Bloghttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/en-GB2010-03-11T16:27:31ZSquarespace Site Server v5.9.2 (http://www.squarespace.com/)Rethink, Redesign and Rebuildhttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2010/1/9/rethink-redesign-and-rebuild.htmlMark O'Loughlin2010-01-09T09:13:51ZWorld Leaders attending Davos-Klosters at the end of this month, are being challenged to rethink, redesign and rebuild the world. The agenda will challenge attendees to help "shape the post-crisis world". Given this challenge the World Economic Forum, in addition to its normal programme, are launching a web 2.0 collaborative platform, WELCOM. They hope this will enable leaders to build knowledge, share insights and reach out to key online stakeholders over the course of the year. To me this again communicates that web 2.0 is considered now as a key component in any collaboration strategy. Especially, in this instance, where the community is geographically dispersed. I shall be very interested to see the additional value that the World Economic forum obtain from using WELCOM throughout the year.

The programme this year will focus on:

How to Strengthen Economic and Social Welfare
How to Mitigate Global Risks and Address Systemic Failures
How to Ensure Sustainability
How to Enhance Security
How to Create a Values Framework
How to Build Effective Institutions

Let's hope WELCOM can support attendees address some of these issues in a "post-crisis world" during 2010.

]]>iSlate could revolutionise the way we read onlinehttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/12/28/islate-could-revolutionise-the-way-we-read-online.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-12-28T11:43:18ZRumours are circulating as to whether Apple will in H1 2010 release a tablet based computer. Their delayed entry into the e-reader market could signify that they have been working behind the scenes to offer a step-change experience, equivalent to that of the iPod, to e-reading and not just rush to release a 'me-too' product to market. It is rumoured by some reports that the New York Times' Editor spilt the beans or at least gave a big hint, which if it was to be revealed to be true, could signify that already Apple is building the partnerships to deliver content behind the scenes. Could this explain Rupert Murdoch's recent announcement to Google?

We must not forget if there is a a revolution in the wings then it started a few years ago with the emergence of XML and RSS - the ability to subscribe to news feeds that can be delivered in a common format so they can be edited locally. From my own perspective, I hope the rumors turn out to be true, despite my growing shelf of e-books I have held out from the current range devices on the market, maybe the iSlate may tempt me to make the trip to Regent Street in the spring.

I found this site useful as it outlines how the iSlate could look and function.

]]>2010 the year to respond?http://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/12/22/2010-the-year-to-respond.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-12-22T12:54:37Z2009 was a tough year, there's the good news. The bad news is that 2010 may well be tougher for those that choose not to respond. Often it is the resisting change and not the change itself that is the harder act. It could be argued from one perspective that the well oiled IT machine has over last few years stabilised, we are after all at ITIL v3. IT is in many ways predictable, performs okay in many organisations and from a CFO point of view has managed to get a reasonable control of costs. In 2009 many IT departments survived through costs cutting, doing the same for less and managing to resist deeper, underlying change. IT managed to survive shaving a few percentage points off the operating expenditure and got through 2009 without severe casualty. The problem is that if IT continues to think like this then it is thinking in a vacuum. The underlying problem remains and that is in 2009 the markets and business arena fundamentally changed. The information system that is IT has to also respond, it is required to provide the information needs of organisations who now operate in a more connected and agile world. In 2010, in my humble opinion, we will start to see reactions to the changes in the business arena from many large organisations. Traditional market watering holes have shrunk and in order to survive organisations will need to follow customers/suppliers to find new ones. Those organisations hoping the storm has passed without their world changing may be resisting change which may leave them to find themselves left behind. Pockets of ‘green shoots’ are likely to emerge in 2010 if they have not already - interesting, niche companies, exploiting new gaps in the market and hungry to make a yard on established players. Established payers have no choice but to respond and react to new competition and one of the key enablers to support this response is through information - IT. Up-to-date, configurable, real time information will need to be available on the move across organisations. It is in my view the time for IT to embrace change and again underline its value-add over and above commodity services in the boardroom. There are threats on the horizon to IT through consumer based technology, social technology and a born-connected generation are all converging on the business arena, meaning that customers, suppliers and users are changing and emerging with new expectations of IT. We now approach the festive period, and after the challenges of this year it is a welcome time to reflect upon 2009 and gain energy and focus ideas for 2010, the questions is coming back next in 2010 how will you respond?

]]>Business Case for Collaborationhttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/12/1/business-case-for-collaboration.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-12-01T13:49:16ZOn first examination it may seem a reasonable practice to suggest that collaboration technologies should require a well argued business case prior to investment, but you may ask where is the hook, on what do you pin the business case? If given this task today then it would be wholly reasonable to consider a starting point of cost of communication, and no doubt you would quickly reveal that face-to-face communication in your organisation would carry a high premium, that , in some cases, may not provide best value. With a little more thinking; adding in the cost of travel numbers you have an outline business case centred on removing 'unneccessary' face-to-face communication and therefore associated travel costs.

With social technologies however, the business case may require a little more thinking and assumptions may be overly streched as you try and model demand and associated benefit for Wiki’s, Blogs, access to Facebook, Twitter and the likes. One of the challenges is that in most cases the use of these technologies is not mandatory they are more viral and very much user benefit led. Altruistic and not process based. Voluntary not mandatory. Users decide when, what and how often they contribute so business case assumptions on uptake and overall use may be a little difficult to accurately estimate. Leaving for the moment the challenge of quantifying the benefit of say Twitter over and above email, could we think about the business case in a different way?

Let’s turn the business case on its head, and think what is the cost not to collaborate, this may make a little more sense. In reading recently Maria Azua’s The Social Factor he quotes one CIO’s sentiments here “This technology [social technologies] is not just an opportunity it is a necessity.” A necessity, as is an office (in most cases), a phone, web site is to most organisations. That is a shift in thinking, no longer a nice to have but a necessity. In his view core to doing business in today’s “social age.” Customers and suppliers are starting to expect you to use them, new employees (the so called Generation Y) expect to use them, existing employees expect to use them. After all taking one scenario, why should we limit our use of social technologies when inside our corporate buildings or logged in remotely working from home. We are, according to Azua, in a new age, a socially defined age and to get ahead organisations need to provide the tools for us to be successful. If our organisations delay or do not we will go elsewhere eventually as necessity begins to bite. Where could we go? Outside the firewall, outside the website filter and even possibly use our 3g phones to access social technologies to interact with suppliers, customers and colleagues. I will step over in this post the infringment of our information governance responsibilities that may bring. Here’s the challenge, because of necessity we will have gone, corporate control would have been lost, and the cost to get us back in the future may be far greater should we even come back. Now creating an argument around the increasing necessity of social technologies, just to be in the game now that would generate an interesting business case.

]]>18 minutes of famehttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/7/18/18-minutes-of-fame.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-07-18T09:34:24ZNext week www.ted.com comes to Oxford for its annual conference, where 700 delegates debate some of the most important ideas of the day. Split in 12 sessions ranging from 'What we know' to 'Nature's Challenge' it is an interlectual feast of ideas and debate. Unfortunately I will not be attending, but one comforting factor is that many of us are still seeking out intellectual debate, we want to debate the big issues and seek out those with big ideas that can possibly address them. If this is not provided through the mainstream politics and media we will seek it elsewhere. That is why ted.com freely releases the videos from the event, it wants to provide a platform for intellectual debate. Each presenter is limited to 18 minutes, I strongly recommend having a look if you have not already done so.

]]>Collaboration Centricityhttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/7/13/collaboration-centricity.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-07-13T17:16:44ZThere are two critical questions one should ask when considering collaboration initiatives. Firstly, why do you wish to collaborate? We generally either collaborate to distribute a message or to co-create something. The rise of web 2.0 has now introduced a second question, how do you wish to collaborate? Do we collaborate in a process centric way – where we know the process, know our stakeholders and therefore a collaboration solution facilitates this known process? Or, on the contrary, do we collaborate in information centric way, we want collaborative input but we do not necessarily know from whom and there is possibly no formal process that will ensure people collaborate? Here we are in wiki world, newsgroup world or even community of practice world. We are “crowdsourcing” and in order to achieve our aim we rely asynchronously on others being motivated to contribute.

So why the distinction? Well clearly a process centric and information centric solutions are different. With one the process is well known and can be optimised through workflow with the other we rely on the “crowd” finding what we are collaborating on and being interested sufficiently to input into the process. It can both altruistic, motivating others for their input, or indeed covert allowing issues and input to be given voluntarily. The challenge is how can organisations tap into the innovation, knowledge and creativity of the “crowd”. Soon we will be releasing more research here but for the moment, please remember the two questions before designing collaboration solutions, why do you wish to collaborate and secondly and as importantly how do you wish to collaborate?

]]>Strategic Management of Innovationhttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/4/7/strategic-management-of-innovation.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-04-07T12:21:54ZWhy is innovation so confusing? Maybe because there is much debate on what innovation actually means, and herein lies the problem. To some it means ideas, to others change and to others huge paradigm shifting disruption. There is a way through this confusion however. First many confuse definitions of innovation with the sole generation of ideas, innovation is not just the capturing of ideas it is about the commercial implementation of those ideas - ideas + commercially viable execution = innovation. An organisation wishing to become more 'innovative' needs to manage the innovation process required to get those ideas into some variant of product, processes, position or paradigm advantage in order for an innovation to be deemed successful. Ideas don’t make money, commercial implementations of them do.

Tidd, Beasant and Pavitt in 2005 came up with the four P’s model. It is a simple way of categorising innovations into one of four categories, products, processes, position and paradigm. So why is it important to categorise innovation? Depending on a number of factors including your sector, size and product/service lifecycle, Pavitt highlights an initial organisational focus for innovation. For example large capital intensive organisations that protect their market space through size and scale, according to Pavitt, should focus on process innovation. Why? Common sense, the product is often commodity and therefore price is critical. A small niche design house should focus on product innovation, as its selling point is its uniqueness of product and not the sheer scale of output it can create, often limited by the size of the market they are addressing.

These are very broad rules, but taken at their highest level they at least give an initial focus point when beginning to examine innovation and that is important as it is the first step to understanding innovation.

]]>Guardian News and Media steps into the cloudhttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/3/9/guardian-news-and-media-steps-into-the-cloud.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-03-09T11:46:36ZWriting last month in Silicon.com Tim Ferguson tells the story of Guardian News and Media move to Google Apps. Andy Beale, Technology Director, explains that "the main driver was to support collaboration and find a suitable tool." The main applications being used by the Guardian are Google Chat, Google Docs and Google Sites - Beale is also working on piloting Google Mail which he aims to complete by this summer. Nicholas Carr, in the Big Switch, seems to have called this right - we are moving to the cloud and market forces will continue expedite the transfer. What is interesting for me about this article is that Beale states "It means we can get on with more valuable stuff and less commodity things like running email services." Bingo! There you go that is CIO 2.0 thinking, moving to the more valuable strategic end of the spectrum and sending commodity IT to the big boys that can do it far more cheaply. The savings, once mail is moved into the cloud, for the Guardian will be some 15 servers and 4TB of storage, that does not mention the opportunity cost of the time given back to IT providing more strategic services.

]]>The Innovation Linehttp://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/3/4/the-innovation-line.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-03-04T14:33:19ZI want to now build on my last article "60/40 is the new 80/20" and talk about a concept I have been debating for a while. The Economist Intelligence Unit in late 2008 published research that was based on a survey of some 661 executives, with over half participating from the C-suite. The research titled the Digital Company was focused on understanding the 2013 workspace.

For me there were two key findings in their research, the first that role of CIO was due for huge change by 2013 and second that new ideas in the enterprise in 2013 would no longer come primarily from R&D, instead they would come from customers. Here indicating a huge change for organisations, in that they would need to collaborate more closely with their customers to deliver specialised products and services.

So coming back to the title of this article, The Innovation Line, what do I mean by this? Well from my experience from clients in 2008 and from talking with leading benchmarking analysts, organisations spend 75-80% on average of IT budgets keeping the lights on, with only 20% remaining for growth and transformation initiatives. Given the current climate and the unlikely change to IT investment levels in the short term at least, I think this line is one of the key KPIs for CIOs to manage, if they are not already.

So what will change? Well there are two forces coming to bear on CIO's, first and hugely important reduce the "run" the business costs. How? Either, consolidate, outsource, virtualise, standardise and/or 'utilitise.' One only has to read the likes of Nicholas Carr to understand the pressure that CIOs may be under over the coming years. Essentially for all of IT to remain in-house then CIOs, through leading infrastructure maturity intiatives, will need to be able to deliver the same for less and therefore stay competitive, or if this is not achievable they can pass selected elements of IT to someone else who can provide the same service for less. This may mean, once the cloud is matured, moving core infrastructure services to the cloud freeing up finance for other initiatives.

Selecting, planning and delivering these transformation changes will be tricky but the outcome will mean that the 75-80% "run" the business spend should start to come down. Here is the interesting part. If customers demand more specialisation then collaboration and product and service innovation become key. Therefore CIO's shift their focus (if not already) and their teams into the 20% "grow" and "transform" space. This is a very diffferent world as many know, a world where innovation, strategy and process are key, a world where collaboration is the norm and innovation is carefully managed and nurtured. It is an empowering place for the CIO, where knowledge of end-to-end processes can increase their leverage.

The line between the two types of spending I therefore refer to as the Innovation Line. CIO's focused largely above the line will be ones that according to the Economist Intelligence Unit who "will be a full partner to the business, helping us meet strategic objectives in most areas of operation" those focused below the line will be "along with with technical support, IT is influential in helping us to improve operating efficency and reduce costs." The Economist Intelligence Unit state that this change will be undertaken in the next 4/5 years by 2013. Even with the current economic pressures seeds for these changes need to begin to be addressed today as leading CIOs know.

]]>60/40 is the new 80/20http://www.markoloughlin.com/blog/2009/2/24/6040-is-the-new-8020.htmlMark O'Loughlin2009-02-24T16:43:55ZBased on findings from McKinsey's third annual survey of information technology spending - the old 80/20 ratio has fallen foul to the rise of a new ratio being desired by executives. That ratio is 60/40 where the 60 represents the percentage spent on operation costs and the 40, the percentage to develop new business capabilities to match or surpass competition. Clearly executives want IT to support them manage out of the downturn and not just focus on cost reduction. In fact the survey revealed more than 40 percent of executives expected an increase in new IT investments in 2009, this compares to only 23 percent of executives indicating the same for operating costs. Clearly the old 80/20 ratio is being compounded from both sides. The full report can be viewed here.

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