Future Ready: The Business of Tomorrow - Today - Business Agility & Resp...

Participated on this panel at the Bloomberg / Dell conference at the fantastic Bloomberg offices in NYC.



In addition to the panel I was on, I really enjoyed the Michael Bloomberg / Michael Dell interview at the end of the event.

Role of the CIO in 2015

Very interesting article by Dion Hinchliff on how the CIO role is changing in today's highly networked organization. He has included some of my comments in his post.

The way work is conducted, especially in knowledge work environments, has changed. The technologies we use and the way we use them is very different from just 5 years ago. CIOs need to change how we select, deploy and support new technologies. Fortunately, many of the newer technologies are cloud-based and, generally, much easier to use.

Managing IT for a Diversified Portfolio of Businesses

Interview by Peter High on how we have created a successful shared technology services in a diversified and decentralized business.

Cloud-first strategy

Nice interview on my cloud-first strategy on IBM THINK Exchange: https://www.think-exchange.com/pacesetters/yuvi-kochar…. Also like the graphic-effects on my picture!

IT as a Service

Information Technology now plays a central role in the functioning of any business. Most, if not all, projects in a modern business have tasks related to technology. As product lifecycles have shortened and more and more business is conducted on-line, the volume of IT work has grown exponentially. IT departments have become a bottleneck in most companies. Business leaders are frustrated by the lack of agility and scalability of IT services and by the constant increase in cost.

Recent advances is Cloud services provide IT with a solution to deploy and scale technology infrastructure quickly and linearly with demand. Further, SAAS solutions like SalesForce and others have demonstrated that high-end technology solutions can be acquired as a subscription and deployed quickly. Further, these solutions are constantly updated with minimal additional cost. Given these experiences with IAAS and SAAS, business now expects internal IT solutions to be delivered in a similar manner. IT as a Service is a hot topic.

Over the past several years, we have developed a model to deliver Enterprise technology solutions as a service. We now have an organizational blueprint and an architecture template that allows us to develop and deliver new services quickly with no capital investment. I will share our experiences over the next several posts.

pic: our backyard, a couple of days ago!

Recent Evolutions of the Internet

At the CTO Roundtable this morning, Steve Crocker, long-term CTO Roundtable member and Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN (the not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with global participants that coordinates the governance of the Internet) led the discussion with two of his colleagues: Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society, and Jamie Hedlund, ICANN's Vice President of Government Affairs - Americas.

Jamie provided an overview of the new how ICANN is rolling out gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains). This will allow the creation of a whole new set of domains like .bank, etc. The idea is to try and make the internet more open and create a pathway for further innovation. It reamins to be seen if this options will start expanding internet URLs away from .com, that now has over 100 Million names. The thinking is that communities built around these new top-level domains will develop enhanced features that better serve the goals of the community members. Also, ICANN, for the first time, is moving away the closed-door selection process that they followed to date to a more open and democratic process.

Leslie then talked about why she believes that 2012 will be the year of IPv6. As we have now allocated most of the 4Bn IPv4 addresses, the long-term way forward is IPv6. IPv4 addresses are bing sold at approximately $11 per address. She believes that this will drive adoption. Also, several large content providers are permanently moving to IPv6 as the default. Let us see if 2012 turns out to be the year of IPv6.


pic: sunset over first snow in 2012

Center for CIO Leadership Success Case
I have been a member of the Center for nearly 5 years now. The interview gave me a chance to reflect on my career and the experiences that prepared me for my current role. We discussed my thoughts on how IT needs to continue to evolve as an integral part of business.

Check out the blog post for an overview or read the full article (PDF).

BYOD

There is an irreversible trend in the workplace of employees owning the computing devices used for work. Given the accelerating rate of new and improved devices hitting the market, enterprises are finding it harder and harder to provide the latest and greatest tools to employees. Teleworkers frequently prefer to work on their home machines than maintain two machines at home.

I agree with the Information Week position that we need to move from protecting the network and the end-points to protecting Enterprise data. While networks and devices are assets that must be well managed and controlled, the true asset is information (data) and insights. So, enterprise IT must primarily focus on securing data. I believe that, for a long time in the future, we will be required to manage hybrid environments where some devices are owned by the enterprise while others are personal devices that employees will like to use for work as well. So, the only way to secure our assets is to secure and manage data.

I continue to look forward to a future innovation where security is embedded with the data and not is just a wrapper around it. That will make our job of securing enterprise data much easier.

Games @ Work
Over the past six months, I have been thinking about the potential use of gaming within the enterprise. The explosive growth of Zynga and other social gaming companies demonstrates how engaging the combination is. In addition, we humans respond extremely well to rewards: loyalty programs, bonuses, etc. Reward programs are also widely used to incent certain customer and employee behavior.

Recently, I came across a new term for this trend - Gamification. I like the Wikipedia definition: The use of game play mechanics for non-game applications.

Game theory is beginning to be widely used to influence customer engagement, behavior and even employee productivity. This BusinessWeek article has examples of use of game theory at a broad range of companies: SAP, Hilton, Siemens, UPS, Nissan, Target, etc.

Earlier this week, Gartner, jumped on the bandwagon with a bold statement: "over half of innovation will be gamified by 2015". Here is a ZDnet story covering Gartners' report in detail. Gartner is advising that "Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization".

I am pleased that we at the CTO Roundable of Washington DC sensed the trend early and are putting together our next Summit on "What CTOs should learn from Gaming" in early fall.

Image: Pacman by Preeti

Cloud Forecast 2015 @ CIO Insight
I was interviewed by Tony Kontzer of CIO Insight for this article. We had a broad discussion about the state of cloud services and how services need to evolve in the areas of management, monitoring, portability and security.

TM Forum Management World Americas - Cloud Summit
I delivered a Summit Keynote at this conference on Nov 9, 2010: Lessons from an Early Cloud Adopter – How the Washington Post Company has Developed its Cloud Strategy

My talk is very well covered in David Carr's blog posting on Forbes.com.

Pic: Fall sunset scene I captured as I walked our dog.

My Podcast
I was recently interviewed by Peter High of Metis Strategy. We covered several topics that are front and center for me. I enjoyed my conversation with Peter a lot. Here is a link to the podcast. We discussed:

• Cloud Computing
  
• Collaboration (Enterprise 2.0) in a decentralized organization
• Leveraging the digital media environment
• Skills IT professionals need for the future
  
• The future of mobile technologies’ impact on media

I checked out a few other interesting podcasts on the Metis website.

Match-making at the Call Center
Infoword reports that IBM and Assurant Solutions will match Call Center reps with callers using real time analytics. Very clever, especially, if it is well executed!

SAAS is now mainstream
I was first introduced to SAAS (then ASP) when I joined Brassring (now Kenexa) in 2000. We were convinced that it was how Enterprise Software will be delivered in the future. Salesforce.com was leading the way. However, most ASPs grew much slower than anybody anticipated. Profitability was elusive and hard to attain.

I believe and Infoworld just validated that SAAS finally arrived in 2009. There is robust growth and one can find multiple feature rich products in most every functional area. My team integrated many new SAAS products with our PeopleSoft ERP last year. A small business starting does not need a single piece of on-premise application software.

CIO focus in 2010 - Light-weight Services
I agree with the results of the Gartner study reviewed in this Infoworld article. Small, very focused projects are getting prioritized. Our 2010 roadmap is filled with smaller projects.

According to the Gartner survey, the top 10 technology priorities for 2010 are (our top 5 are in bold):

1. virtualization
2. cloud computing
3. "Web 2.0" collaborative technologies
4. networking and VoIP
5. analytics and business intelligence
6. mobile
7. data and document storage and management
8. services and service-oriented architecture
9. security technologies
10. IT management

They do not explicitly mention it, but we have seen an uptick in the adoption of SAAS products that can be deployed quickly. We are more focused on SAAS over SOA.

Let users pick their Enterprise Technology?
A recent article in the journal has generated a lot of discussion around how to bridge the enterprise vs consumer IT gap. As usual, it is not as simple as the author makes it sound. The level of flexibility that an employee enjoys should strike the right balance between user productivity, security and cost to acquire and support. Each worker, team and business have different needs and each organization needs to make the right decision for each user. Adopt new technology at the pace that makes sense for your business.

It is important to evaluate a user's needs, determine the most appropriate solution and deliver it quickly. Be flexible and keep an open mind!

Pricing the Cloud
Tony has captured a lot of my thoughts on how cloud computing needs to be priced and consumed in this article. Read the main CIO Insight article on Cloud's Sky High Hype here.

Standards for Clouds - Unit of Compute Power
Cloud or utility computing has been frequently compared with electricity. Nick Carr, in his very popular book Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, painted a very compelling picture of large utility-like computing centers built to host applications and data and compared it with power utilities. The comparison resonated with the readers and his book became a big hit. A significant reason for the creation and the success of power utilities was standardization.

There is a strong consensus on the fact that to deliver to true value of cloud computing, we need standards. However, most people assume that standards imply portability. While that is clearly an ideal state, looking at how clouds are evolving using multiple virtualization technologies, I find the task of achieving true portability daunting and potentially impossible.

I propose that one of the first goals should be creation of a standard unit of computing power - something comparable to KWHr in electricity. This, in conjunction with bandwidth (MBPS) as applied to data transfer rates between the consumer, cloud compute units and storage will provide a simple way to compare, acquire, consume and bill cloud infrastructure. It will also immediately simplify software product licensing.

My initial thought is that this will be a TPC like benchmark that each cloud provider will have to specify and meter.

Collaborate, Innovate ... Succeed
7th Annual Washington Area CTO Roundtable Summit
The event (on Sept 24th) was a huge success. Doug Solomon (IDEO, Apple, Plam) and Vint Cerf (Google, Father of Internet, MCI, etc.) were exceptional. Collaboration is a hot topic and the two of them led a very thought provoking and interactive discussion.

Doug shared how IDEO launched a very successful internal collaboration platform. Key takeaways: Keep it simple, make it useful, eliminate friction and reward participation. It is obvious why IDEO is one of the leading design firms in the world.

Vint started with a brief talk on what one must think about in the context of enabling collaboration. He did not use any slides. He is a very engaging and insightful speaker.

Vint and Doug then led a discussion directed by questions from the audience.

We got very positive feedback during networking. This is the third event we held since I took over as President of this invitation-only group. I believe that it was clearly one of our best!

Twitter for Customer Service
Came across a blog post on WSJ about how Comcast is using Twitter for Customer Service. Then read a couple more articles on BusinessWeek and Techrunch. Very Cool.
I think that Twitter is a perfect place to provide customer service, especially for ISPs. If your customer has an Internet service problem, they can always message you via Twitter.

I will encourage my team to setup a Twitter account for our Intranet Support.