainstream ready’ as mentioned earlier, there are now quite a few viable alternatives to simply moving forward with the next iteration of the Windows ‘fat client’ desktop.
As you are going through this, here are some reports and papers we have put together that you may find interesting and useful:
• Evolution of Dynamic IT
• Desktop Modernisation
• Desktop Virtualisation
• Linux on the Desktop
All are available for free download from http://www.freeformdynamics.com/.
Sunday, December 06, 2009
I have been writing stuff, honest!
To anyone out there who measures a man's worth by the volume of his blog output I probably look a little lacking at the moment, having not posted anything for about a month.
I have been writing stuff, just not here.
The truth is that when push comes to shove and you have limited time, secondary output channels such as social media have to take back seat to the primary channels we use for communicating with the broader audience we serve. Rightly or wrongly, mainstream IT and business communities are still better reached through more traditional media and publication mechanisms.
If you want to see what I have been up to over the past month or so, which includes a couple of reports on desktop and server modernisation, plus a lot of discussion stuff around the evolution of ERP and CRM, check out my page on the Freeform Dynamics site. This provides links to my recent output and, for future reference, it's kept pretty well up to date. All Freeformers have one of these pages, by the way, and they can all be accessed from our home page at http://www.freeformdynamics.com/.
Anyway, no more exuses. The blog is an important channel for some of the people I interact with, so I'll try to post a bit more to it from this point onwards. I'll include some spin-off discussion from our more formal analysis, and perhaps some of my more opinionated stuff on what's going on in the industry.
Watch this space.
I have been writing stuff, just not here.
The truth is that when push comes to shove and you have limited time, secondary output channels such as social media have to take back seat to the primary channels we use for communicating with the broader audience we serve. Rightly or wrongly, mainstream IT and business communities are still better reached through more traditional media and publication mechanisms.
If you want to see what I have been up to over the past month or so, which includes a couple of reports on desktop and server modernisation, plus a lot of discussion stuff around the evolution of ERP and CRM, check out my page on the Freeform Dynamics site. This provides links to my recent output and, for future reference, it's kept pretty well up to date. All Freeformers have one of these pages, by the way, and they can all be accessed from our home page at http://www.freeformdynamics.com/.
Anyway, no more exuses. The blog is an important channel for some of the people I interact with, so I'll try to post a bit more to it from this point onwards. I'll include some spin-off discussion from our more formal analysis, and perhaps some of my more opinionated stuff on what's going on in the industry.
Watch this space.
Friday, November 06, 2009
New insights into Desktop Modernisation
One of the challenges associated with desktop computing is that discussions around needs and value are often complicated by subjective matters.
Even users with relatively routine requirements usually have opinions on what matters about the machine on their desk. There is then the question of image and status that pre-occupies certain types of user, and the tricky job of separating actual business needs from personal interests and desires when it comes to power users.
Layered on top of this are factors such as advocacy and religion, with Mac and Linux fans preaching their alternative way, some in IT looking for an easier life trying to force thin clients on everyone, and even good old fashioned reactionary politics playing a role, as some object to Microsoft’s dominance and what they perceive as a faceless global organisation exploiting its commercial clout.
Against this background, we recently ran an online survey asking respondents (over 1,100 IT pros) about their thoughts and plans on the topic of desktop modernisation, taking the opportunity along the way to figure out where organisations are out there today with their desktop estates.
Some of the findings are pretty much as you would expect – e.g. it’s a Windows world, with XP in particular still dominating the business PC environment. But some of the other stuff that came out was a little more interesting. We found, for example, that the strong positive reception to Windows 7, even before its release, had led to two out of three then current Vista migration initiatives being halted or put on hold.
We also uncovered evidence emphasising the importance of future-proofing desktop estates, and indications that the deferral of investment in many organisations as a result of the downturn and lack of enthusiasm for Vista had elevated the risks here.
Pulling it all together, though, what was clear from the research is the importance of understanding the requirements of different types of user, which can vary significantly, and taking a service delivery view of world rather than getting bogged down in the relative merits of newer and older technology at a feature/function level.
If you are interested in reading more on all this, a full report has been produced which you are welcome to download from here.
Even users with relatively routine requirements usually have opinions on what matters about the machine on their desk. There is then the question of image and status that pre-occupies certain types of user, and the tricky job of separating actual business needs from personal interests and desires when it comes to power users.
Layered on top of this are factors such as advocacy and religion, with Mac and Linux fans preaching their alternative way, some in IT looking for an easier life trying to force thin clients on everyone, and even good old fashioned reactionary politics playing a role, as some object to Microsoft’s dominance and what they perceive as a faceless global organisation exploiting its commercial clout.
Against this background, we recently ran an online survey asking respondents (over 1,100 IT pros) about their thoughts and plans on the topic of desktop modernisation, taking the opportunity along the way to figure out where organisations are out there today with their desktop estates.
Some of the findings are pretty much as you would expect – e.g. it’s a Windows world, with XP in particular still dominating the business PC environment. But some of the other stuff that came out was a little more interesting. We found, for example, that the strong positive reception to Windows 7, even before its release, had led to two out of three then current Vista migration initiatives being halted or put on hold.
We also uncovered evidence emphasising the importance of future-proofing desktop estates, and indications that the deferral of investment in many organisations as a result of the downturn and lack of enthusiasm for Vista had elevated the risks here.
Pulling it all together, though, what was clear from the research is the importance of understanding the requirements of different types of user, which can vary significantly, and taking a service delivery view of world rather than getting bogged down in the relative merits of newer and older technology at a feature/function level.
If you are interested in reading more on all this, a full report has been produced which you are welcome to download from here.
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Mobile rants and moans
Just read a passionate blog post by Philippe Winthrop pleading for some of the emotive coverage in relation to mobile platforms to be toned down. He starts out by saying:
The Internet has been all a twitter (all puns intended) with the new "Droid" coming from Motorola and Verizon Wireless. In fact an analyst at Citigroup is really excited about it. CNET wonders if Motorola can make a comeback with Android devices. Another analyst downgrades RIM. Then, Gizmodo says Palm "lost". People keep on panning Windows Mobile while saying the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread. These inflammatory titles really need to stop.
He then goes on to run through the six major device platforms around at the moment – Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, webOS (Palm) and Windows Mobile – pointing out that none of these is in any danger of disappearing from the scene in the foreseeable future; so why all this adversarial talk about devices among pundits?
I’m inclined to agree with his point and I empathise with his frustration. Rather than silly stories about winning and losing, commentators would do much better to accept that there is currently a very rich landscape, and help to guide people through it, especially those writing for business users.
And while we’re into getting stuff off our chests, I would like to add that from business sector perspective, device/OS manufacturers and operators playing games with exclusivity on new devices is really not helpful. Perhaps in the consumer space subscribers go rushing from one operator to another because the latest hot device has just become available on a particular network, but businesses just can’t behave that way. And with mobile comms and mobile remote access now falling under the IT umbrella in mid-sized and larger organisations, there is good awareness that the device part of the equation is the most volatile, and therefore represents the least suitable pivot point for sensible decision making.
All of this is very front-of-mind for me at the moment as I have been reviewing the options for meeting Freeform Dynamics’ own mobile communication needs, and if you haven’t tried to compare and contrast offerings directly for while, take my word for it, it hasn’t got any easier in recent times.
We are quite aggressive users but have a pretty good handle on our usage patterns and volumes (average minutes and data consumed per month, roaming requirements, etc), so you would think it would just be a case of simply getting a few quotes and looking at what’s included and excluded from the contract. But then things in the small print catch you out such as voicemail access charges, lengthy restrictive agreements, draconian support hours, etc.
On this last point, for example, I was amazed that with one global network, my access to tech support for core business usage on a business contract was actually less than a teenager on the same network looking for help with problem on their pre-pay phone. So much for flexible working any time, any place, anywhere - all well and good from a support perspective, provided you don't stray too much from normal office hours in your home country!
Coming back to where we started, while we all love reviewing and writing about devices, from an enterprise mobility point of view, there really are a lot more important things that matter. As an analyst, I was pulled off onto other areas of coverage for while, but I now feel the need to get back into the whole mobile thing again after recent experiences.
I dunno, you turn your back for a few months..... :-)
The Internet has been all a twitter (all puns intended) with the new "Droid" coming from Motorola and Verizon Wireless. In fact an analyst at Citigroup is really excited about it. CNET wonders if Motorola can make a comeback with Android devices. Another analyst downgrades RIM. Then, Gizmodo says Palm "lost". People keep on panning Windows Mobile while saying the iPhone is the greatest thing since sliced bread. These inflammatory titles really need to stop.
He then goes on to run through the six major device platforms around at the moment – Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, webOS (Palm) and Windows Mobile – pointing out that none of these is in any danger of disappearing from the scene in the foreseeable future; so why all this adversarial talk about devices among pundits?
I’m inclined to agree with his point and I empathise with his frustration. Rather than silly stories about winning and losing, commentators would do much better to accept that there is currently a very rich landscape, and help to guide people through it, especially those writing for business users.
And while we’re into getting stuff off our chests, I would like to add that from business sector perspective, device/OS manufacturers and operators playing games with exclusivity on new devices is really not helpful. Perhaps in the consumer space subscribers go rushing from one operator to another because the latest hot device has just become available on a particular network, but businesses just can’t behave that way. And with mobile comms and mobile remote access now falling under the IT umbrella in mid-sized and larger organisations, there is good awareness that the device part of the equation is the most volatile, and therefore represents the least suitable pivot point for sensible decision making.
All of this is very front-of-mind for me at the moment as I have been reviewing the options for meeting Freeform Dynamics’ own mobile communication needs, and if you haven’t tried to compare and contrast offerings directly for while, take my word for it, it hasn’t got any easier in recent times.
We are quite aggressive users but have a pretty good handle on our usage patterns and volumes (average minutes and data consumed per month, roaming requirements, etc), so you would think it would just be a case of simply getting a few quotes and looking at what’s included and excluded from the contract. But then things in the small print catch you out such as voicemail access charges, lengthy restrictive agreements, draconian support hours, etc.
On this last point, for example, I was amazed that with one global network, my access to tech support for core business usage on a business contract was actually less than a teenager on the same network looking for help with problem on their pre-pay phone. So much for flexible working any time, any place, anywhere - all well and good from a support perspective, provided you don't stray too much from normal office hours in your home country!
Coming back to where we started, while we all love reviewing and writing about devices, from an enterprise mobility point of view, there really are a lot more important things that matter. As an analyst, I was pulled off onto other areas of coverage for while, but I now feel the need to get back into the whole mobile thing again after recent experiences.
I dunno, you turn your back for a few months..... :-)
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Vista and Lotus - Knowing when to let go of a brand
Microsoft spent an absolute fortune on the Vista brand. In marketing terms, the Vista campaign was huge by any standards, and was a big success insofar as raising awareness of Microsoft's next-generation Windows offering was concerned.
Of course as we all know, things didn't work out too well for Microsoft. The the new features and functionality of Vista turned out not to be as game-changing as Microsoft had implied in its messaging, and to make matters worse, the product wasn't really ready for mainstream use at the time it was launched. Initial expectations were therefore not met, leading to a significant backlash in the media, and ultimately among users. In the business context, many made the decision to defer upgrading because of the perceived risk and lack of incremental value, which is why XP is still the dominant version of Windows in corporate environments today.
The irony is that once Vista had settled down over the course of the first year or 18 months, it turned out to be a respectable operating system; certainly fit for purpose, and potentially offering some significant benefits, especially from an operations and risk management perspective in larger enterprises. But by then it was too late. Regardless of what was going on with the product, the Vista brand had accumulated too much negative baggage. And painful though it must have been, we have to give Microsoft credit for realising this, pressing the big red reset button, writing off its investment, and starting again under the Windows 7 banner - a tactic that seems to have paid off.
There is a lesson here, perhaps, for another vendor that has accumulated significant brand baggage that is getting in the way of customers appreciating the potential of a couple of its product lines. Back in the 90s, IBM lost the battle for dominance in the email and calendaring server arena with Lotus Notes and the back-end Domino server that drives it. For reasons that don’t matter now, Microsoft stole the market from under its nose. While IBM still argues the toss around market statistics, frequently trying to make the case that Lotus Notes/Domino is still as successful as Exchange, the following chart from our last Reg barometer study sums up the real situation.
The data we are looking at here predominantly relates to respondents from the UK and USA. Based on this, IBM's footprint looks to be about half that of Microsoft in organisations with greater than 5,000 employees, dropping proportionally as we look to smaller entities. Significantly, however, whereas the commitment and sentiment associated with Microsoft Exchange is overwhelmingly positive, Lotus Notes/Domino is much more likely to be regarded as legacy. This is particularly noticeable in the corporate sector where almost half of respondents using the IBM solution put it into the legacy category.
To be fair, this picture is from almost a year ago, and though it hadn’t changed that much from the previous year (apart from the Lotus footprint shrinking a little), IBM has been doing some pretty good stuff recently. The latest Notes 8.5 release, for example, looks excellent, and if feedback from LotusSphere user group events is anything to go by, the response from the installed based has been very positive. In addition, a number of other offerings have recently emerged or been enhanced under the Lotus brand in hot areas such as social computing and unified communications, which provide some great options for Notes/Domino shops to extend their investments in a future proof manner. With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see if we pick up any changes in commitment and perception when we run our next Barometer (watch this space).
In the meantime, there is a big question around whether Lotus offerings will make a significant impact outside of the Notes/Domino installed base, and the challenge here is not so much relevance and value in an absolute sense to a Microsoft Exchange shop, for example, but perceptions around the Lotus brand. There are two issues here, both stemming from the fact that the words ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ have been tied together so strongly over time. The first is that as the latter acquired its legacy image in the broader market, that couldn’t help but rub off on the former.
Even if IBM is successful at refreshing the Lotus brand, however, and creating a more positive and up-to-date feel around it, there is still a second problem to contend with. This is that the same historical association between ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ leads to the assumption that anything carrying the Lotus name is probably aimed at extending or enhancing the Notes/Domino environment. Given that Exchange shops generally have no appetite for considering a switch to the IBM alternative for core email and calendaring, the likelihood is therefore that they simply dismiss other Lotus branded offerings, such as unified communications and social computing solutions, as not being relevant to them.
Ironically, the latest ‘Lotus Knows’ marketing campaign (http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/) runs the risk of actually aggravating the situation. While the fundamental idea of trying to create and propagate enthusiasm among end user influencers has merit, and there has reportedly been excitement within the ‘Lotus Loyal’ installed base, the whole thing revolves around the benefits of an end-to-end Lotus environment, with Notes/Domino featuring prominently. This simply reinforces the abovementioned assumptions and makes it even more likely that Exchange shops, 97% of which (according to our barometer data) indicate continued committed use, will totally ignore what IBM has on offer under the Lotus brand, even though it might prove useful to them.
Coming back to where we started, against this background, there is a strong argument for IBM grasping the nettle as Microsoft did with Vista, and either letting the Lotus brand go altogether or at least re-branding some of the newer stuff it has stuck under the Lotus banner. Admittedly, it’s not quite the same situation as Microsoft faced in that the Lotus brand is not tarnished in the same way as Vista; it’s more a case of the brand being entrenched in history and having become a bit tired over the years. Nevertheless, by burdening a lot of really cool software with so much historical baggage, IBM is not doing itself or the broader market any favours. The only party to benefit is arguably Microsoft, who will continue to pick up a lot of unified communications and social computing business in Exchange accounts by default, with an important set of alternatives from IBM not even being considered.
Of course as we all know, things didn't work out too well for Microsoft. The the new features and functionality of Vista turned out not to be as game-changing as Microsoft had implied in its messaging, and to make matters worse, the product wasn't really ready for mainstream use at the time it was launched. Initial expectations were therefore not met, leading to a significant backlash in the media, and ultimately among users. In the business context, many made the decision to defer upgrading because of the perceived risk and lack of incremental value, which is why XP is still the dominant version of Windows in corporate environments today.
The irony is that once Vista had settled down over the course of the first year or 18 months, it turned out to be a respectable operating system; certainly fit for purpose, and potentially offering some significant benefits, especially from an operations and risk management perspective in larger enterprises. But by then it was too late. Regardless of what was going on with the product, the Vista brand had accumulated too much negative baggage. And painful though it must have been, we have to give Microsoft credit for realising this, pressing the big red reset button, writing off its investment, and starting again under the Windows 7 banner - a tactic that seems to have paid off.
There is a lesson here, perhaps, for another vendor that has accumulated significant brand baggage that is getting in the way of customers appreciating the potential of a couple of its product lines. Back in the 90s, IBM lost the battle for dominance in the email and calendaring server arena with Lotus Notes and the back-end Domino server that drives it. For reasons that don’t matter now, Microsoft stole the market from under its nose. While IBM still argues the toss around market statistics, frequently trying to make the case that Lotus Notes/Domino is still as successful as Exchange, the following chart from our last Reg barometer study sums up the real situation.
The data we are looking at here predominantly relates to respondents from the UK and USA. Based on this, IBM's footprint looks to be about half that of Microsoft in organisations with greater than 5,000 employees, dropping proportionally as we look to smaller entities. Significantly, however, whereas the commitment and sentiment associated with Microsoft Exchange is overwhelmingly positive, Lotus Notes/Domino is much more likely to be regarded as legacy. This is particularly noticeable in the corporate sector where almost half of respondents using the IBM solution put it into the legacy category.
To be fair, this picture is from almost a year ago, and though it hadn’t changed that much from the previous year (apart from the Lotus footprint shrinking a little), IBM has been doing some pretty good stuff recently. The latest Notes 8.5 release, for example, looks excellent, and if feedback from LotusSphere user group events is anything to go by, the response from the installed based has been very positive. In addition, a number of other offerings have recently emerged or been enhanced under the Lotus brand in hot areas such as social computing and unified communications, which provide some great options for Notes/Domino shops to extend their investments in a future proof manner. With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see if we pick up any changes in commitment and perception when we run our next Barometer (watch this space).
In the meantime, there is a big question around whether Lotus offerings will make a significant impact outside of the Notes/Domino installed base, and the challenge here is not so much relevance and value in an absolute sense to a Microsoft Exchange shop, for example, but perceptions around the Lotus brand. There are two issues here, both stemming from the fact that the words ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ have been tied together so strongly over time. The first is that as the latter acquired its legacy image in the broader market, that couldn’t help but rub off on the former.
Even if IBM is successful at refreshing the Lotus brand, however, and creating a more positive and up-to-date feel around it, there is still a second problem to contend with. This is that the same historical association between ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ leads to the assumption that anything carrying the Lotus name is probably aimed at extending or enhancing the Notes/Domino environment. Given that Exchange shops generally have no appetite for considering a switch to the IBM alternative for core email and calendaring, the likelihood is therefore that they simply dismiss other Lotus branded offerings, such as unified communications and social computing solutions, as not being relevant to them.
Ironically, the latest ‘Lotus Knows’ marketing campaign (http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/) runs the risk of actually aggravating the situation. While the fundamental idea of trying to create and propagate enthusiasm among end user influencers has merit, and there has reportedly been excitement within the ‘Lotus Loyal’ installed base, the whole thing revolves around the benefits of an end-to-end Lotus environment, with Notes/Domino featuring prominently. This simply reinforces the abovementioned assumptions and makes it even more likely that Exchange shops, 97% of which (according to our barometer data) indicate continued committed use, will totally ignore what IBM has on offer under the Lotus brand, even though it might prove useful to them.
Coming back to where we started, against this background, there is a strong argument for IBM grasping the nettle as Microsoft did with Vista, and either letting the Lotus brand go altogether or at least re-branding some of the newer stuff it has stuck under the Lotus banner. Admittedly, it’s not quite the same situation as Microsoft faced in that the Lotus brand is not tarnished in the same way as Vista; it’s more a case of the brand being entrenched in history and having become a bit tired over the years. Nevertheless, by burdening a lot of really cool software with so much historical baggage, IBM is not doing itself or the broader market any favours. The only party to benefit is arguably Microsoft, who will continue to pick up a lot of unified communications and social computing business in Exchange accounts by default, with an important set of alternatives from IBM not even being considered.
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