When IT comes to the Crunch

Buzz Off

2011-10-28T22:57:00.001+01:00

Google's Buzz - their answer to Twitter - is "retiring".

After launching two years ago - and without their usual Beta period - it never got the critical mass or created the buzz needed.

"We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products" Google's official blog explained - in effect announcing that they were throwing everything at Google+ social networking.

The retirement of Buzz is not a big failure. Innovation requires a lot of false starts - although it could be argued that a copy of Twitter is not really innovation. Googles Wave was a very innovative product - but faced a similar fate.

However what could be a big failure - and possibly one that could topple their domininace of the web - is that it seems that Google seems to be forgetting how to innovate;

The closure of Google Labs - announced at the same time - has put an end to their incubation unit.
More importantly Google seems to have forgotten how to fail. Lars Rasmussen, the architect of Wave and Maps, jumped ship to Facebook after the plug was pulled on Wave saying "ultimately failing was obviously a little stressful",

Google is betting all their development resources and their employees bonuses on Google+. However in doing this it seems to be suppressing that vital entrepreneurial spark.

The Magician

2011-10-07T19:52:00.001+01:00

It is hard to add to the tributes to Steve Jobs. He also left such a wealth of quotes that are now so much more poignant.

I look back at hollow media predicitions made at the start of this week for the iPhone announcement.
"It will have a bigger screen" - It didn't.
"It will look slimmer - like the iPad" It wasn't.
"It will be the iPhone 5 -and there will be a cameo appearance by Steve Jobs"
So sad. If Steve Jobs had making the announcement, you just know he would have made it the iPhone 5.

Cut IT Spend by 25% in 10 steps

2011-10-03T23:56:00.001+01:00

Can you really cut 25 per cent from your IT spending in just 10 steps? - Silicon.com Mobile

Cut IT Spend by 25% in 10 steps

2011-10-03T13:04:00.001+01:00

Can you really cut 25 per cent from your IT spending in just 10 steps? - Silicon.com Mobile

A Quandary on Fire

2011-09-29T19:58:00.005+01:00

I'm in a real quandary now.
I lost my Kindle Keyboard 3g at a security search in the US during my summer holidays. It was ideal as I could download books and newspapers when I want anywhere around the world - at no extra cost (unlike my phone which charges £1 /MB in the US) and it will last a week on a charge (unlike my phone which won't last an hour of reading.) Its screen is legible in bright sunlight or in total darkness - with the light built into the cover.
Amazons announcement on 29 September gives me a big problem. Now:

do I get another Kindle Keyboard 3G - but it is hard going back to buttons after using a touch screen
do I get the new Kindle - lighter but no 3G
do I wait for the Kindle touch with 3G - but how long before it comes to the UK?
do I wait for the Kindle Fire - but no 3G and no idea if it will ever get across the pond? - and I have an Android tablet already.

How I long for the days (24 hours ago) when we didn’t have a choice!

Horses for courses

2011-09-29T19:58:00.004+01:00

There is a new hazard for passengers trying to board a London Tube train.
A passenger getting off the train bearing a ipad, bearing it like Moses descending from Sinai with the Ten Commandments on the tablet. Except he is reading it, (and my empirical observations show that they are all males) engrossed and oblivious to his surroundings, with his elbows out,sweeping aside all in his path.
My second observation was made at some major tourist sites in the US: the top of the Empire State Building, Washingtons Lincoln Memorial, and many other photo opportunities, previously called Kodak moments. People waving around iPad2s trying to take a photo.
JUST STOP IT RIGHT NOW!
All iPads should be covered in warning notices: Skype says it shouldn't be used to make emergency calls. My toaster says it should only be used for toasting dry bread.
Yes it has a camera, but that does not mean that you can use it whenever you would take photos with a camera.
Yes it has iBooks, but that does not mean you can use it wherever you would take a book.
The Kindle advertising quotes scientific research that using a back lit screen in bed upsets melatonin levels and stops you going to sleep (but they may keep quieter about it since the launch of the back lit screen Fire)
And as for the company selling nose extension styluses so you can use the iPad in the bath. Dont go there!
An iPad should only be used when sitting on the sofa. And preferably a white one as in all the Apple adverts.

Social Unrest

2011-08-18T21:49:00.001+01:00

China blocks FaceBook.
US State Department requests that Twitter defers maintenance to allow Iranian opposition activists to communicate.
India and Middle East states demand that RIM provide backdoor keys for Blackberry encryption.
Arab Spring protesters use social networking to coordinate protests.
Egypt shuts down internet service providers to stop social networks.

Riots and looting in London.

British politicains call for shutting down of internet connections, social networks and Blackberry Messenger to prevents its use by rioters.

Two british youths are jailed for six months for inciting riots on FaceBook

China says that open access to social networks has contributed to the riots in the UK.

Summer's here and the time is right ...

2011-07-15T13:29:00.001+01:00

...for astronomical data roaming bills
BBC News - Business travel: Keeping mobile roaming headaches at bay

Closing Windows

2011-06-16T00:36:00.001+01:00

There was another new arrival in the office the week I started my first job. An IBM PC. Twin Floppy drives, mono screeen, MS DOS, no Word Processor and no-one had heard of a spreadsheet or powerpoint,

This week the screen on my laptop went, so for the first time my main professional computer is completely Microsoft free: an Asus eePad Transformer. A tablet with a touch screen and docking keyboard, running Android Honeycomb on an nVidia processor. A computer format, hardware manufacturers and an operating system that no-one had heard of three years ago.

It was several years before the IBM PC would be connected to another PC, and it would be ten years before DARPA developped the internet, and Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the Web. My Tablet has a wireless connection to the internet, using Wi-Fi in the office, at home, and through the access point on my mobile phone when moving between the two. It has 30 Gigabytes of storage in a microSD card smaller than my little fingernail - three times as much as my company mainframe had twenty years ago in three cabinets.

Instead of costing £1000 for hardware with another £300 for a software suite (a pricepoint set by Bill Gates before he turned to giving his money away to good causes) it now costs under £400 for top spec hardware with a range of Apps to do exactly what I need, from £4 to free (a pricepoint set by "The Great Turtle-Necked One" with the iPad.)

It also lasts for ten hours continuous use on battery. I unplugged the charger at 6.45am this morning. Eighteen hours and it is still showing as 68% battery remaining in the tablet (having used up the battery in the keyboard).

And it has a big "Search" button where the Microsoft key would have been....

So is Microsoft still relevant? It does seem to have lost it's innovative spark. Without that it is going to decline and fade away - as an irrelevant one product company. Once the dream was "Windows with everything." In a few years time could it be "Nothing with Windows"?

Skype's the limit

2011-05-11T00:08:00.001+01:00

So Microsoft won the bidding for Skype, buying the internet communications network for $8.5bn (£5.2bn) – Microsoft’s largest ever acquisition.

The completion was fierce – with Google, FaceBook, Cisco and AT&T cited as possible suitors.

While Google already has Google Talk and Chat integrated with Gmail, Skype still had better technology. As we saw with its acquisition of YouTube (and the final demise of Google Video this week) it can integrate well. Although its attempt to develop a unified collaboration product with Wave failed.
Skype has recently integrated with FaceBook, who have long been rumoured to want to beef up its messaging and chat. Although FaceBook announced its next generation gMail Killer in November it has yet to be rolled out (to me at least!). If FaceBook was a country it would be the 3^rd biggest country – so its Telco would be bigger than AT&T and British Telecom.
Cisco is a serial acquirer, with LinkSys SoHo networking and Tandberg conferencing. However the Flip acquisition failed with it’s closure this month. Maybe they missed the basic lack of synergy that Flips weren’t network connected. But I am sure that the technology will re-emerge – few homes could want a Virtual Presence but PC free web video conferencing is a big unfulfilled market.
I don’t know why AT&T were in the bidding- any growth of Skype would be at the detriment of AT&Ts enormous US fixed line and mobile networks (which got larger with T-Mobile USA)

Skype was not a good bedfellow for eBay, who failed to integrate conferencing with its auctions after overpaying $2.5 Billion for Skype six years ago. It cut its losses when it sold 65% of the business two years ago, but has finally broken even from selling its remaining 35% stake.

So what will Microsoft do with Skype?

It should continue to allow Skype to thrive as cross-platform software. Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. Many of its 124million users each month are using iPhones, Android and Linux, who won’t give up their platforms if Microsoft try to force them onto Windows Operating systems. It should get a good payback from integrating Skype with its software:

Adding together Skype with MSN messenger’s user base would give exponential benefits under Metcalfe’s Law
The Outlook email client could differentiate itself from the myriad of free email clients by becoming a communications tool.
Why stop with Outlook when you could build in net conferencing into PowerPoint, Word and Excel, to further capitalise on Skype’s penetration into the business world – but Skype’s decentralised architecture won’t go down well with corporate telecoms managers.

Microsoft will only recoup its investment if Skype is used to promote cross platform integrated software, not by trying to restrict us to Microsoft platforms.

Gagging for IT

2011-05-10T00:11:00.000+01:00

I can’t comment on what someone who can’t be said to be a banker was up to when the Crunch hit. The buzz when Twitter user @injunctionsuper spilled the beans was mainly around the celebrities named.

@Ruskin147 - Rather weird that Twitter has been alive with super-injunction details for weeks - but one new account with inaccurate reports is news
@DorothyKing - If we're not "allowed" to know who has a #superinjunction how do we know who not to discuss? Goldsmith? Ryan Giggs? Fred Goodwin? Branson?
@TheSpacePope - Anyone think @injunctionsuper got one wrong deliberately to allow trad media to be able to report the story? #superinjunction

However less was said about the conduct of those at the helm of an industry whose collapse cost the UK taxpayer £1trillion - perhaps because they have deeper pockets. But even if you get a “Contra Mundi” super-injunction it can’t redact the internet rumours altogether.

The story may have been pulled from http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2011/03/12/internet-destroys-fred-goodwins-affair-super-injunction ...but it still shows up in Google search results and the full blog is still in the cache at http://bit.ly/iFPlYR
The Daily Mail may have pulled the story published in print before the injunction from its website – but it seems to have overlooked the mobile version web page.
And Guido Fawkes still publishes a rumour without naming names or professions: http://order-order.com/2011/03/11/unbankable-story/

But I can’t say anything.

Except to point out that sometimes even recent history repeats itself:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1573557/Northern-Rock-chief-had-affair-before-collapse.html

Trolling for your soul

2011-04-04T08:09:00.001+01:00

Digital identities: Trolling for your soul | The Economist

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European comparative law

2011-03-31T19:21:00.001+01:00

Newton N. Minow - Wikipedia Quote from a speech to the Association of American Law Schools:

"After 35 years, I have finished a comprehensive study of European comparative law. In Germany, under the law, everything is prohibited, except that which is permitted. In France, under the law, everything is permitted, except that which is prohibited. In the Soviet Union, under the law, everything is prohibited, including that which is permitted. And in Italy, under the law, everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited."

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Kill the Internet

2011-03-29T21:45:00.004+01:00

"I'm missing the Archers" says a colleague in China. They were blocked behind the great firewall of China, that lowered to block the entire BBC website to prevent news of the Nobel Prize, awarded to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo . It lowered again to limit news of the Jasmine Revolution, with the obvious parallel between Tahrir Square and Tiananmen Square.
The Stuxnet virus is the malware equivalent of a cruise missile. It is designed purely to reach its target – a specific configuration of Siemens programmable controller, controlling centrifuges that were found in Iran's Bushehr Nuclear facility. It is amazingly sophisticated:

It covers its tracks – after spreading from a USB memory stick three times it removed itself off the memory stick, so it wouldn't be found by a subsequent virus scan.
It sends messages back to a website in Denmark to report on its progress
It even receives software updates, and communicates with other copies of the virus on the same network to see if they have newer versions.
When it reached the target computer it would put centrifuges onto a "fast spin cycle" while reporting that they were running normally.

It succeeded – a UN Nuclear inspector said it had set back the Iranian nuclear programme by months – more effectively than an air strike would. Symantec's White Paper provides a definitive analysis of the Stuxnet attack.

The success of Stuxnet led to demand in the US for a Kill Switch Bill. What if there was a Cyber Attack on a strategic site like the Hoover Dam?
Fortunately the Lieberman-Collins Bill picked the wrong week to reach Washington, coinciding with the Egyptian Mubarack regime throwing the Internet Kill Switch. Nothing sophisticated: they just called up all the ISPs in the country and ordered them to pull the plug out of the wall. (OECD estimates this cost the country $90 million)
Whether it is to protect democracy or to protect oligarchy, what proponents of the Kill Switch forget is that the internet is resilient. It was, after all, designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
The Kill Switch also fails my acid test of security measures: would it have prevented the threat that gave rise to it. No. Stuxnet was a hybrid threat that got onto networks that weren't connected to the internet. As a hybrid threat it gets between networks spreading on removable media.
And on top of that there is human ingenuity to continue communications by less orthodox means as this article in the Economist details. As the Chinese authorities try to suppress free speech, bloggers get around it with references to River Crabs- 河蟹 - héxiè which sounds like héxié: 和谐; Harmonization in the word "Harmonious society" Chinese leader Hu Jintao's signature ideology.
Even my colleague in China – not a technical whizz - is back on FaceBook and listening to the Archers.

Finding Facebook

2011-03-22T22:55:00.004Z

The most searched for brand on the internet is…FaceBook.
Experian HitWise, the UK Measurement firm, found that an incredible 3.5% internet searches were for FaceBook.
Why?
I know that there still a lot of AOL users left, but how stupid can people be?
You just go to that box at the top left of your browser and type in:
www.facebook.com

Let me make it real easy.

Push the mouse – that's the other plastic thing on your desk with the wire coming out of your computer.
Move it so that the arrow on the computer screen is over the word http://www.facebook.com/
Then press the left had side of the mouse

(or click on the link as computer experts say)

Insecurity Services

2011-03-17T06:50:00.001Z

From the Times:
A British SAS unit was released on March 6th after being captured by rebels in eastern Libya. Up to six SAS solders were detained by rebels near Benghazi after flying into the area by helicopter on Friday.
It is understood they were escorting British diplomats trying to establish contact with opponents of Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi.. The team is said to have entered without prior arrangement in the dead of night, carrying guns, explosives, and passports of multiple nationalities.

In an embarrassment to the UK, Libyan state television has broadcast what is believed to be a phone conversation between the British ambassador to Libya, Richard Northern, and an opposition spokesman: "We sent today ahead of those officials who are coming ... a small group just to find if there was a hotel, if everything was working and there was somewhere they could stay and work when we get our group organised."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/ 07/3156530.htm?section=jus

At least eight satellite telephones and shortwave radios, six GPS trackers, five laptops and two satellite internet communication devices were found on the troops. There were also explosives components, maps with color-coded landing and extraction points, multiple passports and several credit cards. Several pieces of equipment were even said to have labels saying, "Secret: UK eyes only."
--The Libyan rebels also found the details needed to access the computers on notes among their captives' belongings.

After tapping the usernames and passwords into the confiscated computers, the rebels were presented with one screen that read "Sunata* deployed," which appeared to preface a program for accessing a secure military network.
"It takes you right into the Ministry of Defence system in the UK," a rebel source said, adding that the rebels accessed the network. "We were, of course, curious. But as a courtesy to the UK, we will not divulge all, but just enough to let them know that we know. It's a good thing this hasn't fallen into enemy hands."
http://www.news.com.au/world/soldiers-leave-secret-codes-in-libya/story-fn6sb9br-1226020831526

* Could this be Sonata http:// www.fortinet.com/doc/cases/ sonatasoftware.pdf ?

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It started with an iPhone...

2011-02-16T23:09:00.000Z

It all began with an iPhone....

March was when my son celebrated his 15th birthday and I got him an iPhone. He just loved it. Who wouldn't?

I celebrated my birthday in July, and my wife made me very happy when she bought me an iPad.

My daughter's birthday was in August so I got her an iPod Touch.

My wife celebrated her birthday in September so

I got her an iRon.

It was around then that the fight started... What my wife failed to recognize is that the iRon can be integrated into the home network with the iWash, iCook and iClean.

This inevitably activates the iNag reminder service.

I should be out of the hospital by Thursday!

********************************************************

I would give full credit to the creator of this original work - except that it was long lost on the viral email..

Will IT ease the pain of IASB change?

2010-12-08T18:08:00.005Z

See the article on my new blog IT4finance

A printer friendly PDF version of this article can be downloaded from https://www.box.net/shared/vk9s3b5gjl

Nic Evans is an independent consultant and interim manager for commercial finance technology and business agility. He is an affiliate at Invigors LLP. If you want to discuss any points raised by this article or broader issues he can be contacted by email nic@nicevans.eu or through LinkedIn http://uk.linkedin.com/in/nicevans

Off to the beach

2010-07-10T13:12:00.003+01:00

tSummer's here and the time is right for thinking about what technology to take on holiday. Mrs E has booked flights with just carry-on luggage and the apartment outside Barcelona has free wi-fi. So what is my choice for desert island discs?
My three alternatives are:

Netbook

A Samsung N130 in the John Lewis summer clearance sale – never knowingly undersold at £230. I am disregarding the perceived wisdom to go linux & open apps and ended up with a full Microsoft configuration: Windows 7 Starter (take care as most of the Samsungs still come with Windows XP). Office Student and Home one year trial that came with it (installed with the minimum features I can), Internet Explorer 8 and Security Essentials are running fine with the Intel Atom and 1Gb Ram. Using Office 2010 on my main laptop gives me a Microsoft Live Skydrive with 25GB of online storage . The only non-Microsoft product in the main line-up is G-mail & Google calendar – installed to run offline with Google Gears – which performs much better than Outlook 2010 on 3GB Ram on my main business laptop. Google Docs gives me a further 1GB of online storage. It has a matt finish screen which makes it most usable with any glare from the sun.

USB Memory Stick/MP3 Player

A 4GB MP3 Player gives ample space to install PortableApps.com with FireFox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, OpenOffice and a host of other open apps, which can be added to. I have added audacity to edit any recordings of music I take. This can plug into any USB port with a PC in an internet café or netbook to give you your apps anywhere.

Oh and did I mention that the MP3 Player is waterproof so you can take it to the beach or the pool. The model that I bought from Maplins two years ago has now been upgraded with a touch screen which has bumped up the price to £80. This makes it a touch expensive for a gadget of uncertain quality. But to dive into the pool listening to Steve Boyetts Podrunner is just priceless. Just choose the track going at the right pace!

Smartphone

iPhones and blackberries need to be brought with a contract, and being tied into a 24 month contract I was restricted to an Android – which is not too much of a limitation! Preferring a physical keyboard steered me to a Motorola Dext. Slightly lower powered processor than the latest Nexus and HTC models but on offer at £150 for a pay as you go, which will take my SIM. As there is competition between manufacturers on the Android platform you get more bang for your bucks.I am just bracing myself for the mobile data bill for roaming internationally – needing to make sure that I download all I can over the wi-fi. The only software to pay for has been documents to go (upgrading a licence from my ten year old Palm Pilot) to give me ability to edit Microsoft Office 2010 documents.An 8GB MicroSD will let me store all the music, podcasts and documents I need. A great camera – uploading pictures to facebook – but missing a flash and GPS working with Google Maps will provide the navigation for our hire car. I am just awaiting the release date for the upgrade from Android 1.5 Cupcake to Andriod 2 so we can get all of the latest Google tools including turn by turn navigation. Until then I will have to follow directions from Mrs E.

And the winner is…

..well I can't decide. I will just have to take all three.

And one more addition for family communications..

Summer is the time for festivals, and Master E is doing two this summer, Download and Sonisphere – which mostly seem to feature bands which have been going since before he was born. With the risk of everything getting trashed, but needing some way of being rescued, he just needs the cheapest phone on the market. One small consolation with England's early ejection from the World Cup is that the price of the Alcatel OT 206 with Saint Georges Cross has come down from £2.99 to 99 pence.

Snakes and Ladders

2010-06-16T18:56:00.005+01:00

The Benefits and Pitfalls of Pan European Finance Systems.

Henry Ford is the father of modern mass production. His production lines established Ford as the first global car manufacturer. Yet it was not until 34 years after his death that Ford produced their first global car – the Ford Escort. Ford set out to use common components worldwide, but by the time the Escort came off the production lines in Detroit, Halewood, Saarlouis and Nazareth, the cars only had three small components in common.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that many global finance system initiatives have started from US-based companies. They are well accustomed to the benefits of having a single system and common processes for their operations from Florida to Alaska, with the enormous economies of scale from a single service centre covering continental operations.

However many attempts to replicate these benefits across European operations have not delivered the same benefits. The financial services division of one manufacturer is said to have scrapped their global systems projects, writing off many tens of millions of dollars of development, and many other major projects are running years behind schedule and over budget.

So what are the benefits from a single pan-European system?

Attack of the clones
Many of the earliest international asset finance systems were not based on a single system, but multiple installations. An AS/400 or an installation of InfoLease (which seemed to be the system of choice for international lessors in the 1990s) would be cloned around Europe and each copy modified for the needs of each country. While this approach delivered some payback from standardisation it couldn't achieve the main benefits.

For IT management there are significant benefits from a single system. Development changes, fixes and upgrades only have to be made to one version, so new features can be introduced much more quickly, and testing of changes is greatly reduced. Data Centre and IT operations costs are greatly reduced and the reliability increases with only having one system to run, albeit larger and more complex.

Shared Services
The bigger business benefits from a single international system come through the provision of shared services. While US-based operations can easily centralise customer services, there are obvious challenges in Europe, particularly from languages and wider business cultural differences. Several international technology captive finance providers have set up European customer service centres in Dublin, including Cisco Systems Finance, HP and Dell, with others using "near shore" locations which have a plentiful supply of graduates with language and business skills.

Even with distributed customer services, a single system allows centralisation or regionalisation of parts of the business, particularly the management and oversight of sales, credit, pricing, treasury, operations, asset management and risk. Shared service centres can also be set up for some back-office functions with less direct customer interaction like remarketing and finance – indeed some technology funders get a strong advantage from remarketing equipment at an international level, by shipping used equipment to developing markets with more demand for lower specification equipment.

Centralised management functions are greatly assisted by a single database for consolidated reporting, which can be run "at the touch of a button", rather than having to run reports for each country then collecting them before consolidation. This can reduce reporting cycles from weeks - even months - to days, with some flash reports available in real-time. Tim Hricko of Oracle cites a captive finance company that rolled out a single instance to 14 countries in Europe. "It used to take them six months to get a report of their install base of assets throughout Europe - and when they did get it, they couldn't trust the accuracy. With the single instance in place, they now get a report in 30 minutes and it's 100% accurate." However even with a single database this reporting is not without its challenges – such as multiple currencies and exchange rates (see article "Go Forth And Multi-ply").

Two nations divided by a common language
Introducing standardised systems – and common business processes – is an enormous undertaking. Although a global business may be using the same general business model around the world as the project gets down to the detail needed for effective systems delivery, a myriad of differences and complexity can emerge. From the "thirty thousand foot view" it all looks the same. Some differences may be immediately obvious. But down in the detail– to use the tangled quote of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - "there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know."

A US accountant can find that the methods for calculating VAT on an invoice are the same as US Sales tax and stop there, remaining unaware of the need for credit notes, that there are different regulations for implementation in each European country or the legal penalties incurred if errors are made. (A few years ago in a presentation to a ELFA conference in Boston, I exercised my theory that Americans are inherently unable to understand European imposed taxes on goods – overlooking the site of the Boston Tea Party!).

Apparently standard business practices, like direct debit automated collections, vary enormously in practice. In Norway and Denmark a direct debit has become an electronic invoice, with customer confirmation required before payment is made. If you were expecting that the Single European Payments Area would simplify things, the European Central Banks "Blue Book" of Payment and Settlement Systems for the Euro Area runs to 460 pages.

One of the themes coming out of my discussions for these articles and my own experiences is that however capable global systems are, they are never going to be able to support all the requirements, and the business may get many of benefits just from simplifying the business processes. It then comes down to analysing the process differences as:

"Have to have" features – such as for regulatory, tax or statutory requirements in each country).
Features needed to offer competitive advantage in the market - in which case the costs of the implementing the feature can be balanced against the financial benefits.
"Just because that's the way we've always done it." - in which case the differences can be eliminated, remaining sensitive to the risk of changing processes without a clear benefit for those impacted.

An example of such a feature is the formula for calculating rentals variable for interest. While the feature is not common in UK German or French markets, but is essential in CEE and Scandinavian countries, and even Euro zone countries which had weaker currencies before adopting the Euro. Aside from the Base rate used in the calculation, the formula will vary – and is often set by local funding banks. Should a pan-European system cope with every single formula, or could you standardise?

Could you achieve benefits just by simplify the business without a single system? "One alternative that we are seeing more interest in recently is Business Process Management solutions." says Steve Byrnes of Cap Gemini. "This alternative enables companies to leave the existing infrastructure in place and still deliver enhanced, standardized, processing capabilities."

International Diplomacy
Managing this change – particularly on an international basis - is critical and complex. No-one is going to accept change "for the greater good". Stakeholders need to be engaged, sometimes with individually tailored communication approaches, to build up two way trust and shared goals. "Managing Successful Programmes" – the big brother of the Prince2 project management methodology - even suggests a "stakeholder map" - a matrix of key project players and areas of interest, charting if each player is a supporter or opponent for each area. While avoiding national stereotyping, communication styles need to differ by country. The Rough Guide to Scandinavian travel advises "The best way to get a Norwegian to accept your idea is to make him think it was his idea." And you wouldn't get a Brit to give up their Pint just for European standardisation!

A breakdown of this mutual trust can be catastrophic, resulting in imposed solutions, on an unwilling and unco-operative business.

Faced with escalating complexity and costs, an international project can end up with a compromise solution – and compromised benefits. One international project manager draws a comparison with European Politics. "When safety or quality are compromised, people get hurt. Yet in Europe, compromise is often a political ideal. The appointment of Lady Ashton as the EU's foreign-policy chief wasn't because she was the best person for the job. It was a compromise, as she is British and a woman – and because she isn't Tony Blair."

© Nic Evans 2010.

Mobile Data Security

2010-04-23T14:15:00.005+01:00

Apples next generation "4G" iPhone looks cool: front facing camera, 80GB of storage, but still has that old problem of mobile data security….well…that it is just too mobile.

"I underestimated how good German beer is." Gray Powell updated his Facebook status as he was out celebrating his 27^th birthday at Gourmet Haus Staudt at Redwood Shores, California. Like all of us he takes his work home with him, particularly if you are testing the next Apple iPhone. Only he didn't take it home with him. He left it on the bar.

MobileMe can brickbat the phone – wipe it clean. But not before a "Random Really Drunk Guy" passed it for safekeeping to someone at the bar ..who saw the owners Facebook page. Unlike most lost mobile phones and laptops, it was returned to its rightful owner. But via Gizmodo who borrowed it for $5,000, took it to pieces and published a detailed analysis.

A stylish as the iPhone is, it is inherently insecure: data is transmitted and stored without encryption on the device: UK Government Ministers were reminded in June that the iPhone is not approved for official use in Whitehall for government communications. This effectively also rules it out for official use for FSA regulated financial services companies.

The iPhone simply can't beat the rock solid security of the BlackBerry. When activating a device on a corporate network, it will automatically enforce corporate security standards, and encrypt the data, both for storage and transmission. Behind the scenes Blackberry run their own data network for transmission of the data. This introduces an unexpected point of failure – as I found on a conference in Rome where all the participants were hooked to the US Blackberry network, which crashed. However it does provide security which is good enough for all but Barak Obama – who has had to trade down to a Sectera Edge.

Further bad news for the mobile paranoid came with the cracking of GSM (or A5/1 algorithm to be precise). As ethical hacker Belial demonstrated at FST Live, last month, it doesn't take a lot of kit. It has remained secure for 8 years, but it has a flaw that it can be cracked it by setting up your own cell base station. You see the security isn't there to protect your chat. It is there to stop you getting onto the network without paying. If you need further evidence of this, once the call gets past the base station it is transmitted unencrypted down the wire. The networks just didn't expect the cost of the technology to drop to the point where a hacker could make their own base station.

If it's any consolation Lufthansa have offered Gray Powell a free business class ticket to Munich. He hasn't taken it up yet. Things are a bit difficult at work…

How to make a small fortune on Social Networking..

2010-04-12T15:51:00.002+01:00

…Start with a large fortune.

Ten years on from the dot com bubble comes the “Web two point hero to zero”

This week AOL announced it was pulling the plug on BeBo , the teen social networking site it acquired for $850M two years ago. Its membership had fallen from 40 Million at the time of its acquisition to 12 million.

MySpace which News Corp bought for $580m in 2005 when it had twice the number of members of FaceBook, now has falling membership, loosing its lead in the US in June 2009 with FaceBook now having twice the global membership.

So why have these social networks collapsed under corporate ownership?

How did they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?

You can look at the demographics of the social networks – MySpace is dominated by US High School kids and much of Bebos population was school age – split between the UK and the US. And guess what? They grow up and move on to FaceBook (like my two teens).

But there is no doubt that News Corp and certainly AOL paid too much for their acquisitions. Perhaps News Corp were running it too much like a media company rather than a social network. BeBo’s business model was always a bit dubious advertising online casinos to pre-teens. When the new owners came to try to get return on their investment network users just move on.

At the end of the day the business model of the social networks was uncertain. I think it is not so much killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. More of a failure to check that the eggs were golden in the first place.

Graphic (c) Economist

Keep taking the tablets

2010-04-08T18:01:00.003+01:00

Apple does it again. Even before Steve Jobs announced what it was, we all knew we had to have one. Whatever it was.

He could have announced an iSlug and the faithful would be queueing around the block to be the first in the door of the Apple store.

If Microsoft offered a product that didn't multitask (except for a few utility programs), only let you run programs bought from the Microsoft store, which didnt support a webcam, and you knew it wouldn't be upgradeable to the next version coming in six months... well I suppose you might have an Xbox, but they wouldn't really get away with it.

The iPad is very impressive, by all accounts, and it just looks and feels so sexy.
It will be successful. Even my Aunt is getting one for my uncle, to persuade him to use the internet and email. (This secret is quite safe from him here, as he doesnt go near a PC.)

And now for the IT Directors worst nightmare... here come the corporate applications. Your voice mail box is full as everyone calls with the reason that they have to have one for business. Here's the policy:

You have to buy it at your personal expense.
You can't connect any wi-fi device directly to the corporate network.
You can't use the iPad/iPhone email client because it's unsecure.
You can only use it for approved applications..and we have't approved any yet.

Perhaps Wyse and Citrix have released the first application to get approved. Virtualisation clients which let you run a corporate desktop with windows 7 from an iPad. You can only use an iPad if it looks like a Windows PC. Perfect! This should soon stop Apple's corporate ambitions. It's like saying you can have an Aston Martin but only use it to take your Mother-in-Law shopping.

25.com

2010-03-15T14:58:00.001Z

dot com’s 25th Birthday is today! Symbolics.com was first domain name registered 15th March 1985 - with 5 more that year. http://bit.ly/a1Bg2t

Social Security

2010-03-09T20:22:00.007Z

"Put all your mobile numbers on Facebook so we can keep in touch" said a teenage cousin's status.

http://pleaserobme.com/ lists up-to-the-second positions of twitter users who have just left home, to highlight the information that people give away.

"She made one mistake and has paid for it with her life" Mother of Ashleigh Hall, who was groomed on FaceBook and murdered by a known sex offender posing as a 19-year-old, registered on at least ten social networking sites which he used to look for girls, amassing more than 6,000 "friends".

While clearly there is a need for greater public education on protecting your privacy online and safe surfing, are the social networking websites playing their part in encouraging privacy and responsible security?

FaceBook recently introduced new privacy settings, but the defaults for these disclosed significant personal information.
Google new social networking tool, Buzz, disclosed new users g-mail contact lists, until privacy lobbyists forced a close of the breech.
Facebook is today under growing pressure to fix the "glaring failure" to include on the website the Ceop button, which helps users access advice and report suspicious activity

But do the social networking giants comply with fundamental EU data privacy laws:

"Anyone who processes personal information must comply with eight principles, which make sure that personal information is:
•Fairly and lawfully processed
•Processed for limited purposes
•Adequate, relevant and not excessive
•Accurate and up to date
•Not kept for longer than is necessary
•Processed in line with your rights
•Secure
•Not transferred to other countries without adequate protection"

Yet Facebook UK Ltd, who has UK Employees, and uses UK personal data to target advertising sold to UK companies has no entry on the UK Data Protection Public Register.

And their privacy policy which uses US Safe Harbor to process EU personal data simply states:

Personal Data Covered: online
Human Resource Data Covered: No
Do you agree to cooperate and comply with the European Data Protection Authorities? Sel

There is no explaination of what "Sel" means.

If you want to delete your facebook profile will they delete your data in line with the data protection principles? They keep it forever to make it easier "should you want to come back".

If the worlds largest collection of personal data blatantly ignores data privacy legislation and responsible security, is it entirely blameless for the high profile deaths of its users?

Twitter and Facebook, despite their size, still have an immature business model. The one thing that they have identified is that the more personal data they can share, the more they can monetise it. This puts them in straight opposition to the basic rights of their customers.

Dark Clouds for Security

2010-03-01T18:21:00.000Z

It hasn't been a good start to the year for cloud computing security.

Firstly the largest Cloud App - Gmail - got hacked. This became a major diplomatic and corporate incident.
Google blamed the Chinese Authorities, in effect, of state sponsored corporate espionage. They identified China as the source of attacks not only against Chinese dissidents email but a number of US technology companies. Google then said it would quit the country unless the government relaxed censorship.

Next Germany and France advised their citizens not to use Microsoft Internet Explorer because the Chinese attacks had exploited security flaws in IE.

In a seperate incident hackers were able to penetrate the virtualization boundaries in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud - EC2 - service and view what was going on, on other peoples servers.

However it seems that Amazon have protected themselves against this - as Anthony Assi of Thales points out - in their Web Services Customer Service Agreement.

Security. We strive to keep Your Content secure, but cannot guarantee that we will be successful at doing so, given the nature of the Internet. Accordingly...you acknowledge that you bear sole responsibility for adequate security, protection and backup of Your Content and Applications.

One of the major business arguments against cloud computing is lack of security. Yet it seems that one of the major cloud computing providers agrees, and simply denies all responsibility for it.

Improving market mechanics

2010-02-22T16:37:00.001Z

Asset Finance Europe: Nic Evans explores how to improve market mechanics for lease syndication http://bit.ly/aVU2M0

The traditions of fishermen on the coast of Kerala in Southern India have not changed for hundreds of years.

Yet Robert Jensen of Harvard University found that as mobile phone coverage extended down the Kerala coast between 1997 and 2001 the improved communications, and the resulting efficiency of the market, brought market prices down by 4% - while the fishermen’s profits increased by 8%.

While the inefficiencies of the asset finance broking and syndication marketplace aren’t as great as this, in previous articles I have explored the benefits and obstacles to improving the liquidity of markets for asset finance. In this article I will look at the mechanisms needed for such a market. More..

History of the World in 101 objects

2010-02-09T18:01:00.000Z

I am amazed by a radio program about historical objects. It is very unusual radio. You can't hear history. And silent objects don't make good radio. Yet in "A History of the World in 100 Objects" Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, brings the objects alive and puts them in their context. A flint hand axe is introduced by James Dyson (who must hope that the design of his tools last half a million years) and Madhur Jaffrey says how her mother gave her a pestle when she came to England, 4000 years after the first farmers ground cereal.
Here's my nomination for the 101st object.

From 1981 - an IBM PC running a Lotus1-2-3 Spreadsheet

The PC transformed business computing. It took the processing power out of the data centre and put the control on the desktop. So it could be used when needed, rather than having the schedule controlling the users. And the spreadsheet liberated business users from the programmer. Rather than having to have programs written to perform predestined tasks you could just express the relationships between data and perform calculations that change each time the data changes - sometimes not quite with the expected results.

It marked the pinnacle of the thirty year long IBM Mainframe empire, which collapsed under competition from clones of its wunderkind. IBM even purchased Lotus, but gave up on the manufacture of PCs in 2005.

The PCs growth became stratospheric, once it became the standard gateway to the internet. A spreadsheet error even played a bit part in the global financial meltdown in October 2008.

Its partners in the skunkworks project, Intel and Microsoft, did profit much more from the PC and the software to run on it, until the demise of the PC, after its thirty year reign, brought about by the pincer attack from the iPad and Google in 2011.

Messages from the future, lessons from the past

2010-01-25T18:16:00.000Z

The start of 2010 saw a new strain of the pandemic everyone thought had been beaten - the Y2K Bug. This new strain - 2K10 - saw several epedemic outbreaks:

Users of Microsoft Mobile saw SMS text messages from the future 2016.
30 million German credit and debit card users were told "nein!" and had payments declined because of a bug in their card's chip.
Symantec's Endpoint Protection Manager stopped receiving updates.
As always in epedemics the elderly were most vulnerable, and Apple's hand held device stopped working ( resuscitate those iPhone addicts - we are talking about the Newton!)

On 1st January 2000 I was hit by a bug - just a common 'flu bug - and spent the day on Lem-Sip life support, certifying that our European business had not been impacted. This included testing that washrooms and car parks were fully working. In the three months of testing, there was only one old PC that an employee had at home which stopped picking up email - quite rightly because email hadn't been invented in 1900!
After the hysteria of Y2K testing, it seems strange that the testing of future dates should not be one of the standard system test cycles. To be fair, if you have to test a complex ERP package, it is not a simple task to "wind on the clock" and rerun an entire regression test (particularly if you have to change every date input to reflect the change to "todays" date.
But the most of the devices impacted were not that large or complex, and its an expensive mistake with the €10 replacement cost of 30 million cards.

A Year of Change

2010-01-15T14:13:00.000Z

Despite the relative absence of large new clients, lease software vendors are still investing in their products, particularly their back office functions, reports Nic Evans in January 2010 Leasing Life

Finance Companies are expecting their technology to work harder in these tough times. As many organisations start new budget periods in the new year there will be further downward pressure on the total technology budget, on top of cuts already made during 2009.

In the last quarter Corporate IT spending as a whole has been making something of a recovery. IBM and Oracle, big suppliers to the enterprise market, recently announced quarterly results up on a year ago. Forrester and Gartner, leading IT research firms, predict that the downturn will bottom out in the fourth quarter 2009 and that growth will resume in 2010. However the two firms don’t agree on the depth of the recession in IT and, more importantly, the speed at which the technology industry will pull out from its slump. Forrester sees a V-shaped future, whereas Gartner predicts more of an L, with revenues remaining below last year’s level until 2012 at the earliest.

Even if corporate investment in IT does bounce back, it could be some time before the benefits are felt. In their new book, “Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology Is Reshaping The Economy”, Adam Saunders and Erik Brynjolfsson highlight that it often takes five to seven years for larger IT investments to produce substantial returns because it typically takes that long for enterprises to make the organisational changes needed to capitalise on the new technology. The recession has encouraged companies to focus their IT investments on boosting the productivity of shrunken workforces.

More specifically in the asset finance market the signs of recovery in software sales are not so apparent. None of the software vendors I have spoken to in the last quarter of 2009 have had more than a couple of new European customers this year for the big administration packages. However the expenditure that is being made, shares the focus on boosting productivity.

“Greatly improving origination practices including rethinking risk assessment are top of mind for nearly all business leaders.” Says Todd Davis, International Decision Systems CEO. “Also, to be able to rapidly evolve as the economy strengthens, companies are looking to be more nimble and adaptable. Being able to quickly and inexpensively react to a growing market or the ability to handle a unique deal type will provide the critical foundations for growth.”

Much of the expenditure is being spent on improving the implementation of existing software to get more efficient use – taking out some of the complexity and customisations that may have accumulated over the years or upgrading the software to take advantage of the latest features. GE Capital is in the process of re-implementing their installation of Oracle Lease Management in the UK, to take advantage of the new features in the upgrade to Release 12 of the eBusiness Suite.

There are clearly some burning areas for immediate improvement. “We are seeing a big focus on collections and forecasting, particularly liquidity reporting” says Ed White of White Clarke Group. “Our delinquency management modules are just flying off the shelf” concurs Andrew Denton of CHP Consulting. “And there is a big demand for reporting to monitor the effectiveness of the business.”

However there is a wider trend visible away from the traditional emphasis on sales systems towards improvements on the portfolio management. “We are seeing a move from the traditional front end focus of the industry toward operational excellence and back office process improvement” says Denton. “With the cut back of costs and headcount reduction that the industry has experienced there has been a loss of experience to make the necessary changes” warns White.

The maintenance and support costs of software are a major part of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the technology. The basis of the charges will depend on a number of factors. For software run on the finance companies own infrastructure the charges will be a percentage –up to 20% - of the initial licence cost. This licence cost may be calculated on the number of users, the modules and functionality used, or the volume of business under management. Clearly there are savings to be made by reviewing the licence agreement and taking unused licences and modules off maintenance. “With a choice of two systems, we are simply putting all new business onto the system with fixed costs rather than using the alternative which has volume based charging.” confides one lessor operations manager.

The other area where savings on licence and maintenance costs can be made is through consolidation of systems, particularly following rationalisation, mergers and acquisitions. One major UK bank now has five separate instances of the same application running in different locations. The software vendors are keen too assist with rationalisation of systems, even at the expense of maintenance income. “It’s in our interests to strip out unneeded costs from the organisation and help them invest in taking the system forward with new features rather than maximising our support revenue.” says CHPs Denton.

In the last month CHPs release of version 5 of their ALFA package is the most trumpeted asset finance technology news of the year. Technically it is a major change for the company, translating the entire package to Java. However from the user’s point of view the change is much more evolutionary. CHP claim that they have kept all the functionality from the later versions of release 4 so it doesn’t require reimplementation or reconfiguration of the system. The portability of Java and SQL gives clients a broad choice of technical platform: “They can run v5 on their current platform. They can run it on a low cost open source Linux and MySQL database. They can run it on an IBM Mainframe. It’s all about maximising their existing investment in technology” Says Denton.

A big ownership saving from ALFA v5, and other entirely web based applications, comes from reductions in the desktop computing cost. Running entirely in a web browser cuts the deployment costs – there is no need to install software on each desktop - and the PC client costs – it will run equally well on older PCs or lower powered netbooks.

The simplicity of web based clients coupled with business rules processing and workflow offers more strategic efficiencies to companies. Functions such as collections or repossessions can easily be outsourced, or financial functions can be centralised into shared service centres to give economies of scale. “The trick here is to decide what to keep local. Business rules give you the flexibility to keep short term arrears handled by operations in the customer’s local office. Over 30 days they can be passed to central delinquency management or outsourced collections.” CHP’s Denton says.

Todd Davis of IDS reiterates the strategic benefits of operational agility “With configurable solutions like the ones from International Decision Systems, business users can use administrative tools to adapt business logic or product extensions to quickly and easily capture opportunities in a changing business landscape.”

An entirely web based client does open up a wider range of alternative options to the traditional Windows based laptop and desktop. In theory web-based applications could be run on Linux, Apple, or even a Blackberry. Google is already offering its Chrome web browser, as a slicker alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and Android, a smartphone operating system to challenge Blackberry and the iPhone. There is much talk of Google bringing out its own free operating system.

In practice however more complex business browser applications will be optimised to run under a specific web browser – usually Internet explorer – and they would not be usable on smaller screens of smartphones. And while webmail reduces the need for the Windows PC to run Outlook or Lotus Notes email, a business is not likely to be able to run without Microsoft Office.

With this unavoidable dependence of business on the Microsoft based PC, most organisations will have been watching Octobers public release of Windows 7. The perceived corporate wisdom is that there is no benefit for early adopters of Microsoft products: “Always wait for Service Pack One”. However with most corporate users having held back from upgrading to Vista and staying on Windows XP, many will now be planning to move quickly to Windows 7. Most will already have betas and corporate preview copies being tested. The business benefits of Windows 7 are certainly there:

Improved security features including Bitlocker disk encryption also protecting USB memory sticks,
Improved performance over Vista, with Win7 already appearing on low powered netbooks, which previously could only run XP.
Improved usability, with many of the annoyances of Vista ironed out.

However if you are looking for immediate cost reductions from Windows 7 you will have to look very hard. With the typical licence upgrade from XP or Vista costing around £100, many of the innovative features only available in the Ultimate premium edition and most upgrade strategies needing the PC to be wiped, Microsoft are clearly looking at restoring their revenues rather than lowering the Total Cost of Ownership.

Nic Evans – is a consultant and interim manager for finance technology, business change and value delivery, specialising in asset finance. Contact: Nic@nicevans.eu and LinkedIn

Legacy documentation and other obstacles to liquidity

2010-01-07T20:54:00.000Z

In Asset Finance Europe:
My second article on the obstacles to building new syndication markets and liquidity for asset finance. http://is.gd/5SfYt

A year of change

2010-01-03T16:53:00.004Z

Working Harder, Working Smarter

Despite the relative absence of large new clients, lease software vendors are still investing in their products, particularly their back office functions, reports Nic Evans in January 2010 Leasing Life

Finance Companies are expecting their technology to work harder in these tough times. As many organisations start new budget periods in the new year there will be further downward pressure on the total technology budget, on top of cuts already made during 2009.

http://bit.ly/bpzKKt

The 2009 Data Breach Hall of Shame from CIO.com

2009-12-19T09:12:00.000Z

If you were ever to need any justification for the cost of security:
The 2009 Data Breach Hall of Shame on CIO.com

Silo but deadly

2009-12-08T15:36:00.001Z

A great article in the Economist on Banks and their Information Technology.
How can the sector spend so much on IT and still have such messy systems?
What was ITs role in the financial crisis?

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15016132

Deepening funding markets for finance

2009-11-17T14:53:00.001Z

In Asset Finance Europe:
Using technology to bring badly needed liquidity to leasing and asset finance http://is.gd/4X7W2

Global risks from within

2009-10-21T18:50:00.014+01:00

What is the biggest risk from within their own organisation that keeps CEOs awake at night?

The Financial Sector Technology Security Conference earlier this month was chaired by Marcus Alldrick, CISO of Lloyd's of London. He shared insight on Global Threats from research Lloyd's had commissioned from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Global Business Leaders rated the priority, and their preparedness, for risks to their business.

The top nine risks were much as you would expect - particularly in the current climate:

Source : Global Business Leader Survey: Risk Priorities and Preparedness
The surprise for me came in tenth place with the highest placed internal risk -Project Delivery Risk.

Companies are more prepared to get hit by excessive regulation, insolvency and a credit crunch than they are for their own projects to go wrong. Project delivery risk comes above protectionism (ranked 13th), failed investment.(14th), fraud and corruption (15th) and an information security breach (16th).

So how is it that projects, that are started by the organisation as beneficial change to deliver strategic value, can turn into such a big risk ?

Could the risk be from the very leaders themselves? Executive sponsorship of major projects is critical. They should be leading the project drive to deliver benefits and also overseeing the major project risks - particularly risks coming from outside the project organisation. Yet all to often the Executive sponsor will have little experience of leading major business change, particularly technology enabled change. They will have earned their position by being great at running the business.

Project Portfolio and Programme Management (P3M) is also vital. A big part of their role is risk management, and stakeholder management. If they don't properly keep on top of risks, and the organisations expectation of what the project can realistically deliver, then they are failing - and the projects will too.

This years update of Prince2 with the publication of guidance for Directing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 2009 should be greatly welcomed. So too is the implementation of Gateway Reviews for major Government projects.

Businesses should take on board these best practices. Although public sector projects have a notorious reputation for failure, adoption of the strategies to avoid such failures can benefit any project. Eliminating the cost of failure and assuring the value delivery of projects would be sweet dreams for any CEO.

Hitting software costs below the belt

2009-09-29T14:07:00.005+01:00

It was hitting below the belt. I’m sorry.

The conference technology vendor panel had been discussing how to make your systems work harder. They agreed on that, in general, organisations only use 40% of their software. And consensus was to improve that utilisation by more effective – and efficient - implementation. One suggested the efficiency savings could be up to 20%.

I just had to ask the question: “Shouldn’t we just stop paying for the 60% we aren’t using?”

The vendors did mutter a valid response: I can’t just pay Microsoft for the 40% of the Office functions I use – and different people use a different 40%.
But then my family gets a Student and Teacher licence for Office costing only 10% of the Pro licence (under £100 for 3 user licences – which fortunately corresponds to the number of students and teachers in our household!) And it seems they only use PowerPoint and Word Art for presenting their homework.

There is however a serious point behind my question.

For most enterprise software you are paying up to 20% of the current licence fee in maintenance. Those bills will be coming in through the year, and probably get approved by local management on the basis that they are pretty much the same as they have always been. And they must have been in the budget.

You must review all the real estate of your application portfolio including all those old applications tucked away.
You are still paying for all the user licences for old CRM systems that are now only used by one department - you could cut the user licence maintenance by 80%.
No-one in the department can actually remember why they had to carry on using the old system. There was some feature that they needed.. but no-one quite remembers what it was.. or if it is still needed. The old manager kicked up such a stink that they just carried on using it for a transition period… now five years. So with a small process change you can eliminate the entire system licence maintenance… and the servers they use.. and the Disaster Recovery costs… and the support effort.. and the database licences.. and all the duplicate entry.

The rigorous approach to this requires zero-based budgeting. Each year you must consider if each application is really earning its keep.

Government finally realises IT project chiefs need ‘relevant experience’

2009-09-25T13:48:00.001+01:00

Government finally realises IT project chiefs need ‘relevant experience’

Posted using ShareThis

Sun rises for Oracle

2009-04-21T12:35:00.005+01:00

So Sun Microsystems have wed with Oracle - for a reputed dowry of $7.4Bn after jilting suitor IBM.

While I am sure that Oracle have done their sums for this deal, I question the the value of this merger for customers and the industry.

With Oracles software aquisitions of Siebel, PeopleSoft, BEA and JD Edwards in the last few years much of its focus has been inward on Fusion - merging the products and trying retain customers, rather than developing and innovating.

Oracles main attraction has been its offering based on open systems, Linux and hardware independance. The inevitable focus on Sun hardware and Solaris will be a small step backward. Whether Oracle kill MySQL or not, the industry has certainly lost the independance of the only serious open source database.

Will this diminish the attraction of Java as a software development platform? Up until now Java has been fiercely independant of major software vendors - as evidenced by Sun's legal victory over Microsofts attempt to produce its proprietory version. Incidentally, it seems that Sun's settlement from Microsoft was blown on their aquisition of StorageTek - how did one declining hardware company expect to get synergy from aquiring another declining hardware company?

I believe that the pearl for Oracle in the oyster bed of Sun is OpenOffice.org. This is the only competition in sight for Microsofts Office and gives Oracle a small foothold on the desktop, flying the open source flag, as they aspire to challenge Microsoft.

Further comment on the deal at:

Peter Thomas: http://peterthomas.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/mergers-and-value/
Andrew Brust: http://www.brustblog.com/archive/2009/04/20/the-oracle-deal-what-it-means-for-microsoft.aspx
Tony Baer: http://www.onstrategies.com/blog/?p=362

Can Web 2.0 fit into Dot Com enterprises?

2009-04-14T23:23:00.008+01:00

IT news headlines force me to return to the subject of sustainability of Web 2.0:

What are we to read into this high divorce rate?

Can it be that more traditional dotcom businesses don't quite know how to manage these web 2.0 social networking startups?

Or is it that the social networking startups have a flawed business model?

It is not enough just to have a cool idea - it is only really cool if it has a sustainable business model. - "Hey, wouldnt it be a cool idea just to give away pound notes"-

I do concede that Skype does qualify as really cool on this criteria as it does actually manage to charge customers!

This sustainability distinguishes the "next big thing" from a "passing fad". Is Twitter just “this year’s Second Life?”

More fool the dotcom businesses who rushed to snap up these startups - more rapaciously than a banker buying toxic debt- with no clear idea of how the acquisitions would fit into their portfolio - and deliver strategic value to justify their premium prices.

Don't Cut Costs - Add Strategic Value

2009-04-01T12:15:00.014+01:00

Five Habits of Highly Efficient Banks! I came back to an Arthur D Little survey of 51 Major European banks, published in August 2008.

The habits of the most efficient banks can provide useful inspiration for improvement

And who are they?

1. Banco Popular - Spain
2. Kaupthing - Iceland
3. Sv. Handelsbanken - Sweden
4. Glitnir - Iceland
5. HBOS - UK
6. RBS - UK

Now after my short lived prediction about Twitter (not charging) I can't claim any great prophecy abilities. To the credit of the authors they do provide some useful insights

Develop a cost-conscious culture. In banks that have a corporate culture where cost-efficiency undergoes continuous improvement, cost-consciousness is deeply integrated in overall strategy and is encouraged throughout the whole business. Top management makes cost-efficiency a priority.
Invest in IT. Advanced IT systems have an important role to play in improving efficiency. Their impact is on two fronts: they help reduce human involvement and they support faster and more accurate processes.
Balance cost-cutting and revenue generation. When it comes to cutting costs, it is crucial to cut the right costs; there has to be a balance between reducing the cost base and retaining the capacity to generate revenue.

There are just some very painful bits:

For example, at Kaupthing, slow and cumbersome decision-making is seen as more risky than fast decision-making, since slow decision-making creates the risk of missed opportunities. Similarly, Glitnir has a dynamic and flexible organization designed to allow the bank to provide services faster than its competitors, both to satisfy customers and to lower its own costs.

The lesson I draw from this is that the focus should not be on cost cutting, but rather delivering strategic value.

It doesn't add to the strategic value to have a data centre full of servers running at 10% CPU utilisation. So invest some money in virtualisation - and turn up the thermostat on the air-conditioning a few degrees while you are in there because the servers wont mind.
It doesn't add to your strategic value to own your email servers. If you can get e-mail (with the security you need) in the cloud go for it.
Go through your application portfolio and question the strategic value of each one. If the costs outweigh the strategic value then switch it off. Don't cut costs - but rather eliminate them if you can.

Of course, it may be that those banks that have fallen from grace did have IT right. They could have had their IT and change programmes fully aligned with their business strategy. It was just the business strategy that was wrong....

the Economics of Twitter

2009-03-31T01:11:00.013+01:00

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.” —Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988).

No sooner had I questioned the Twitter business model in my last blog and boldly predicted ...

“The hoax on Twitter charging caused such a supernova explosion in the
twitterverse so [Evan Williams] couldn't ever do that now.”

...than it came out in Marketing Magazine that Twitter would start charging.

Twitter’s Biz Stone clarified it in his blog:

… it’s important to note that whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. What we’re thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services. We are still very early in the idea stage and we don’t have anything to share just yet despite a recent surge in speculation. When we do, we’ll be sure to let you know.

While that’s a long way short of a business plan that my bank manager would want, it’s good to see that there is some thought about how to make Twitter pay for itself.

So having blown my credentials as a technology futurologist, let’s stay on some other facts about corporate use of twitter:

Salesforce.com announced a beta interface from social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
I got a second family car this week.

“Hang on” I hear you ask. “What’s that got to do with twitter?” Patience, dear reader.

To get to the point, after over two hours on a very faint VOIP line to an offshore call centre my insurer came back with a quote that was 250% higher than one car, rather than the 20% discount I was expecting. I vented my rage on Twitter.

I got three replies to my twitter in a few hours:

One from a fellow disgruntled customer
One from another insurer saying they would welcome my business
One from the UK Head of External Communications at my insurer asking me to email him with more details.

I agree with Manager Tools audio blog that Twitter is a big personal distraction. However, if you haven’t got someone in your company looking at how to use twitter and social media to engage more effectively with your customers, then drop me a line.

An unhappy customer tells twice as many people about their experience, than a satisfied one. If that "flame" is on Twitter it can be seen by tens of millions. So if you aren’t listening to your customers who is? It's all free (for the moment) so cost isn't an issue. It's good to see companies who listen to their customers – and who treat social media as more than just something for teenagers.

Update: The customer service department at my insurer has checked the recording of my call, and has just sent me £20 in retail vouchers as compensation for my wasted time. Is there anyone else who has actually made money from Twitter? - I wouldn't make a living from it!

Remove unwanted guests and dotcom 2.0 free lunches

2009-03-21T07:02:00.023Z

A warning about unwanted guests is received. "I'm sorry to say that you may have had more guests than you anticipated when you kindly had little Freddie to stay." his mother emails. "His head was fair crawling - believe me what was going on up there would put the Summer of Love to shame."
A quick check in our family finds no cause for alarm. But if there had been, Gmail provided the answer. Top of the sponsored links - triggered by one word in the email - was the link "Remove Lice Eggs Now".

Google survived the last dot com boom, and will grow through this crunch, because it got its business model perfectly right. Despite the cut back in media advertising, Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief executive of the world’s biggest advertising company, WPP says he is placing more adverts on Google through the crunch. He gets perfectly targeted placement and feedback on the response in seconds. Everyone wins. Advertisers get value for money, Google "does good" and makes a profit which pays for my gmail, calendar and contacts cloud, and my two blogs and youtube.

The jury of the business world is still out on Twitter. I use it as a big RSS feed. I follow tweeps who chat :

on my subjects and interests: @CorneliusFicht @MikeSchaffner @LMHead @D_RJoseph @BookBrowse
on social media: @SebastienPage @ZacharyFiner @TheParallaxView
news and tech: @IT_World @GuardianTech @R4Today and @LeasingLife (what a sad life, I hear you say)

Even the ancient office of the Lord Mayor of London follows Twitter - that's the Square Mile of the City not buffoon Boris. An intern pointed out that during any speech he makes there would be at least five people twittering: they get instant feedback and spin.

But the big thing I just don't get about Twitter is how Evan Williams is ever going to make any money from it. I don't ever visit the Twitter website so no adverts. I text my twitters or send them from my iPod Touch. Twitterdeck picks up the twitters I want. Twitterfeed pumps out links to my blogs. Twitscoop tells me the hot topics. The hoax on Twitter charging caused such a supernova explosion in the twitterverse so he couldn't ever do that now.

The leader in this weeks Economist gets right to the point:

The demise of a popular but unsustainable business model now seems inevitable.
“IN RECENT years, consumers have become used to feasting on online freebies of all sorts: news, share quotes, music, e-mail and even speedy internet access. These days, however, dotcoms are not making news with yet more free offerings, but with lay-offs—and with announcements that they are to start charging for their services.” These words appeared in The Economist in April 2001, but they’re just as applicable today.

Now bear with me as there is one further important point in my flow of thought: Facebook.

If Facebook was a country it would have a population between Japan and Mexico. And a GDP below Zimbabwe.

Its targeting of advertising frankly sucks. Although my status is married it continues to tell me that there are hundreds of singles in my hometown dieing to meet me. I give the "thumbs down" to the advert but they don't take the hint.

More sinister is what they want to do with all the information we are providing with them on our preferences, addresses, phone numbers: - a young cousin is pleading with all his friends to put their mobile/cell phone numbers onto Facebook. But Facebook wants to claim perpetual ownership of all content ever loaded to the site. What is the response? Out of 175 Million members they have only had 30,000 comments. That's less than the number of people campaigning against the "new look". Twice as many people have joined "Nutella is SEX in a Bottle "group than care about what happens to their personal data.

Am I lapsing into paranoia? I clicked on a fun looking movie quiz application in Facebook yesterday. In the small print to use the application ,the third party asked for my consent to use my personal details including my status, location and friends... What is their Web 2.0 business model?

Update 1: Leaks that Twitter will charge for certain corporate services

Update 2: Good argument for why Microsoft should buy Facebook..

Update 2a: ..while admitting defeat in Encarta v Wikipedia.

Update 3: CIO. com article Why the Financial Future of Social Networks Depends on Solving the Privacy Puzzle The business models of social networks could rely on an ignorance towards privacy from their users, experts say. But recent research indicates normal Facebook users have begun altering their privacy settings to control the information people (and potentially advertisers) can see, which could affect the ability of social networks to make money...

Virtual Disaster

2009-03-12T23:39:00.007Z

With the undoubted cost benefits of virtualisation, are we ignoring some downside risks?
When you see the same issue coming at you from three different directions then it must be time to reflect:

I had an interesting perspective on my “virtual laptop” blog from a colleague in Disaster Recovery: “this return to network centricity is a substantial threat/risk”.
Stratus (veteran of high reliability computing) is to offer users high availability within a single server using VMware's Infrastructure Foundation together with its own system for fault-tolerance.
Companies facing IT budgetary pressures should not overlook testing their disaster recovery plans, especially those with virtualised environments.

So who is right?

Most virtualisation cost benefits come from centralisation of technology. Is the downside of this that we are putting all our eggs in one basket? Are we moving away from having a distributed computing model, interconnected with internet technology – which was developed in the cold war to withstand a nuclear attack. The Centralisation Empire Strikes Back?
Well, if you just have one big blade server running your virtual server farm then it would become one massive single point of failure. It's the virtualisation management software that does the magic to really mitigate that risk. The virtual servers are just software files that can be:

quickly copied for rapid provisioning of new virtual servers (and bare metal recovery of existing servers).
moved between different disks and CPUs so they become completely independent of underlying hardware (and any faults).
stored in a database, which can then be continuously replicated to a second site.

This very ethereal - almost fluid - nature of managed virtual servers makes them much less prone to both faults and disasters.
If you have got the technology right – and tested that it really does what the salesman says!

Low Hanging Fruit? You have no idea.

2009-03-04T08:42:00.004Z

The other day I was walking in Bushey Park, the royal hunting grounds next to Hampton Court Palace. There is a glorious avenue of mature chestnut trees that leads up to a fountain of Diana, the goddess of hunting. I couldn't help noticing how the lower branches of the trees were trimmed to a perfect height.

As I walked on into a wilder corner of the park I came across a herd of deer. In a business meeting.

The Chairstag of the meeting introduced the main agenda item:
"The herd has enjoyed enormous success since the introduction of the relaxed regulatory regime for royal hunting. We have seen double digit growth in our numbers. However this growth is simply not sustainable. We do not have enough food in the park to support further increases. The Royal Park Keepers have been to the government to ask for some hay bales, but found that the Banks had got there first. So we need to take drastic action. I will now open the discussion to the floor."

A young stag was bursting to speak. "I know the answer! We should go for ....low ..hanging ..fruit."

A wise older doe cut him off. "I have eaten them already. You must have no eyes. You missed a few choice chestnuts. But I will refrain from calling you anything"

"We have only three options:
Firstly we wait to evolve into Giraffes to reacher higher up the trees. But that will only benefit future generations.

Secondly we could turn into carnivores and eat that consultant listening to our meeting over there. But that would destroy our brand image, and we would lose 4,000 years of goodwill.

So in the absence of any better ideas, I am going to break into the park keepers hut to get that chainsaw, and chop me a few trees..."

As the doe walked past me, I couldn't help asking her: "What do you call a deer with no eyes?"

"No idea...."

Free as a cloud

2009-02-23T09:33:00.003Z

This blog may seem terse as I am multitasking. Walking the dogs,
listening to a podcast on the latest financial collapse, and blogging.

Using my free cloud computing infrastructure.
- A free iPod touch that came with my mobile phone contract,
- contact from gmail using MS Exchange synchronization (OK, I did have to
pay £5 for the touch software upgrade)
- sent from an open wifi access point I pass on the way home.

Could an enterprise harness this?

Sent from my iPod

Nic Evans
Mailto:nic@nicevans.eu

Virtual Laptops?

2009-02-18T15:59:00.007Z

The worldwide market for virtualisation software is going to increase by over 40% in 2009 according to Gartner. With much of that growth coming from Hosted Virtual Desktops or HVDs.

In layman's terms that means you don't run your programs on your desktop PC but you get a good view of the programs running on your share of some massive computer complex somewhere else. As there is only one computer with one software configuration, in one place, it is much more reliable and cheaper to run.

Yes you can call me a jaded old cynic - because I fear I have become one. I don't quite see why 2009 is going to be the breakthrough year for the virtual desktop. Except for the big Crunch pressure on Total Cost of Ownership TCO.

My second IT assignment (over 25 years ago) was working on Virtual Storage Personal Computing. With programs running on your share of some massive computer complex somewhere else. It was much better than the first IT assignment where we had 30 developers working on a mini-computer with 4Mb of memory. We only got 3 compiles a day.

And Citrix and Terminal services have been established for many years now. They are certainly successful at distributing those big complex desktop applications, which have the non-pc name of Fat clients. Because of the low TCO - and because they can be right beside the big databases which have to exchange large amounts of data with the fat clients.

The two biggest obstacles to the HVD still remain:

The user experience is never perfect. Given any choice, most users would go for a slower PC, rather than a faster HVD - that might slow down at random depending on what other users are doing.
Most user communities have a mix of desktops and laptops.

Now there are ways around this. At a Citrix conference I attended back in 2000 they demonstrated a thin client running on a Psion 5, the forerunner of todays netbook. And with a 3G dongle and wi-fi, it is becoming practical to run a virtual desktop from anywhere.

The main "desktop applications" - email and office suites- have been optimised to run on desktops and laptops and carry on running when offline. A blip on the line and your virtual desktop is lost.

One of the most pointless virtualisations I saw was to deploy email Lotus Notes (which still remains the best distributed database) using Citrix.

Now there is a virtualisation technology I mentioned in my last blog that offers an interesting way around these obstacles. If you haven't done so already take a look at Moka5. It is a virtual machine that runs on your desktop or laptop. The entire software image is pulled down from a central distribution point, but can then be run offline. User data on the client can be backed up the server, and is kept separately from the Software image (Which can be refreshed if it is updated or gets broken). The virtual machine will run on a variety of operating systems, and can even run on "bare metal" - a PC without any operating system. Their labs have a number of example Virtual Machines: I have a Linux XP, and One Laptop per Child downloaded , as well as my own Windows 7 virtual machine. They even claim that you can put the Moka5 client onto a USB memory stick so you can "provide Users with their desktop: anywhere, any device"

Which is I suppose the ultimate Virtual Laptop.

(For more details behind Gartners view see http://gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=883312 )

Curtains for Windows XP?

2009-02-11T20:31:00.009Z

I am writing this blog from Windows 7 beta.

It is running on my main business laptop.

Am I mad? No - because it is running in a vmware virtual machine kept well away from my production programs, data and Windows Vista. First sign of misbehaviour and the VM gets it.

However it is looking good so far - and MokaFive virtualisation is brilliant!

Depending on which Microsoft spokesperson you listen to Windows 7 is the saviour of Microsoft, or is going to bring about a peoples revolt where users will rise up against the evil corporations perpetuating the use of Windows XP.

Well Mister Balmer- don't start your monkey dance yet. Windows 7 may be what Vista should have been. It may have the cool Aero interface of Vista. I love it when you press the Windows button + tab and all the open programs flick past like my album collection on the iPod. But cool alone doesn't make it on to the enterprise desktop.

Internet Explorer 8 may have a lot of new features - including a backwards compatibility button that IE7 was missing - and gone a long way to catch up with Google Chrome and Firefox. But if I want IE8 I can install it on XP anyhow.

But the two biggest bugbears of Vista still remain:

it runs like a dog. I am just running one program - Chrome - on a machine with 1Gb memory and 2 x 2Ghz Processors and it is crawling. *
they moved all the controls around in an apparently random way so noone can find anything.

Enterprise Desktop engineers will get a few licences to pilot as a precaution against the day when Microsoft finally say WinXP goes out of support. But there simply isn't anything BIG enough in Windows 7 to make it a compelling upgrade for the Enterprise.

At the Microsoft demo of Windows 95 I asked the squirming salesman "Is this naming convention a marketing tactic so users will always be demanding this years windows version?". I can see why Microsoft had to drop the date: how could they sell Vista as Windows 2005 when in finally launched in 2007?

However for the foreseeable future the Enterprise is going to save its money and cling onto its Windows 2002 well into 2010.

As a postcript it seems that even Intel are saying that Windows 7 is going to be tought to fit onto a netbook - and that is with a premium version that only lets you run 3 programs at a time

* for comparison I have added this comment from a virtual machine running Linux XP with half the memory and it is flying!

There's Snow Business..

2009-02-02T18:10:00.007Z

If, like me, you woke this morning to a foot of snow what would your first reaction be?

Call a "duvet day" and go back to sleep for another hour.
Dig your way into the car and get it defrosted for an early start.
Execute your company business continuity plan.

If your answer isn't (3) - why not? Your business continuity plan ( that keeps the business running - not just your technology) should be able to cope with any interruption to your business.

Relevant sections of your plan on this snowy morning are:

How do you assess if there is a threat? Does it include contact details for the building security guard ? They will be able to tell you quickly what access to the office is like - since they started their shift at 6:00am.

How do you communicate with your employees? Your plan should have a documented way of getting a message to all your employees, through a call tree or SMS text blast. Whatever decision you have made after your assessment - even if it is "try and get in if you can" - you will have a good picture of the likely turnout within 30 minutes of sending the message out. You will also find out all the problems in the call tree. I can guarantee that the main problem will be the managers who don't keep their copy of the numbers at home "because the only time we ever use it is for the annual test."

How do you run the business with a skeleton staff? Pandemic planning, that the business continuity planning professionals say we should now have, sets the priorities to run the business with 30% absence. What are those priorities for the business? What bits of the business can really be run WFH (Working From Home)? Hint: You get the accounts receivable function going before the accounts payable...

How do you communicate with your customers? You don't e-mail all your customers to say you are having problems, but you should have a message on your customers service desk to apologize for the longer response times. You do make really sure that there is someone good answering the phone for new business enquiries. Your next customer may not be able to get into work but they are going to be looking to spend the morning placing orders.

Your Business Continuity plan is a real working document. It must cope with any interruption to the business. You must plan in advance.. because when it happens you won't have time to plan. Or has the plan not been touched since the position of BC Planner went in the last round of job cuts?

Spare a thought for the DJ on the breakfast show of our local radio station. Most of the staff couldn't make it in - including his normal sidekick and the traffic news reporter. The website collapsed under the weight of hits. The list of school closures that he was reading out was getting slowly longer - but most schools couldn't get through to the switchboard or had lost the password to stop hoaxers. In the end he just gave up and said: "I have made a decision that all schools are closed this morning."

NetBook - Net Profit

2009-01-28T18:37:00.005Z

Little is constant in technology. Yet Gordon Moore's Law has held good since 1965. In short the cost of processing power halves – and the usefulness of a device at the same price doubles - every eighteen months.
(In long: the Intel co-founder observed that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. As this governs every basic measure of the chip – processor speed, memory even pixels on a digital camera – some measures which are a combinations of these factors increase faster.)

Of course Gates' Law that Windows expands to fill the space available does its best to compensate for Moore's Law.

So if you want a device that does a little less, and you run Linux or an older version of Windows, then you can get a netbook laptop for under $500 or as little as $300 (£180). And that's with wi-fi connection, webcam and card slot and USBs to quickly add more capacity.

Its not going to run you Outlook email or big number-crunching company applications. But it will Skype... Blog... Transfer pictures from your camera to webmail or Facebook.... Run a Cloud Application (but more on that soon).

The netbook was the hottest selling new device of 2008. IDC reckon 10.8m sold worldwide in 2008 and more than 20m will sell in 2009. From zero to 10% of the Laptop market in 2 years.

If you haven't been into a school recently, then go along immediately. They have some really neat technology – essential to engage young minds. What I wouldn't give to have had an interactive whiteboard to animate a “death-by-powerpoint” business presentation.

As a Governor of a local school, facing further building delays for its new ICT suite, I was equally surprised to find you can now get an ICT suite in a box. A trolley – you can even bounce up stairs – that opens to reveal 40 netbooks, all charging, and a wifi access point. All for less than the cost of the first IBM PC. And one hundred thousand times the RAM... which using the back of my envelope is right on line with Moores Law.

So if you haven't found a place for the netbook in your IT strategy yet – or at least your weekend carry-on bag – why not?

Get Rich Quick for Blue Monday

2009-01-19T14:03:00.005Z

Today is Blue Monday - proven to be the most depressing day of the year - in the biggest depression of our lifetime so TODAY IS AS BAD AS IT GETS!
Drastic times call for desperate actions. So stop off at the supermarket on the way home and get cheapest supermarket own brand biscuits, butter and chocolate, soft brown sugar and a tin of Carnation condensed milk and make yourself millionaires shortbread - the recipe is on the tin or here.

The shortbread is all yours which makes you a millionaire for a few minutes...
£1.50 of ingredients will make you 9 pieces, each of which retail for £1.50 each - 900% return on capital.
Or if you have the self will take it into work tomorrow and give a piece to each of the survivors and the resulting motivational lift will repay countless times.

Make money by saving it

2009-01-15T12:40:00.013Z

The figures are grim: Sales down 20%, bad debts rocketing, cost of materials from suppliers still going up despite the falling rates on the commodity markets. All heads around the board room table turn to the CIO – avoiding eye contact with the HR Director. An all too familiar scene isn't it?

The “nice to have” projects went a long time ago, and the innovative agile development for the customer service web site was the next to go. Everything has been offshored, virtualized and converged that can be . We are now getting down to cutting the essential maintenance on the accounting system or even “turning the lights off” - stopping the running of core systems.

However, you can still innovate and get IT to provide benefits while still cutting costs: Not just “Do more with less” but “Make money by saving it”.

It's not the only tool in the bag but that “web 2.0” is a good hammer to start with.

At my previous work place, the old intranet website was on it last legs, and wasn't accessible by new teams that had merged into the organisation. The cost of rebuilding in Sharepoint was out of the question. A WikiMedia web site, with the pilot running on a PC under the technical architects desk, provided not a new intranet but a wiki and more:

Updates were no longer channelled through a few editors. If you want to make an improvement you just click on the edit tab – although a WYSIWYG editor was top of the list for web 2.1.
Blogs provided an extra way of communicating the challenges we faced, and personal profile pages provided Generation Y ( and others) with a way of networking without the data leakage and time wasting of FaceBook (which remains firmly blocked by the corporate NetNanny)
External training was not provided – but a few wiki evangelists led the charge ( see Wikipatterns

on ways to promote your wiki ).

Exective patronage was essential. Use of blogs as a primary means of communication by senior management greatly helped to the adoption, together with their acknowledgement of other blogs as a two way discussion.

And no security maintenance. Once you had edit access (controlled by our standard web access management tool ) you were trusted to edit anything - with the auditing of changes and undo of errors. Demands to set up read only areas for those critical pages that must never be changed - like the CEOs profile – are answered by adding the page to your watchlist.

But bottom line was that a whole new paradigm for internal communications and knowledge sharing was provided while lowering cost.