Are your IT staff adequately trained?

An interesting finding emerged from one of our recent studies into IT Service Management (ITSM). It concerns a cause and effect that is pretty obvious once it is highlighted. Put simply, IT departments operate much more smoothly and efficiently if IT staff are adequately trained.

The data, which is derived from over 1,100 responses to an online survey, is difficult to argue with. There is a clear relationship between the attention paid to IT staff training and the perceived level of burden experienced by IT. To put it another way, properly trained staff find it easier to cope with the demands placed on them in areas such as infrastructure optimisation and management to keep service levels up and costs down, effective maintenance of desktops to manage user satisfaction and keep security risks under control, and provision of helpdesk services to meet user expectations with regard to support.

What’s more, the relationship between training and operational efficiency and effectiveness is a linear one. What does that mean? Well, it doesn’t really matter whether training requirements have been neglected, if the organisation already has its act together, or if it’s somewhere in between, indications are that that incremental training will always have a positive impact. To put this into perspective, another finding from the same report was that investment in other areas, such as systems management automation and integration, does not deliver benefits in the same linear fashion. Essentially, you need to get past a threshold of capability before significant improvements are generated.

There are some interesting lessons in here for all organisations, but particularly those that have a tendency to skimp on investment in skills development. If this study is anything to go by, such an approach is clearly false economy. In fact, if you have anything to do with running an IT department that is underperforming on IT service delivery and operational efficiency, then the first port of call when looking for improvements should probably be staff development. While upgrading your systems management tools and technology may also be a necessity, investment in this way will take time to pay back. Meanwhile, a bit of additional training at a fraction of the cost is likely to have a much more immediate impact.

Oh yeah, and study also quite clearly shows that training end users can have a similar impact, reducing the burden placed on IT in areas such as desktop management and help desk delivery. The basic principle here is that adequately trained users encounter (and create) fewer problems, and when problems do occur, users are much better placed to sort themselves out.
There’s a lot more to this research than the stuff we have been talking about above, so if you’d like to learn more, you can download a full copy of the findings from here. And if you’re interested in a companion report looking at the future of IT Service Management (ITSM) in general, you can download that from here.

The customer view of BEA’s acquisition by Oracle

When the BEA Oracle deal was finally announced last week, my first instinct, like many analysts and journalists I would guess, was to rush to the keyboard and bash something out. But what was there to be said that hadn’t already been covered? After re-reading my previous post on the topic, I didn’t have a great deal more to say at that point.

So, instead of writing a blog post, I composed a little questionnaire and reached out to Oracle and BEA customers through an online survey to capture opinion where the rubber meets the road. In a very short space of time, I gathered nearly 300 responses, including a lot of freeform feedback. I then spent an interesting few hours reading through and categorising people’s views, which is the part of this job I really enjoy. Gathering statistics through tick and bash surveys is one thing, but reading a few hundred comments in which a bunch of smart people tell you what they think in a totally unconstrained manner is a great way to get under the skin of a topic.

In this case, I quickly uncovered a bunch of angles on the BEA acquisition that I hadn’t previously considered. Here is quick summary the themes, both positive and negative, that I managed to pull out (ranked in order of frequency of mention):

Reasons given for why the acquisition is bad news
1. Reduced choice and competition in the market
2. Uncertainties for customers with existing product investments
3. Loss of innovation, Oracle will smother the goodness of BEA
4. Concerns about Oracle as a supplier (style and nature)
5. Increased cost for BEA users (particularly maintenance)
6. Fear of lock-in as Oracle optimises between stack components

Reasons given for why the acquisition is good news
1. A stronger and more mature solution will emerge (eventually)
2. Rescue of good technology from a company that had lost its way
3. Creation of stronger and more credible competition for IBM
4. Better synergy between BEA technology and Oracle RDBMS, tools, etc
5. Reinforcement of distinction between commercial offerings and OSS
6. More integrated approach to customers and account management

Even though a lot of these are pretty obvious, I’m sure most people looking at this list will spot a couple of angles that they hadn’t previously thought of, and if you are a customer trying work out the impact of the acquisition, then this probably isn’t a bad starting point for assessing the balance between risk and opportunity in what is actually quite a complex situation.

Of course we also gathered some stats, and I’ll throw in this chart in here that illustrates the sentiment overall.



So, the initial reaction to the acquisition, while mixed, is definitely net negative.

Anyway, if you’re are interested in a drill down on the above chart broken down by customer type (BEA versus Oracle versus joint customers), along with and fuller discussion of the findings, you can check out the more complete analysis I put together here or here.

Here’s to a more balanced 2008

While everyone seems to be busy making predictions about hot technologies, revolutionary industry developments, and various tipping points being reached in 2008, I can’t help hoping that we see a bit more balance emerging in views and opinions over the coming 12 months. It’s probably wishful thinking given that more extreme and/or disruptive ideas are used as a lever for selling everything from hardware and software to management consulting and analyst research, but it would be nice to see us getting away from bandwagons, magic bullets and the simplistic 'single track' thinking that often accompanies them.

Of course that’s not to say that interesting things aren’t happening, and we can look forward some important trends and developments continuing to unfold in the coming year, such as the ongoing move towards more virtualised, dynamic and service oriented infrastructures, the gradual evolution of sourcing and outsourcing options, the awakening of more enterprises to the potential of social computing, etc. The only real seismic shifts we are likely to see, however, are in marketing collateral, analyst reports and the media.

So, while many around us are ‘bigging up’ SaaS, cloud computing, open source software, Web 2.0, and so on, we will continue to do what Freeform Dynamics has always done - examine all of the ideas and propositions in a practical, down-to-earth and objective manner, and provide insights and advice for those working in the real and complex world of ‘brown field’ IT and business.

And with this focus, the ‘how?’ is just as important as the ‘what?’ and the ‘why?’, so our emphasis on community research, tapping into the experience of practitioners as well as strategists, will remain a big part of what we do going forward. During 2007, we gathered over 45,000 responses from IT and business professionals in our research studies. Our analysts therefore really do have a good in-depth understanding of what’s going on out there, and it is a position we fully intend to maintain.

Let me finish by saying a big thank you to everyone that has supported Freeform Dynamics since it was founded two years ago, and wish all of our subscribers, readers, clients, partners, friends and anyone else who knows us a happy, harmonious and ‘balanced’ 2008.

Managing signal to noise

A couple of months ago, I decided to get stuck in a bit more to the whole social media thing, as a few conversations with other’s that were much more active than me had planted the seed in my mind that I might be missing out on something. Those who know me will realise that this wasn’t so much me getting involved in social media for the first time, as I have been a producer and consumer of blogs for a couple of years now. It was more a case of stepping up a level.

Anyway, I made a real effort to go through the blog rolls of the 20 or so blogs to which I was already subscribed, took recommendations on interesting wikis, and signed up for a bunch more feeds. I also decided to explore the extreme real-time end of social media, and signed up to Twitter.

Fast forwarding to this weekend, I have just deleted my Twitter account and got rid of most of the RSS feeds I had added as part of the exercise.

Why?

Well two reasons. Firstly, I just couldn’t keep up with everything. I struggle to stay on top of my incoming email already, so having too many other streams to monitor and sort through just means more time away from the family and ‘real life’ and/or more chance of missing something important. This last point leads me on to the second reason paring things back again – the signal to noise ratio got considerably worse as I expanded my subscriptions beyond the hand-picked sources I had already been using.

One of the particular challenges I encountered was that so many bloggers and Twitterers out there are clearly on a mission or pushing a specific agenda. Nothing wrong with that in principle provided you take what you read with a pinch of salt, and I personally find it interesting and useful to understand the range of views that exists. Unless you are on the same mission, though, such sources quickly become very boring. There are only so many ways of making the case for ODF, for example, and a daily stream of evangelism thereafter is really just noise to most people.

However, with the exception of Twitter, which I struggled to see the point of, I did actually get some benefit from exploring things a bit more widely. I now have a list of blogs and wikis that might not have a high enough level of genuinely new insights to subscribe to on an ongoing basis, but do represent sources to browse from time to time to keep up to speed in certain areas or provide input for research. The difference is that it will be me going to them rather than them coming to me from this point onwards – which is pretty much the way I have been using the Web for the last decade.

So, while I remain a big fan and active user of social media, I have discovered that to me it is the content being exchanged that matters more than the act of communicating itself. Perhaps that makes me relatively ‘unsociable’ in the online sense, but when it’s the socialising that takes precedent, it is only natural that the signal to noise ratio deteriorates.

Again, nothing inherently wrong with this, but just like I all those ‘put the world to rights’ conversations in pubs, small talk and one-upmanship competitions at parties, etc, activities that are primarily about social interaction should not be confused with the production or exchange of useful information. Somewhere in between lies the ‘conversation around the water cooler’ that forms an important part keeping people informed and tuned in, and there are blogs out there that encapsulate this spirit and are therefore very worthwhile subscribing to (e.g. monkchips). Most of the other feeds I am left with are concerned with blogs and wikis that explore issues and debates in an objective, informed and thought provoking manner, with high level of original content - but these are harder to find than I think many social media advocates like to admit.

At the end of the day, it’s all about how you spend your time, so the trick is to find the optimum balance between continuous incoming streams and keeping tabs on the sources of information that are useful to access but on more of an ‘on demand’ basis. The next stop for me on my social media adventure is therefore tagging and bookmarking.

Avaya crosses the line

This is not going to be an in-depth post. I just wanted to put on record that I was very impressed with a lot of what I heard during the Avaya industry analyst conference a couple of weeks ago.

It was a pretty big gathering, with analysts from across the world rubbing shoulders with each other. I love events like this, as while we here at Freeform are continuously researching the European and North American markets, it is great to talk with people who have in-depth knowledge of thrusting economies like India and China.

With so many analysts on one place, it also reinforced the myriad of different styles, approaches and areas of coverage that exist within the research community. I guess it will be no surprise that with Avaya’s heritage, the majority of the delegates were specialists in the communications industry, and I lost count of the number of conversations I had on the nitty gritty of the telephony market that left me way behind.

So why was I impressed?

Well, I am a bit of a hybrid when it comes to coverage in that I think of myself as a business and IT analyst primarily, but with a reasonable working knowledge of how the communications part of the equation touches this world. This is very relevant to the Avaya discussion as one of the big topics of the conference was Unified Communications (UC). I don’t want to dwell on this specifically as Robin Bloor, who was also at the event, has already written a pretty good treatment of the topic, but the main point is that UC represents the clearest business and application level cross-over between the traditional IT and telephony spaces outside of the call centre environment that we have seen to date, and Avaya seems to ‘get’ what’s important to be successful once you cross over the old dividing line. The understanding is multi-dimensional too, i.e. Avaya is thinking as much about partnerships, IT related architectures and standards, and business process enhancement in the broader application sense, as well as simply neat functionality.

If you are an Avaya customer, I would encourage you to catch up with the firm’s latest developments in unified comms and 'Communications Enabled Business Processes' (CEBP), as ways of bridging the gap between domains that are still considered separate by many.

I am going to resist saying much more at this stage as Jon Collins and I will be spending some time in a week or so with the most visible player in the unified comms space, Cisco, and one of the objectives we have is to bring ourselves completely up to date with its ideas and developments with regard to IT/comms convergence. I’ll also have to track down the guys at my old firm Nortel, as there have been some interesting developments coming out of that camp in recent times too, and it is a while since I have caught up with them properly.

Looking at the bigger picture, the coming together of communications and IT at the application and process as well as the network level is a significant development which represents opportunities for both suppliers and customers. But it is obviously not just the traditional comms players that are moving into this area – IT incumbents such as Microsoft and IBM are also very active (see here and here) – they are just coming at it from a different direction. You’ll therefore be seeing us spending a lot of time on this topic in 2008.

Meanwhile, it is nice to see Avaya, backed by its new found private equity arrangement, starting to cross the line into the world of IT so convincingly.

Context and social media

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to recently threw up a post that provided a link to a YouTube video of an Analyst Relations (AR) professional talking about their job and why they like it. There was no explanation, just a link straight to the clip. Presented in this way, it looked a bit silly, and my first reaction was to ask why on earth the person concerned had published it.

Then it occurred to me that the video was probably made as part of some internal “who’s who” thing or perhaps in a personal capacity to give friends a little insight into what the person did for a living. Whatever the reason, once the clip had lost its original context, it was difficult to know how to take it.

Now in this particular instance, there is probably no harm done, but it got me thinking about people using YouTube and other content hosting sites as essentially a convenient way of storing and retrieving media for embedding in another site. While it’s great to be able to do this, there is a risk that the content may be interpreted and perceived differently when accessed directly or, indeed, via someone else’s site where the content or a link to it is embedded in an entirely different context.

It’s similar to the problem we face as researchers. We have to be very careful when we report the results of our primary research studies to include commentary relating to constraints or restrictions, which, if ignored, could lead to a statistic being taken out of context and spun to mean something that is not supported by the study as a whole. As an aside, this is why we retain copyright of all of our output, even though we make much of it available free of charge and allow anyone to copy it and pass it on. If we placed it into the public domain in an unrestricted manner, it could easily be taken apart and elements presented out of context in the kind of misleading manner we have been discussing.

Zooming out a little, this general issue of maintaining or understanding context highlights the need from an individual perspective to make sure we think before putting something out there that could be picked up in isolation or re-used by someone else for a purpose other than that which was originally intended. Wherever possible, we therefore need to make sure that media objects either contain important context within them or have an explicit reference back to the original source – e.g. your website address.

When we are more in information consumption mode, there is then a need to pay attention to the provenance of content, particularly when looking at a site, page or post that has been assembled by pulling together material from different sources. Personally, I try to track down the original source as much as possible when I look at a quotation, statistic, or even a picture or video, before relying on something I have discovered on the Web. It is so easy to be misled if you are not careful.

Perhaps this all sounds very obvious, but as someone who, like other analysts, has a job that involves gathering, comparing and making sense of intelligence and viewpoints from many different sources, it never ceases to amaze me how often information is misrepresented, either deliberately or unintentionally, by taking it out of context.

With its emphasis on user generated content (UGC) coupled with the absence of editorial processes and other safeguards by design, social media just increases the risk of being caught out. Forethought and vigilance are therefore the watchwords when producing and consuming information in this brave new free-for-all Web 2.0 world.

Dissecting SaaS

I sometimes think I am living in a parallel universe when I get into conversations about Software as a Service (SaaS). People keep talking to me as if there is some kind of seismic shift taking place in the way organisations are acquiring and running software. Then I look around me and down at the results of study after study of buying patterns and investment plans that we carry out here at Freeform Dynamics and all I can see is the continued gradual creep of the price per user per month hosted model that has been taking place in a steady but non-dramatic manner for the best part of a decade now.

When I ask what it is that people are basing their evidence on, they point to solutions such as salesforce.com and Google Office, then at the number of column inches and marketing dollars being spent telling us that SaaS is the future. And yet, beyond salesforce.com finding an opening for a hosted service around a niche application that is largely stand alone and sold into green field environments (at least from a sales force automation perspective), the evidence for the revolution is pretty elusive.

Now before any of you SaaS evangelists write me off as a grumpy old sceptic, I must point out that I am a big SaaS fan, provided you approach it sensibly. Indeed, I have championed SaaS for internal use in both of the companies I have had a hand in building – bet my businesses on it, if you like. It is my firm opinion that there can be little justification for any small business to run email servers and the like in house.

But, I am also a realist, and the evidence I can actually have confidence in tells me that I am unusual in my acceptance of the SaaS model in a business context. For every organisation that says it has SaaS on the agenda, there’s about 7 saying they don’t. And those that are going down the SaaS route are mostly doing so very selectively – they are not looking at a complete shift in philosophy or approach as some would have us believe.

So, SaaS is definitely a trend and this way of delivering solutions will increasingly find its place in the mix, but, in keeping with the title of this blog, let’s keep it grounded and be realistic about the rate of change that is taking place. Just because vendors say it is exploding, doesn’t make it true.

Putting all of the SaaS mania to one side, though, the individual elements of the typical SaaS proposition are actually quite appealing to many. Paying for software on a subscription basis rather than forking out up front for a perpetual licence can help with both cash flow and the optimisation of accounts (subscriptions can be conveniently categorised as an operational cost). Having your applications hosted on someone else’s servers can be beneficial too, especially if this allows you take advantage of robust and scalable platform technology that you would otherwise not have access to. Finally, of course, having someone manage your environment for you means not having to worry about the distraction, cost and risk of maintaining the necessary resources and practices in house – IT is, after all, a non-core activity to most businesses.

The point is, though, that you don’t need to do all of these things at once. If it is the subscription approach that appeals, you can take advantage of this without having another party manage and/or host your applications. If it is getting rid of the hassle and overhead of looking after systems then there are lots of firms willing to provide a managed service, regardless of where your software and hardware resides and who owns them. Such services, just like traditional hosting models, have been around for years and are nothing new.

So, my advice to anyone trying to figure out where SaaS fits into their IT strategy is to look at the components of the proposition individually in the context of a specific requirement. If all three elements, the subscription approach, hosting model and managed services, seem relevant and attractive then SaaS is worth looking at, but if only one or two out of the three appeals, then look for the products, services and/or commercial terms that fit your requirement. The bottom line is you don’t have to drink the Kool Aid and commit your soul to the church of SaaS in order to benefit from any of these things.