InformationWeek Stories by Eric Openshaw

InformationWeek Stories by Eric Openshawhttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2012-12-24T09:06:00Z5 Ways To Stay Ahead Of Consumerization Of ITHere's how to seize on the user trend as an opportunity rather than a problem.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/5-ways-to-stay-ahead-of-consumerization/240145037?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsNo CIO or IT department can fulfill every business user need internally -- budgets, skills and timelines constrain even the best departments. And with the variety of third-party offerings easily available to users, it's pointless to try. Empowering users can make organizations more flexible and help employees do their jobs better. So what's the problem? You know the problem: Employees are bringing devices, applications and even data sources into the enterprise at a grassroots level, sometimes unknown to the business and IT leadership. How then can CIOs support employee innovation with new technologies and accelerate their impact on the organization without giving away the keys or undermining the enterprise? Consider these five approaches. 1. Adopt The User Perspective CIOs and IT organizations should continually ask: How do employees, customers and partners engage with our business? Which information and technology services do they need, and how are we provisioning these services? How might new technologies and applications help users, not just to work better and faster, but to do their jobs differently? [ Looking for help writing your New Year's resolutions? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/6-ways-it-still-fails-the-business/240144288?itc=edit_in_body_cross">6 Ways IT Still Fails The Business</a>. ] At Amtrak, train conductors have broad operational responsibilities. By adopting the conductor's perspective, Amtrak developed a mobile app with a magnetic card reader that lets them process tickets, validate cases of fraud, update schedules and car capacities, report maintenance problems, schedule repairs at stops en route, and perform other functions -- from a handheld device as they move through a train. Customers have a complimentary app that provides scheduling, ticketing and check-in, as well as interactive features and games to engage travelers on their trip and beyond. 2. Know The Landscape As third-party service providers and consumer app stores expand into enterprise-oriented offerings, find out which "almost-enterprise" services and apps are good enough for specific user needs and which fall short. Create a catalog users can consult of IT-sanctioned services developed both internally and externally. Consider the experience of a leading global restaurant company that wanted to strengthen brand loyalty, increase visits and grow average check sizes. The business understood that the proliferation of mobile devices, social applications and analytics must offer some opportunity, but how? The answer was a set of mobile, Web and kiosk applications that let customers order appetizers, check wait times at multiple nearby restaurants, put their name on the list before arriving at a restaurant, and then receive a personalized greeting when they walk in. New tools let customers manage their loyalty program benefits and other rewards, such as receiving a targeted discount or redeeming an incentive, from a mobile device. Without a knowledgeable IT department able to integrate multiple technologies and trends, those apps probably never would have been conceived much less deployed.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   3. Shorten The Timeframe Most consumer technologies that find their way into the enterprise are advancing at lightning speed. CIOs should embrace rapid prototyping and an iterative approach aligned with agile or scrum methodologies. Prioritize use cases that will have a clear business value, and create a roadmap for addressing them, starting with the easiest. Rather than try to identify the one "right" architecture or tool, experiment with likely candidates. Different use cases may require different architectures, or experimentation may reveal a clear winner that can become the company standard. When Deloitte wanted to go mobile with its internal portal, DeloitteNet, where employees do everything from entering time and expense reports to locating an office, it identified the six use cases that were most common and seemed easiest to tackle. The Deloitte IT team began developing apps for all six cases simultaneously: It built native apps for three cases, used a cross-platform development tool for two cases, and used HTML5 for one case. Deloitte quickly learned that HTML5 was not yet robust enough (this was 18 months ago), so it halted that pilot. Development with the cross-platform tool proved effective, but the look and feel didn't seem appropriate for every use case. The native pilots continued, and those apps were released in the field as soon as they were completed so that the team could incorporate any insight into the use cases still being developed. 4. Create Centralized Platforms Without some oversight, each business group will go through its own process of assembling or developing services, apps and devices to solve what may be similar use cases. This sort of experimentation may lead to innovation, but the learning is lost to the organization and the results won't have an appropriate level of enterprise-class features. Centers of excellence provide a place where people working on a problem, such as how to apply gamification to improve operations, can gravitate. The learning there is captured, amplified and fed back to the larger organization. Meantime, the CIO can apply controls and governance to those innovations. Contest structures can further spur innovation, either internally or externally. 5. Keep An Enterprise Frame Of Mind The fast-paced experimentation required to support a tech-literate, self-serve workforce still must account for the different types of risks -- privacy, security, access, continuity -- for different users and use cases. User-friendly technologies must be integrated with existing workflows and back-office systems, the job of the IT department. At OfficeMax, the IT department focuses on process to help users better understand their needs and the capabilities of the new applications. "It's not surprising that some users expect new technology to be a panacea for deeper issues rooted in their processes," says CIO Randy Burdick. "But simplicity should start from the business process." Has your organization had success changing its IT delivery model? Which types of IT governance and support can deliver the most value? Leave a note in the comments section below. Eric Openshaw is vice chairman and U.S. technology, media & telecommunications leader for Deloitte LLP. Mark White is U.S. consulting chief technology officer for Deloitte Consulting. 2012-11-15T12:30:00ZSocial Analytics Isn't Just For Social NetworksBroadly applied across all company functions, social analytics can focus attention on the most pressing internal performance issues.http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/240142166?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsRemember the scene from the end of Indiana Jones, where the crate containing the lost ark is rolled through a maze of shelves piled high with equally anonymous crates in an enormous government warehouse, presumably never to be seen again? The vast quantities of data being collected through systems and sensors might not have the mass of that dusty artifact, but for many organizations the effect is much the same. It was an exciting ride deploying the technology to gather and store all of that data, but once the lights dim and the screen fades to credits, the treasure is forgotten. From customer data to social data to performance data, there's no limit to what companies can collect, track and measure. And we're just at the beginning. Yet many organizations have succumbed to analysis paralysis. They know there's more to be gleaned from the data, but they don't know which questions to ask of it, or even where to begin. The data is shelved, the data warehouses unexamined. Data and technology alone have limited reach. It's the skill to derive meaningful metrics from the data that will make or break the opportunity for each company. CIOs must begin developing that expertise. The first step is to expand inward. So far, social analytics -- the integration of social software and big data analytics to create insight from unstructured information -- has been the purview of the marketing and sales departments, where the focus has been on monitoring sites such as <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/twitter-helps-build-social-data-ecosyste/240007903">Twitter</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/facebook-seeks-next-generation-big-data/240008120">Facebook</a> to gauge customer sentiment and engagement. But social analytics can do more. Broadly applied across all functions, social analytics can focus attention on a company's most pressing internal performance issues. [ Learn how analytics can cut power consumption. See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-meets-texas-smart-energy-grid/240077542?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Big Data Meets Texas Smart Energy Grid</a>. ] Enterprise social software and sophisticated sensors that track flows of information are letting organizations capture more granular data on internal communication patterns, as well as those that include customers and suppliers. Companies can analyze these flows to quantify their impact on metrics that truly matter to the business. For example, most business leaders realize that financial metrics, though widely reported, tell us how we did in the past, not how to move forward. Operating metrics, such as customer churn rate or time to market, can be leading indicators of financial performance, but by the time companies accurately measure them it's often too late to change the outcome. In contrast, creating flow metrics based on internal and external interaction patterns can help managers not only anticipate operating performance -- and in turn financial performance -- but also help them take corrective action.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   The notion that certain patterns of interaction contribute to higher operating performance while other patterns tend to diminish it is not new. Witness the ongoing interest in workspace configurations and team structures. However, social analytics lets managers, for the first time, really test the validity of these conceptions and act on their insights. Imagine a development team gearing up to launch a product. Management could monitor communication flows -- on the enterprise social platform, if the company has adopted one, but also from scraping anonymous social data from internal networks, email, phone and Web interactions -- across affiliated teams (product development, marketing, sales, manufacturing) to track the progress and coordination across teams. If prior analysis had revealed that rich interaction flows contribute to compressed product lead times, management could get early insight into the likely operating performance of the team and, if necessary, take action to influence different communication flows. These new leading performance indicators could move management practices beyond "break/fix" or "sense/respond" and help executives anticipate performance problems and opportunities. If Not The CIO, Who? IT leaders have an untapped asset. As the custodian of the company's data, it's the CIO's job to tap into it. Start with a one-time deep dive into the company's social data. See that data warehouse? Dive in. What are you looking for? Patterns of interaction. Make observations about how these patterns influence performance and engage with other business leaders about these insights and about how the patterns identified in social data could be used to create truly predictive indicators. To fully capture the opportunity of social data requires more than building out the technological tools to capture and analyze vast repositories of data. The real opportunity comes after. Collectors of data must learn which questions to ask of it and which hypotheses to test. The window of opportunity won't remain open for long. Participating in and organizing big data platforms could soon become a business imperative, and the CIO is in the best position to ready the team. Data will ultimately migrate to where it can create the most value. Those who can't harness the value in their data will find themselves at a disadvantage to those who can. Has your organization tried to tap into social data for non-marketing purposes? How might social interactions from within or outside the enterprise inform your operations? Which metrics might be developed to anticipate operating performance on an ongoing basis? Please weigh in with a comment below. Eric Openshaw is the vice chairman and U.S. technology, media and telecommunications leader at Deloitte. John Hagel is director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. In-memory analytics offers subsecond response times and hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. Now falling costs put it in reach of more enterprises. Also in the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/091912s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Analytics Speed Demon</a> special issue of InformationWeek: Louisiana State University hopes to align business and IT more closely through a master's program focused on analytics. (Free registration required.) 2012-09-17T08:36:00ZWhat CIOs Should Know About 'Outside-In' ArchitectureToday's flexible, loosely coupled supply chains and business models require a whole new approach.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240007372?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsConventional wisdom can change as rapidly as the world around us. With information easily accessible and business processes transparent, standardizing processes, stockpiling resources, and trying to control operations is no longer sufficient. The capabilities that "add value" aren't necessarily classic manufacturing or service activities so much as those that connect capabilities across organizations. Innovation depends upon knowing how to connect. Today, what organizations need is the capability to tap into third-party resources to meet changing demands and opportunities, and to adapt to changing players, rules, and desired outcomes. They need flexibility. That might mean the ability to offer services sourced from thousands of business partners, updated in real time, and maintained over the life of a transaction. Rearden Commerce, for example, continuously adds multi-party travel and entertainment services for its corporate customers. At the same time, Rearden must support its customers' policies (geography, service class, cost) and resolve exceptions (rebooking, cancelation, delay) across the often-lengthy life of each transaction, from booking to fulfillment. For many companies, flexibility also means the ability to change and customize offerings in response to external changes. For example, at TradeCard, a company that facilitates supply chain transactions, the financing requirements evolve rapidly based on global economic conditions, broader business policies, the changing payment terms of buyers and sellers, and new participants. TradeCard must not only track and mediate policies across buyers and sellers throughout the supply chain, but also identify profitable opportunities for the company to step in with new offers of financing, such as when a buyer wants to pay on a 45-day basis and the seller needs 30-day payment. Each of these companies depends upon the ability to fulfill flexibly across many partners, sharing information and outcomes. They can't be worried about what system (or lack of system) each participant runs or waste time coding new interfaces or middleware to manage interactions. Conventional enterprise IT systems aren't very good at coordinating complex, long-lived transactions across multiple, autonomous parties, but that is just what emerging models based on collaboration and resource-sharing require. [ To be the best, you have to be willing to hear the worst. Learn <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/6-uncomfortable-questions-it-teams-shoul/240007022?itc=edit_in_body_cross">6 Uncomfortable Questions IT Teams Should Ask</a>. ] In both cases, an "outside-in" architecture supports the more flexible, loosely coupled business model. TradeCard's outside-in architecture includes an emphasis on explicit management and mediation of policies across diverse participants. Rearden Commerce created a virtual common policy platform, which is invoked by customers when searching for options based on geography, vendor preference, logistics, and expense policy constraints. It's used by merchants when listing, describing, and promoting their services. And it's used by Rearden to drive long-running transactions and resolve exceptions. Rather than build around business capabilities, Rearden links functional services to the underlying infrastructure stack. Policies encountered at the business layer drive actions at the hardware and network layers.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   The answer lies in re-envisioning your architecture, not as an enterprise-wide monolith but as interrelated systems and data sets, encapsulated for external consumption. More Than Just SOA Some of you might think this crossroads is starting to look familiar. Haven't IT departments been in pursuit of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for years? Yes, but outside-in architecture is a more advanced concept. It exploits the shift from proprietary technical stacks to standards- and Web-based communication and interoperability. To accommodate a model where processes, systems, and even people are interchangeable building blocks, regardless of where they reside, can require a sophisticated platform of services to identify, provision, orchestrate, meter, bill, and mediate events across these components. The implications aren't trivial. In an outside-in model, there's no guarantee of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomicity_%28programming%29">atomicity</a> across systems and organizations. Failures must be addressed with compensating transactions rather than automatic rollback. In addition, outside-in is inherently pessimistic, thus human interaction--to resolve exceptions and apply business context--is expected and must be accommodated. The platform must also support versioning and the persistence of services, as well as policies to maintain whatever business rules or policies were in place at the inception for the life of each long-running transaction. Policy-driven interoperability is at the heart of an outside-in architecture. The policy layer may be a combination of human input and ongoing extraction from a variety of legacy systems or other data sources. In addition, because there are so many participants, a centralized policy must govern authentication, access, and entitlement of participants to underlying workloads. Interoperability applies not just at a systems level, but for varying levels of technology and sophistication; the architecture must accommodate a range of technologies, including offline modes such as voice and hardcopy. What To Do Adopting an outside-in architecture can involve a fundamental shift in thinking and execution. For the CIO and IT team, it requires skills in managing and orchestrating many moving parts, across organizations and geographies. 1. Consider the development of an outside-in architecture as a staged process, one that can accommodate traditional enterprise components. 2. Focus on specific operations that extend beyond organizational boundaries. 3. Look for long-lived transactions that aren't well served by enterprise systems. 4. Look at the areas that currently or potentially will have many diverse participants, particularly where performance is under pressure. 5. Look for areas of valuable localized innovation. Outside-in can accelerate innovations inside the enterprise and act as a catalyst for technical and business support. Of course. this isn't just about IT. The first step is to look at the organization as a set of business capabilities and meta processes, each of which may be delivered in a different way. This reassessment can allow for a strategic mix and match of internal and external resources, of packaged solutions, homegrown systems, and services acquired through the cloud. Eric Openshaw is the vice chairman and U.S. Technology, Media & Telecommunications leader at Deloitte. Michael Canning is National Managing Director of Deloitte Consulting's U.S. Strategy & Operations practice.