Social Networks & Big Data - Testing business hypothesis On the Cloud

Business innovation reflects in the form of new products and services, re-engineered / revamped business processes, new delivery mechanisms and sometimes a very different engagement model. One common factor that defines the mood of teams who role out these innovations, is the fear of unknown. Most innovations ( as opposed to changes) typically dabble in the paradigm of rolling out the untested and the unproved with absolutely no clue around how the end consumers might react. Enterprises typically follow a prototype and pilot model before a Big Bang roll-out to counter most these issues. Some forward looking organizations have adventured tools such as market predictions to gauge the reaction of people to new concepts ( could be a new product or a new HR policy) with the employees (employees are end consumers too).

To gauge reactions to a concept post ideation, one needs participants who are willing to put their mind to it and react. We need a platform that can capture these reactions and tools to analyse these reactions. Social networking sites provide this platform and the needed digital footfall , big data technology helps analyse the reactions. Business hypothesis can be tested on social networking sites to take a call on how well the assumptions measure up.

At the CIO round table on the evening of the first day of TechEd 2013 in Bangalore, one of the CIOs brought this point up and we were wondering, where do the Microsoft's products stand on Big Data. To begin with Apache Hadoop is made available as a service called HDInsight on Azure Cloud. What this means is that VMs on Azure cloud support full functionality of HDFS and MPP execution of MapReduce. HDInsight service also has ODBC connectors to enable analysts and BI professional leverage the simplicity of usage of Excel and the power of analytics + reporting now available in MS Sql. As far as I know, this is possible for structured data. To use unstructured data, PigLatin scripts will need to be run on the VMs. One can get visualisation of results going in excel ( from what I gather - I have not tried this or seen this as a demo yet). If this works out fine, one could potentially use Excel, to analyse the end results with the power of dissecting information that excel so very well provides. I am definitively sure excel empowering users to fire  HIVE queries  from it's interface.

There were slides shown pointing to Pig, Hive, Flume, Pegasus, Sqoop and Mahout  implementations provided for on the HDInsight services on Windows Azure. This however needs to be tested for ease of usage and the actual power this implementation puts in the hands of the analyst and the business users. Microsoft has enriched HDInsights service with the ability to control accesses and privileges using Active Directory. For enterprises that use active directory, this wheel needs no reinvention for Big Data setup, if done on Azure.  HDInsight does not dilute any of Apache Hadoop capabilities ( hence running as a Azure service you get the same high availability and reliability) with the HDInsight clusters managed thru System Center 2012.

HDInsights service on Azure cloud, with the simplicity of integrating enterprise data warehouses and data marts with unstructured data in HDFS and with the simplicity of using excel and other in-house BI tools to query and visualise results; enables enterprises to empower their business users to start testing their hypothesis and make better informed choices and increase the probability of success on their innovations.

Mobile Architectures

Enterprise applications follow certain architecture guidelines to deliver the business needs on functionality, TCO and ROI. To achieve this, trade offs made often tend to sacrifice asynchrony and flexibility in favour of assembly-lining of processes to deliver maximum bang for the buck spent and IT security. Large enterprise applications work on the philosophy of FTR ( getting things first time right). Efficiency, effectiveness and cost-control are derived from FTR theme. Any incremental and/or dramatic changes to the systems are mellowed down against the need to keep things familiar, avoid employees going thru a learning curve. Hence most changes are never dramatic, on a floor shop where most processes are simplified and assembly-lined. The pressure to avoid drastic changes is high in order to keep re-learning cycles low (to realize efficiencies from changes faster and at lower cost). In such environments, you would find IT systems architected in a fabric of synchrony when it comes to processes and events. In such environments you will find human resources avoiding the complexity of multi-tasking on mutually exclusive process threads.

Architectures for mobile apps need to deliver on different goals. These goals being asynchrony, multi-tasking and usability. Events arranged in a tight sequence will not work in the real world as the real world is a very different place when compared to the controlled environment of back-office and enterprise shop floors. This is true for sales processes as well. If you really look at the retail sales processes and the events as they unfold on the ground, they are seldom in tandem with the way the processes in the systems have sequenced events, implemented controls and designed the processes. This is one of the many reasons for change requests budgets and exceptions being sought for on mandated process. This is one of the reasons why systems have the facility to request for exceptions and an approval authority workflow for their approval.

When I look at some of the mobile apps from the enterprise that are either customer facing or sales force facing, I have found these apps tightly stitched from an enterprise operations viewpoint, backend to the front. While in reality the mobile app needs to be de-linked from the enterprise backend to avoid the trap of synchrony and the trap of irrelevance between sequence of event play-out in the real world (there are no fixed sequences here) and the fixed sequence of processes manifested thru screens and logic on enterprise applications. How often have people got into BPR exercise initiated as and when these gaps are experienced at a medium to high frequency.

Cloud plays a big role in delivering asynchrony and de-linking from backend to keep the app behaviour relevant to the way events play out in the real world. Windows Azure Mobile services provides some fantastic platforms on the cloud to make this happen.

As an approach the mobile developers should focus on usability and architect the app to handle each fundamental unit event in entirety without stitching the code to create dependency on another event's initiation and/ or closure. Enterprise IT need to provide for multiple entry points for data from mobile apps into  processes on the backend systems, without imposing the synchrony that is inherently built into the backend systems. For those who believe that this is an expensive change to make on the backend, it could be and again it may not, if one leverages the cloud queues and service bus to hold the data till all the pieces fall in place for a backend process to consume the data. This will require constant polling from enterprise network to the cloud / a mechanism for the cloud to let the enterprise network know that data is ready to be consumed.

The mobile app, writes to the cloud. Depending on the need, this could be a table (no-sql table) , cache, queue or a service bus. Build the processing logic on the cloud and not on the mobile app itself. On the cloud you would have two roles. A web role, typically the web app executes in a web role and a worker role which typically are cloud resources such as cache, queues and tables which the web app uses. The mobile app is stitched for usability to cater to various events as they play out in the real world. The processing happens on the cloud. The backend systems consume the data to process and give an output back to the cloud. The mobile app takes this output from the cloud to display on the mobile screen and wait for consumers next request, rather than initiating the next sequence for the consumer.

In the traditional development approach, a developer would sit down to create table structures and database schemas , normalise the database design, design screens, write processing logic to read and write data, logic for integration points with the enterprise database and so on. In the new normal, the developer will just focus on UI design, use Azure no-sql tables to store data. The Azure tables, create the structure depending on incoming data. The processing logic is held on the cloud as a web app in a web role. Session data persistence is managed by azure cache. If one needs to capture images or videos ( surveyor capturing data for car insurance claim processing), this can be held on the cloud CDN. Interaction with enterprise systems (for synchronous processing) can happen thru the service bus on a publish/subscribe model.

For example while shopping in a real world brick and mortar store, as I see what I like, I could take my mobile out, invoke the store's mobile app, read the bar code off the merchandise on display, attach credit card from my m-wallet and leave a delivery address and walk out. While different stores will have their own respective mobile apps, the bank could just publish a web app on the cloud, cloud storage (no-sql table) to which different apps could write credit card data, create three different themes on the service bus :

- Shopping Item theme

- Payment Approval Theme

- Item delivery theme

..and publish/subscribe to these themes depending on the context of the transaction. The store app would publish item details and price to the first theme, the bank could subscribe to it for it's records. The bank would publish credit card authorization decision to the service bus , to which apps could subscribe to. As the item is delivered to the customer, the enterprise apps of the stores could publish these details for the bank's systems to subscribe (in case there is a dispute later). The enterprise systems could have web services for interaction with the service bus on the cloud and the web app on the cloud.

Its clear from my above explanation that the app developer can create magic while being completely ignorant of the underlying enterprise systems that come into play. The developer need not worry about database design and structure and can focus only on UI and logic. The enterprise IT teams re-use the existing processing and business logic on the system by directing the data from the cloud into the right systems thru a SOA layer, they build and manage. Welcome to the new normal.

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A Social Network for Enterprise Applications

Put together a few day-dreamers, high skilled innocent techies who can be taken on a fantasy ride, some chilled beer and the beautiful spring evening of Pune city; what you end up with is a crazy concept and a design document written on tissue papers and thick-paper coasters, for the wackiest  and unimplementable idea one could ever come up with. If only one could get some venture capitalist or seed funders on the same table; the next one year could be a well funded sabbatical for most of us around that table. Two fantastic experiences I still savour in from last evening. The build-up of the wacky concept and the associated technical design document (if you can call it that) and the green tea with fresh ginger to end the night!

The big idea - a social network for enterprise applications. A space where different applications on heterogeneous platforms, from different enterprises could reach out to each other on a need basis or otherwise, to befriend one another, share and exchange both data and intelligence for mutual benefit and in a secure manner without violating privacy laws. The applications decide their privacy settings and create trust groups with trust levels of various degrees. I guess by now you guys would have gauged the height and depth of lunacy that prevailed around that table. I state again, there was just beer on the table, nothing else!

Straight thru collaboration between enterprises has always been looked at as a fictional idea. Enterprise IT Policies, data governance mandates and zero tolerance towards alien incoming traffic into enterprise network have prevented straight through collaboration. Management will power always gave way to the logistic nightmare of establishing trust relationships between enterprise networks, working thru the mindsets of enterprise IT teams, enterprise risk teams and IT auditors. Cloud and particularly Azure services seem to have unknowingly offer a solution in this space.

Some of the elements needed for straight thru collaboration between enterprises for consumer's benefit :

1. Authenticating consumers , employees and partners for the scope of the collaboration in focus.
2. Persisting session data across multiple systems belonging to different enterprises and  enabling these systems to access this data. 
3. Persisting Master Data of the consumer to be accessed by collaborating enterprises,  their respective processing partners and the consumer himself, subjected to data access rules of these organizations.
4. Data transformation outside of enterprise networks as needed by enterprise apps, partner apps and consumer's personal apps enabling these systems to understand the data against the backdrop of diversity in codification of master data and other data items. 
5. A very effective 2 phase commit of transactions across collaborative systems, one that is non-intrusive.

There are a lot more demands that STC ( straight through collaboration) will place, so the list if not truly a complete representation of all the challenges that would need to be met.

Azure services such as :

• Identity (AD on the cloud)
• Caching (App Caching and content caching on the cloud)
• Business Analytics ( BI and Hadoop Services)
• Messaging services ( Queues and Service bus on the cloud)
• Data Services ( Sql Db, Tables and Blobs on the cloud)

can be meaningfully stitched together into a solution around the scope of collaborative services enterprises want to offer to their consumer. As enterprises start authenticating with the Aadhaar framework, ability to collaborating on a non-intrusive mode will get a further boost. I hope enterprises see merit in authenticating not just consumers but all actors needed to get collaboration going, being authenticated by credible third party services.

Ability to transform data, run transactions to their logical end with asynchrony as a key element of the collaboration fabric, with 2 phase commit as the final goal across collaborating systems, would have been impossible without Azure messaging services ( queues and service bus on the cloud).

Azure business analytics services that unlocks enterprise intelligence to empower it further with big data outputs, will add the winning elements of context, timing and relevance to the collaboration services being delivered to the cloud. Getting these three elements right for a single large enterprise is itself a complex activity, getting it right across multiple collaborating partners is a near impossible task without the ability to transform and interpret data on the cloud. This is the reason why we need multiple services as bullet-ed above to be stitched together into a solution. 

The other issue that crops up is that enterprises would not like to remain wedded to it's partners to get STC going for delivering value to the end consumer. The collaboration arrangements could run out of relevance with passage of time , sometimes under 3 hours ( example: credit card companies wanting to collaborate for discounts with in-mall merchants for 2 hours). We need a framework where enterprises could negotiate online the terms and conditions of collaboration, do an online hand shake and get the collaboration going. This is very similar to the scenario where we allow apps to connect to our facebook profile, accept friends invitations on facebook and keep tuning our privacy settings and keep categorizing our friends to get a meaningful discussion / collaboration going. A similar framework will need to be evolved for enterprises to hook-on and hook-off with each other for various transactions that need collaboration between their systems,  their partners systems and consumer's personal apps and devices. A social network for enterprise applications!

What started as a fun fantasy discussion, quickly spiraled into some serious paper napkin drawings of architecture design and some specifications bullet-ed down behind a few thick paper coasters   We were not completely insane, so there were some assumptions that were made. We assumed systems would be intelligent enough to decide whom to befriend and decide on the degree of trust they would like to establish with the system seeking to connect. We decided to tackle the implement-ability of such a scenario on a later date, and focus for now on other issues to get this concept moving forward! 

I need to mention here why I picked Azure. The way Microsoft is approaching the cloud computing paradigm, empowering it with platform services that enterprises need, putting in frameworks for extending these to mobile clients and keeping an open mind on heterogeneity of personal devices and strong preferences of the enterprises to have the flexibility of the cloud with the comfort of implementing their corporate policies. Most of Azure services could literally be an extension of on-premise digital assets as enterprises evolve their view around the right model of governance , security and  management for leveraging the power of the cloud.


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Build - Measure - Learn

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I was dreading the idea of sitting thru a 2 hour keynote session. To my surprise, I quiet enjoyed the content and the delivery of speakers. I actually enjoyed listening to Amit Chatterjee, Managing Director - Microsoft R&D Pvt Ltd, talk around a flavour of scrum methodology inspired by Eric Ries's The Lean Startup. He talked about how Microsoft R&D has successfully adopted scrum and has become more agile in the last few months. I simply loved the Nordstorm Stores example he presented.

The Nordstorm example set me thinking. Does the next generation impatience and need for instant gratification and results , need a completely different model of execution? When business and operations within an enterprise ideate, they are bound to be assumptions, risks and and unwillingness to entertain any failure on a large scale. Failure is still a stigma in most enterprises despite claims of nurturing innovation and asking people to challenge their boundaries without the fear. New ideas are new, by virtue of being un-thought of before, and hence untested and not yet proven. They are either hypothesis or a bundle of initiatives designed to achieve an objective laced around a foundation of hypothesis and assumptions. These hypothesis need to be put to test without building definitively, a system or a solution around that idea. Nordstorm sent a couple of developers to he floor shop. These guys took the business hypothesis and talked to Nordstorm's customers. Got inputs from them. Coded on the spot and got customers to use and experience it. They built-in the learning by making changes to the code, in front of the customers and got them too try using the application again. By the end of the exercise there were multiple iterations involving collaborating with shoppers on ideation  -  coding a solution - getting shoppers to interact with the applications - build in the learning. By the end of the exercise, they had the true picture of what the success criteria for the application should be and the metrics they should use to measure the success criteria. Sometimes, enterprises guess these on behalf of the customers and hence possibly get it wrong sometimes.

Amit talks about making the business hypothesis a testable experiment. It makes sense to get all stake holders whose lives will be impacted by the hypothesis (employees, partners and customers) around a table for the experiment and digest their take on the hypothesis. What you then get is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Measurement to calibrate the results need to be included in MVP. Once MVP is coded and ready, validation against the embedded measures is done as users use the MVP. Learning is gained, which then find their way back into the MVP. Measures are re-adjusted and or re-calibrated. The cycle repeats again. The important part being, that all stake-holders traverse this cycle together.

Somewhere during this cyclic iteration, there will be enough learning based on which you could choose to persevere with the hypothesis or pivot to a new hypothesis. Before you guys jump to conclusion, let me tell you what this process is not. This is not a process to decide what a end product should be. This is a process to test the business hypothesis by studying customer behaviour.

User departments and end customers of the enterprise are very good at articulating their need at a very high level. As devil is always in the details, The  Build-Measure-Learn approach avoids the creation of a wall between IT and the rest of the organisation and between the organisation and the end customer. Just as IT is accused of not understanding it's internal customers, organisations are accused of not understanding the needs of their end customers.

Coding as a part of structured ideation process, to test hypothesis,  helps in avoiding scenarios where IT teams accuse user departments of not giving detailed requirements in entirety and IT teams do not have to deal with the frustration of changing requirements. This approach avoids the Big Bang model around conceptualisation, requirement gathering and delivery.

I have seen and experienced scrum models where requirements are broken down into small chunks, after which a traditional approach is followed where business analysts (BAs) write down requirements, effort estimation is done and development happens in isolation. This model again results in user depts accusing BAs of missing out requirements, which in reality was a result of lack of bandwidth with the business users and most of the times, the lack of will to spell out everything to the last T.  Why do IT teams ask business requirements as if they are part of a different organisations? Why do we need to carry IT on the payroll if they cant figure out business requirements as an integral part of the business? These frustrating questions and scenarios can be avoided by following scrum they way it should be. Developers get the taste of the real world and the rest of the organisation starts appreciating the value IT brings on the table. Developers help the business users see the issues with their business hypothesis. This results in all-round appreciation for each other's efforts.

What I personally like about this approach is that it gives an opportunity to take what we have and make it a little better every day. This method greatly helps drive change management where impact is needed on the behaviour of stake-holders for the innovation to deliver and be effective. Stakeholders go thru the process of experiential learning during the build phase, rather than being forced to change behaviour post build-out; during the end user training phase of the project. This approach helps in facilitating a more cordial environment during end user testing and acceptance stages of the project. The biggest outcome of this method will be reduction in rejection of ideas. Management that is unable to visualize the benefits or finds change management around the idea over whelming typically label such ideas as either bad, ambitious and unpractical. The Build-Measure-Learn model executed with scrum methodology, helps evaluate ideas based on experiential learning rather than on perceptions power point presentations create.

It's always a good approach to talk about a new idea and invite stakeholders to test the hypothesis as a collaborative exercise in the build up of the idea and subsequently on solution creation phase, instead of constructing the idea in isolation and then hard-sell it to the management. The challenge is in change management around adoption and not in ideation or executing the system build up. This approach gets people to collaborate to make change management relatively easier by virtue of collaborating in build up of the idea.

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Genchi Genbutsu

Innovation is a much used term these days in enterprise meeting rooms. I have maintained for some time now, in a few past blog posts, that most of time incremental improvements get termed as innovation, which is quiet sad. As with innovations, incremental changes too cause disruption and present a change management issue that is not trivial. Innovations, unlike incremental changes, significantly alter lifestyles, make certain parts of the eco-system redundant and almost always puts someone or something definetly out of business or commission.

In the banking and financial services space I have seen very little innovation happen in the last 5 years. The last innovation was the brought in by the dot com boom, where people could bank, pay, purchase and help themselves thru self service using internet banking and on-line portals from financial services providers. This has put stress on the incumbent dis-intermediation business models to the extent that some have folded up. I wait for the day to see this happen in insurance industry, where the dot com's today are an additional step adding to the incumbent new business sourcing process for most of the insurance products, barring a miserly few. The reasons for this, is material for maybe another blog post at a different point in time. I am sure, some of my friends from insurance companies will be a bit upset for me having said this.

There are those within the enterprise who are waiting for that dream, that next big idea, something that has not been done before, something unique. Ideaologies that bridge the enterprise vision with what the customers would accept, are more likely to come up with innovations that might work. While one might fight to death on diversity of views w.r.t definition of innovation, one tends to quickly agree to the view that its not about what customer's thought they wanted and most definetly its not about telling the customers what they ought to want. While the latter happens quiet frequently when strategy consultants and IT companies engage with enterprise CIOs!

Some companies in the non-hi tech space, have innovation centres and innovation themes to motivate people to take time away from day-to-day hustle-bustle and come up with new ideas. I wonder how innovation centres, specially in the non-hitech space, measure their performance. I wonder what sort of a yardstick is used to measure their performance and how do they get rewarded at the end of the year. If the innovation centre was belting out one successfull idea a year, we would have seen some awesome stuff coming out from enterprises in the last few years, which is not the case.

In my view the one thing that an innovation department or an innovation center enriches itself with, provided they have a structured approach to the fabric of their life, is validated learning. Without a structured or a framework approach, you would have learning, not validated learning. Companies that adopt lean approach to innovation as a framework and test hypothesis as a structured methodology, gain validated learning. I feel that the innovation centres should not worry about how much stuff they are actually building, but rather measure the amount of validated learning they are accumulating. Learning gained by virtue of exploring ideas directly with the customers are invaluable.


This gives fantastic insights into customer behaviour that could be key to the current idea's success or could break the interia around junking the current idea and exploring a new one. The famous example of this approach was the manager entrusted with the design and development of the Toyota Sienna minivan. He undertook a staggering 53,000 miles roadtrip across US, Canada and Mexico, observing and talking to minivan customers and sometimes driving it himself. The outcome was validated learning! Genchi Genbutsu, as the Japenese say, is the Toyota way to do things!

Another important observation is that not all such endeavors succeed. Successful people have always credited lady luck for putting them in the right place at the right time. For every successful one in the right place at the right time, there were others too, in the right place at the right time, and did not succeed. The difference then has to be that successful people had the foresight, ability and tools to discover what works and what is misguided. Validated learning arms you with this precious treasure, so that you could decide to persevere or pivot; as Eric Ries puts it in his book, The Lean Startup.

Architectures for the new age

The next generation workforce that enters the organisations, come from a world of funky and cool mobile apps and gaming interface users. As this workforce starts interacting with the enterprise apps, comparisons will start being drawn. Two aspects will stand-out as sticky sore points:

1. The user interface and information arrangement on the screen
2. The lack of asynchronous approach to processes

Most of us know how screens of enterprise systems look like. Even though access to corporate digital assets are aligned to the needs of the role and the type of responsibilities employees carry, the screens typically display the master-detail relationship of data with very little effort spent on the GUI design to highlight focus on the few data items that would be responsible for initiating the next set of actions or have a significant role in the decisions that need to be made.

Most enterprise systems are hardwired on context definition and this comes across when we view the screens against the backdrop of changing context on the same shop-floor. The issue repeats itself with enterprise processes. The approach to architecture design around the  context - process - screen design relationship,  reflects organisational preference of operating in the manageable environment of the synchronous, and the sequential, delivering on the first time right paradigm. Having said this, there is a huge management thrust towards getting people to multi-task, be asynchronous, take risks and be flexible on sequencing events and actions in a process to stay relevant in a world of changing contexts. This is the only way organisations maximise efficiency and quality on a fixed cost base.

This is a great paradox enterprises live in. Once this paradox manifests itself on a large scale and starts affecting relevance of delivery to the end consumer, IT systems get labelled as inflexible, rigid and legacy. In the real world, the word legacy has such a positive connotation to it. We all want to leave a legacy behind that we would be remembered for long after we have gone. Legacy however is an uncharitable word when used around IT system! That however is a topic for a different blog post.

Enterprises will find personal devices increasing their sphere of influence in the domain where enterprises will see individuals in employee role, traversing down a path where enterprise data access only on enterprise devices policy will be a hinderance in delivering results. Class of devices will expand beyond smartphones and tablets as we know it today. Multiple devices that are personal, public and enterprise assets will come into play as internet of things expands to consume every thing that has a potential to store, compute, persist, connect and digitally perish. The GUI of this world will dictate the tastes and preferences of the users and will drive behaviour. GUIs of enterprise IT systems will need to align to avoid high training costs and larger learning TATs to get Gen-Next employees effective and productive.

When I take a look at the Metro framework, at a very high level, I see a lot of thought that has been put in to :

•  create a digital UI fashion trend - and an infectious one

•  chart a path forward for enterprise IT systems as they undertake a journey to manifest themselves on the list mile on personal consumer devices.

Metro stands out on the following aspects:

1)    Its a scalable framework ( tempted to say standard, qualifies in my book to evolve as a standard) that could become a standard as it gets device agnostic and OS agnostic. At this moment the framework for mobile smartphones is different from that of tablets. Metro defines, usable and unusable screen areas assuming the world needs only 16:9 surfaces and hence the different framework for smartphones.

2)    Framework has provision to represent master-detail relationships and has guidelines that drive programming behaviour around handling data that is multi row - column tables and scroll. Best practises and the right model to manage activity needed NOW to move forward a process on the timeline in a contextualized environment.

3)    Nudges developers to make asynchrony as the underlying to define behaviour that is responsive to now and always ready for the next. The  nature of next being that no one can foresee the future and hence a tight synchronous process is not the way to build on personal devices. Asynchrony is central to engage, based on decisions and choices consumer make to progress ahead on the timeline.

4)      Guidelines around content being front and central to enable readability puts the consumer instead of enterprise (process ,data and events) in the the centre.

5)    Framework to Win As One that keeps you firmly rooted in the present for you to decide on the next moment, enabling developers to stitch the data of events, relationships, communication threads, facts and status all in a grid format on one screen. Imagine your grid shows the meeting that comes up in the next 5 mins where the agenda is discussion around performance management. One square shows calendar data (just the meeting name and time). Next square shows discussion threats from email around appraisals, one that matter for this meeting. A third square shows the bell curve of your team. a couple of grids displays pictures of your top 5% of your team with rating. This picture is not complete without that one red grid that shows payroll budget over-run telling you that you cannot have a top 5% but a top 3% of your team as high performers! Its your choice if you want developers to write code, that makes this choice!!

The dilemma I have in my head is that Enterprise IT systems are stitched for rigidity and robustness. Hence the processes are sequential. Any data entering thru points of integration, will necessarily have to go thru a synchronous, end-to-end experience.  Last mile architected around asynchrony integrating into a central system architected around sequential end-to-end process thread, are like chalk and cheese. Some thought will need to be given to Enterprise IT Architecture to make this work.

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BYOD : Issue of classification & personal lifestyle

As people bring in their own devices, the cost of accommodating these devices into the enterprise could far outweigh the cost savings envisaged around not equipping the workforce with such devices. To be able to get the workforce to effectively deploy their personal devices to empower themselves in meeting their goals and objectives; enabling them to take on both the enterprise landscape and personal challenges, one will need investments in infrastructure, security and other digital assets and services apart from the investments needed in planning, governance, monitoring  and management of this way of life.

Enterprises are keen on  BYOD for completely different reasons. Most forward looking organisations today hire talent for their attitude, character and potential of promise amongst other personal attributes that HR folks look out for, as they recruit. Gen-Next India from both the employable and ready to graduate in the next 3 year category, though not digital natives, are immigrants who in the last 3 year have been responsible for the momentum that consumerization of IT has gained. Their attitude and way of life reflects in the kind of devices they carry, the kind of apps they download and the way they use them in their daily lives. It will require some serious imagination on our part to gauge and calibrate the attitude, culture and expectations the digital natives will carry to an enterprise as and when they join the employable resource-pool in the next 10-15 years. Today, every young Indian has a digital lifestyle as a result of the device proliferation and consumerization of IT.  This talent pool leaves digital footprints all over the cyberspace that is indicative of their attitude, culture and lifestyle in general. These people look up such data in the cyberspace to analyze, interpret and take decisions based on the digital footprints of others to decide the nature of relationship they would want to pursue.

As these young people enter the enterprise, they will be bringing their way of life into the enterprise. Organisations that do not change to accommodate the culture of this talent pool and make them feel at home, will be able to leverage little to nothing from this educated, smart next generation. Don't be surprised if people are searching for their bosses on facebook, twitter and four-square to form their first impressions about them. If they don't find them there, don't be surprised if their interpretations manifest as behavior that might seem bizarre to those not tuned in to this culture. Don't be surprise if in a brain-storming meeting a young one suggests a-kin to download this, put it in sky drive , open the app, modify, scrap from there, click this, put together , check with you on Skype to see what you feel and then its a go.  Having been in banking and financial service and having started my career with new age banks and financial service, I can visualize some very senior people (some of them IT leaders) reacting to such a scenario with bewilderment and irritation if this were to occur in their meeting rooms. This will occur. And when it does, and if the enterprises react with irritation and bewilderment at such approach to work-life, the talent pool will look up with little respect both towards the brand and the individuals who represent them. Gen-next will find and very little in terms of alignment between their strong-suite characteristics that makes them productive and keeps them creative, and how they see the enterprise empowering them to excel. BYOD today is seen by enterprises as a way of getting in the new age talent pool and retaining them for the strength they bring in.

There are multiple challenges in going the BYOD way. Among numerous other issues around BYOD, the issue of segmentation of data and the subsequent life-cycle management of the same is complex, one that does not have a solution. As data gets accessed using personal devices, content will be accessed not just to be consumed, but to actually action on the data that was rendered. These actions could result in the need to modify the rendered content or request for more enterprise data to add/modify/delete or create new data - all of this on the go and using personal devices. Editing and creating content will need a store-edit-review-collaborate-despatch cycle to be enabled locally on the device. This is an issue with most enterprises who hate to see their data leave the enterprise network and enterprise storage structures.

There is a need to segment data as enterprise and personal so that it can be governed by the enterprise policies to protect enterprise digital data assets and to cater to personal digital lifestyle and cultural needs of the workforce. This segmentation is a complex issue and has no clear cut solution. As long as the data comes from corporate database, this problem ceases to exist. The problem crops up as one uses word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, design creation, ideation (creation and documentation) and collaboration tools to create, edit and collaborate on content. Ability to segment such content at the time of creation, is a complex problem to solve. A heady cocktail of features in content authoring tools, digital rights management integrated with some aspects of DLP and other document life-cycle management attributes, employee life-cycle management attributes (around roles and access rights) and IT security software attributes will need to be prepared to solve this issue. As a player in both enterprise and consumer space I hope Microsoft finds within itself the right recipe for this Long Island Ice Tea! 

The next problem in accommodating BYOD scheme is to provide for a platform for workforce to go thru the iterative cycle of content creation - review - co-creation - collaboration and then submission to corporate networks in a manner that can be governed and managed effectively and efficiently. My view is that an integrated approach between MDM, cloud storage such as Skydrive / Dropbox / Google Drive and mobile apps can make this possible today. Microsoft as an organization that is a serious player in both enterprise and consumer space, is the right organization to take on this challenge and provide solutions. So, I will stick with skydrive, for articulating the enterprise need in the remainder of this post.

Some changes in skydrive will be needed. Enterprises will need to subscribe for cloud storage in a manner that aligns with enterprise IT Security policies. Microsoft's Cloud On Your Terms approach makes skydrive a good candidate for this solution, if they can pull the solution off. Each employee will need an account on skydrive with two logical partitions ( similar to C and D drive on your desktops and laptops); one where all enterprise data is stored and the other where all personal data is stored. One cloud storage account partitioned to create an enterprise cloud and  a personal cloud for an employee. If the employee leaves, the data does not go away, as the organization has administrative control on the storage cloud. When an employee leaves an organization, similar to the way employee car policies and mobile policies work where the employee pays the WDV and carries the car/mobile device with them, Microsoft will need to provide for merging the enterprise logical partition into an enterprise pool post which the enterprise could give the personal cloud back to the exiting employee in a format where the exiting employee continues to use the skydrive account, in line with Microsoft's consumer offering. To prevent the corporate data from getting downloaded to local mobile device storage, an integrated approach of accessing all data thru an enterprise app integrated with MDM implementation will need to be done. When this employee joins another organization that happens to be a microsoft cloud customer (skydrive in particular), the technology will need to accommodate for creating the employee account with the new enterprise with similar partition logic and pull the new recruits personal cloud as a partition into the corporate skydrive account. This keeps employees personal data persistent as employees transition organizations or even change roles (employee/customer/partner).

The bigger problem though is of segmentation. Pure-play consumer organizations like Google might not be willing to solve this problem. Microsoft which plays both in enterprise and consumer space should take this problem up and resolve it. Doing so, Microsoft will end empowering its customers to attract talent pool that can usher in creativity and agility into an enterprise.


written for :

The Mobile Apps Paradigm

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Got an opportunity to peek into the mobile app paradigm, interact , brainstorm and inhale the energy, restlessness and ambitions of various entities that form the ecosystem defining this landscape. I decided to take some time off and interact with minds that imagine and create. I found myself walking the corridors of Microsoft TechEd 2013. The energy was intoxicating, and infectious.

All the big names from TCSs , Infosys's and Wipro's of the world to small unheard of startups, were all there. A couple of 22-24 year olds proudly flashing their business cards carrying the names of their startups and their CEO designation starkly contrasting mature 35 year old project managers carrying equal amount of energy and enthusiasm. Almost everyone I met believed that as developers, they have the power to shape culture, influence behaviour  and redefine lifestyle ! They all said it in so many words.

I took some time out, sat in a corner to ponder on that statement. When I look at the Apple iphone  and ipad, the Android smartphones and tablets and now the windows 8 smartphones and tablets; the singular thing that strikes me is that, there was no real crying need for any of these devices from the any of the consumer community and nobody really asked for it as a solution to a problem. As a corporate citizen, I have always been moulded in the mindset that  innovation occurs when one is forced into a crisis or issues of significant criticality. Sometimes, in such situations, dramatically incremental changes pass off as innovations within an enterprise. Problem solving has always been the main corporate theme. Corporates work on opportunity creation when the existing set of revenue generating techniques run their course to stagnation and/or finally  become irrelevant. This happens because corporates invest in platforms and then refuse to make changes till they sweat the platform to maximize their return on investment. Having said this, there are a few forward looking ones who experiment to find new opportunities. These generally tend to be organizations in the hi-tech space ( where R&D is part of their platform) or family run businesses in the non hi-tech space.

The developers who were walking the corridors with me were of different mindset. These guys were dreaming of a space where things could be done differently, the difference being the cool factor. One of the guys showed me an app where the you rest a mobile phone on a table and once you invoke the app, the camera comes on, the phone vibrates and the vibration was programatically controlled to make the phone rotate 360 degrees in a 120 second window to capture a panoramic view of your surrounding. I was stumped, not because of the programmatic brilliance needed to achieve this( none needed actually), but was a little amazed on the need for the mind to come up with something like this. Who needs such a solution. What was the seed of this idea?  I asked her. She just shrugged and said, that every time her phone vibrated on silent mode, she always felt it would simply be cool to channelize the energy generated by the vibration to get the phone to move in a circular motion and capture the image. Then she developed a software that can help you look at this amazing complex picture render different parts of it in context and scale that gives you some amazing views. One her friends, smiled and said, sometimes when you are living your life, you miss all the wonderful things that are happening around you which are not in line of your sight ! 

Bottom-line, these guys are not in the problem solving mode. They are in the mode of creating things that people have not asked for, never imagined they might need it and might not even pay to use it. They want to infect people with their output and attempt redesign our lifestyle, influence our behavior and our culture. More power to the programming brains. Software developers have truely shaped our lifestyle and culture. I am devotee of shirdi Sai Baba and see my god and the aarti whenever my heart desires, thanks to the portal that webcasts live. I have got into the behaviour of seeking blessings live from shirdi before I get into something important, the first thing after I wake up in the morning and before I hit the sack! I go about travelling to places without planning at all, thanks to the gps based apps that map, find hotels and eating joints. I have various metrics at hand as I jog, from the num of kms to my heart rate and the music I need to keep me going.  From what I have seen and heard at TecEd, I foresee us swamped with apps that we would never ask for and that we can do without, but very soon our lives will start revolving around these. Apps of similar nature will find their way into education, healthcare, banking and also into our family life and our personal space.

Cloud v/s CIO Battle - Where is the battle?

NASSCOM 2013 was buzzing with the topics of CIOs relevance in the current context of cloud and consumerization of IT. I was on a panel discussing what keeps a new age CIO awake and alive. The discussion turned to questioning the relevance of CIO within 10 minutes of panel discussion kick off and stayed that way for the balance 50 minutes!

Consumerization of IT fueled by mobile device proliferation, app stores and apps now has received a further shot in its arm with cloud coming in. Cloud is fueling a whole new business that will lead to consumerization of enterprise IT Infrastructure, if you may please, with large players and eager startups jumping into the bandwagon. Almost all IT services being targeted by entrepreneurs will cover the entire gamut of services provided by the CIO / CTO to his organization and more. Even before the advent of the cloud and consumerization of IT caught traction, there were parts of the enterprises that started sourcing their own IT. Enterprise IT teams were caught either in implementation of core systems (ERP, CRM, etc) that were long gestation projects and completely energy sapping, that most of the frontline departments started sourcing their own IT. 

Having said that, there is something about the cloud that has sparked off debates about CIOs relevance.  The cloud creates the ability to provision, de-provision and price services at a level of granularity that was not possible before.  IaaS, PaaS and SaaS service providers will ride the cloud to drive cost down even for moderate to small scale of operations. CIOs have always been seen as people who were stuck with fixed costs in the face of declining business when the economy was under stress, and still is in certain parts of the world. Service providers ride on this aspect as they vend their cloud based wares.

 Service providers will always end up selling solutions that solve a part of the puzzle.In complex environments (read SMB and Large Enterprises) there is a need for a person who can source the right kind of services and stitch them together in a manner that makes sense for the enterprise, and in a manner that enables enterprises to derive and deliver value. Industry sectors that are regulated, cloud will take time and will need regulatory head winds to blow across those enterprise skyline to rain the promised benefits. I do not see the CIOs role diminishing, but the role needing skills that are way different  from what CIOs are used to.

Unless CIOs fully understand the business of their enterprise, the context in which the business operates and impact of macro economic and eco-system changes on the business, their value to the enterprise will always be questioned. Unless this evolution happens, the CIOs will continue to compete with technology service providers and consultants, instead of strategizing with their peers in the organization against their organization's competitors. Cloud or no cloud, I feel the issue is what I just mentioned. The noise on CIOs life expectancy either because of cloud or consumerization of eneterprise IT are just symptoms and not the real cause.