Thinking IT

The end of Active Directory

You may have heard of this "new" thing called the cloud: all of our systems, processes, data and relationships accessible via any old device with an internet connection. All very clever.

The second jigsaw piece is consumerisation of IT. Also, nothing spectacular here - services that are made available initially to individuals trickling 'up' into the corporate world.

So, what does this mean for the future of traditional directory services tools such as Active Directory.

What does AD do? Firstly it gives assurance over identity. Well, I manage relationships with a few hundred people on the usual suspect social tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and so on. I am confident that I have sufficient assurance of their identity for the transactions I share with them. For low-risk transactions such as Twitter post - low assurance. For high-risk transactions such as sharing family photos - high-assurance. I can manage a few hundred of these connections with various levels of "closeness" to me; but I am over forty. People twenty-years younger than me - internet natives - are actively managing many more relationships.

Secondly AD controls access to corporate resources. Things like networks and laptops. I work from my home office on a personal PC and network accessing corporate information resources. What about printing? Really? How 2005.

Increasingly I expect smaller organisations which are using tools such as Google Apps to switch off AD and use other web-based or social methods of identity assurance. Give it five years and larger and larger organisations will abandon traditional directory services in favour of social, web-based, organic, personal relationship management.

The real corporate assets are information, expertise, processes and relationships, all of which we are learning to manage and interact with via our friend the internet connection.

Social fireworks

This time of year I get a bit obsessed by fireworks. My local fireworks shop - Epic Fireworks - is worth a mention as I am pretty impressed by how they marry on-line with their traditional shop.

All of their fireworks have YouTube clips so you can see what you are buying, they blog - about fireworks of course - and tweet. My favourite part though is their Flickr feed. Buy a load of fireworks from them, and they will pack them beautifully into your car boot for you then take a photo of you in front of them. The next day you are on their website with some complementary caption (I thought it was just me but it seems they are nice about all of their customers).

All this builds a connection between company and customer which many a large company could learn from. I think the key elements that make this mix of social media and traditional shopping work are:

• It makes the customer feel good
• It adds genuine value to the buying experience
• It's fun
• It draws you in to their enthusiasm about their product

My only regret is working out the cost-per-second of my fireworks display. Some things are better left un-calculated.

The fridge is lagging behind

The promise of the internet age was clear: one day my fridge would have its own IP address. Today, my computers, printers, TV and DVD player all have IP addresses, as do my phones, games consoles and  MP3 player. I even read today about bathroom scales that can connect my network. 

Why is the fridge lagging behind?

A dog's dinner not haute cuisine

This week I experienced some pretty horrible customer service. As it happens, the company was Samsung, but I fear the underlying cause of the failures is something that exists in many organisations including my own department at work.

So, the short version of the tale of woe and then some reflections.

Part one - on the web.  To deal with a problem with my mobile, I tried self-serving via the website. To do this you need to know your customer account number. There is no way past this web page if you don't know this number there is no option for it to be e-mailed to you, no option to re-register. I checked my welcome e-mails and there is no mention of this account number in any of them. Foiled.

Part two - on the phone. I navigated the usual IVR and endured the messages about how much easier it would be for me if I didn't call but went to the website instead. and got through to a charming and helpful agent. On the worst phone line ever. Everything had to be repeated, spelled in the phonetic alphabet  - a truly awful experience. Oh, and the agent couldn't e-mail me the details as she did not have e-mail capability.

Part three - the service offer. If I want my five-month-old Galaxy S fixing, I am advised to buy a jiffy bag and post it at my own cost and risk to their service centre, where it can be repaired with an estimated turn-around time of two weeks. There are no options for loan phones or diverting my number.

Having unburdened (so cathartic) these are my reflections on the root causes.

1. Great people being let down by terrible IT systems. I have no idea how the person I spoke to managed to be so helpful when each customer must have been pre-programmed to be grumpy by the failures of the website and telephony.
2. Not eating your own dog-food. I guarantee that no-one senior from Samsung has ever tried to access service from their website or phone lines or it would be fixed.
3. Not thinking like a customer. The phone I have is marketed as a luxury item that will enable a connected life. The service wrap changes the experience of the phone to be one of a piece of old junk that the supplier thinks you can be without and it doesn't matter.
4. Not thinking like a chef. Great food is about perfect components being assembled with artistry. I am sure that no-one is Samsung wants their service to be bad, but the cumulative effect of each individual service design decision - probably all made for good reasons - has aggregated into a dog's dinner not haute cuisine.

 

Top 10 blogs to get an IT leader thinking

These blogs will get you thinking, even if you don't agree with everything they say:

1. http://www.bnet.com/management A collection of blogs on leadership, targeted at different audiences. No shortage of opinions.
2. http://www.manager-tools.com/blog/manager-tools Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne offer free coaching for managers and workers (individual contributors) through their massively popular podasts and now short-sharp blogging.
3. http://bankervision.typepad.com James Gardner - CTO for the DWP - blogs about innovation.
4. http://blogs.techrepublic.com Another collection of blogs, this time with a distinctive techie feel. Lots of voices, lots of thoughts, and comment on current news.
5. http://bobsutton.typepad.com Hard-hitting thoughts on bad bosses, dysfunctional workplaces and organisational pathology.
6. http://blog.ted.com TED's claim of offering: "riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world" maybe grand but is also pretty accurate. Definitely worth a look - one of the highest 'nuggets per minute' ratios of any site.
7. http://blogs.hbr.org Harvard Business Review. Enough said.
8. http://www.inkrebels.com A kind of meta-blogging site. Blogging about blogging. Well written and always helpful.
9. http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog Apparently the path to leadership begins in the mind. This will lead you along the path.
10. http://stevefarber.com/ Author of 'The Radical Edge' offers his take on leadership.

The digital inclusion paradox

The government has recently published the latest stats on access to and use of the internet: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/iahi0810.pdf.

The headlines are both interesting and encouraging from a digital inclusion perspective: 30m people using the internet daily, a big increase in mobile phone internet use. 

However, 9m people have not used the internet. Ever.

This number will reduce over the next five years (I see a new career as a futurologist coming with predictions like that). As it does so, I worry that digital exclusion will become more severe.

I have an elderly relative who is digitally excluded. She is connected to fast broadband and uses her computer and the internet daily. Her exclusion comes from the fact that she lives in a strange corner of Kent where there is effectively no mobile phone signal. Five years ago, most of us had mobile phones, but not having one was not that odd. Now, when mobile phone usage has reached ubiquity there is an assumption that services can be delivered via mobile to everyone.

So, wind forward 5 years. the number of people in the UK who don't have internet access might be less than 1 million. At that point, service providers, both public and commercial, will assume web access ubiquity and start to provide services only via the web. I think we may be at an even earlier part of the same curve for mobile phone apps.

The exclusion of the excluded will be made more severe by the increase in internet access.

IT's hygiene factors

Frederick Herzberg famously posited the two-factor theory of motivation.

This suggests that some factors in work ("hygiene" factors) can demotivate us if they are wrong but can only be improved to the state where they drop off our motivational radar. If the temperature in the office is wrong, we are unhappy: get it right and we don't think about it. We can't get it so right we are delighted and motivated to do a great job.

On the other hand there are positive motivational factors which can have a good and growing influence if they are present.

I think the same can be said of an IT service. These are my top five IT hygiene factors and motivators.

Hygeine factors (if they are wrong, we are grumpy)

1. The speed of the IT systems;
2. How quickly you get through to the IT Service Desk;
3. System availability;
4. Anti-virus, anti-spam, back-ups;
5. The printer that is three feet from my desk working.

Motivators (if they are right, we are happy)

1. Mobile working solutions;
2. An IT application that makes your life easier and has been implemented in the last six weeks;
3. Someone from IT calling back when they say they will;
4. Getting a service from IT without filling in a request form;
5. IT recharge costs going down;

Let me know what you think.

Notes to self

I have just returned from two weeks annual leave. Due to industrial action at the Irish Passport office for the last five months my wife is passport-less and hence we were restricted to the UK. We had day trips out from home; my children are 3 and 7, so the zoo and various parks and eateries featured heavily and I even managed to sneak off to watch a bit of cricket or for an occasional ‘coffee and crossword’ hit.

Despite my best efforts, I did occasionally think about work while on holiday.

We all loved Twycross zoo. The combination of improved facilities and some great customer service meant it was easy to have a good time. Note to self: we need both enhanced IT infrastructure and a great service wrap for IT to be easy for our people not hard.

At Calke Abbey, a National Trust property, one of the staff broke their rules to allow our 3-year old to use the staff toilets rather than trek back up the hill to the public ones. Note to self: standard processes and rules are great, but breaking them can sometimes be greater.

Then of course, the cricket – what a game. Fantastic test cricket from both sides at times, completely overshadowed by those allegations of betting scams. Note to self: days of great work by the team will be dwarfed by one major embarrassing failure.

Top five location-based tools

A common theme of IT applications over the last ten years has been communication wherever you are - that is, removing geography as a constraint. I can email, telephone, blog, view the web, use all of my work applications independent of my location. 

I am now getting really excited by the explosion in applications that use my location as the key part of their core existence. 

These are my top five:

5 - Microsoft street slide. Google street view is great - this looks like it might be even better. It solves the problem of context for a street view bubble and gives a quick run up and down a street. 

4 - The as-yet unborn lovechild of Locale and Tasker. Locale puts my Android phone into a particular mode based on my location; easy to use, but simple. Tasker is a great tool for setting all kinds of phone actions based on trigger states; powerful, like a programming language but takes some getting used to.

3 - Qype. My personal favourite place-rating community.

2 - Layar reality browser. The future, only already here. Would be my number one but it needs one more round of finessing the interface.

1 - Google places. Find my nearest cash machine, petrol station etc. Dead simple, works a treat and you can save your own searches (find my nearest curry house at the touch of a button).

At the moment these are fun and personally useful applications, but they don't impact on the business world. However, we all have to do lists and calendars. Things to do, and things to do when time criteria are met. These applications point the way to a new type of to do list. Things to do when place criteria are met; when I get to the London office, speak to Fred; if I am driving towards a stationery store read out the supplies shopping list. I look forward to the next generation of these tools.

What IT could learn from Finance

The relationship between IT and Finance has been long and occasionally painful. Finance managers used Visicalc and its various descendants long before other departments saw any benefit to Data Processing (the old name for Strategic ICT). So, the new profession of IT became linked to Finance.  

Now, IT often reports in via Finance. This is either because the FD is the only one on the senior team with any IT management experience, or the CEO is looking for a way to keep down the number of direct reports, and the Finance / IT relationship is well established (much harder to ask HR to report in via Facilities Management). I am sure also that there is a shortage of IT leaders with the broader leadership nous to be credible on an executive board.

So how do we as IT folk deal with this? A common conversation I hear at IT leadership gatherings goes like this:

"I am the IT Director for company ABC"

    "Who do you report to?"

"The Finance Director"

    "I am so sorry to hear that, you have my sympathy"

However, I think we have much to learn from our colleagues in Finance. Here are five things Finance folk are good at and which IT folk could be better at:

1. Influencing without authority. A good Finance team influence all parts of the business, even where they have no direct authority. Gravitas.
2. Investing the pounds in one area, while still watching the pennies elsewhere. Choosing where to invest and where to cut back is a key Finance skill. IT people can become obsessed with one at the expense of the other.
3. Talking shareholder language. Shareholders speak Finance (or is that the other way around?) If you want to influence a shareholder, ask an accountant.
4. Mobilising the troops. Its time for the half-yearly forecast. Finance can get people all around the organisation to drop what they were doing and do Finance stuff. When it is time for IT to mobile the same people for user acceptance testing on the new application, less success. Perhaps the case for a link to organisational goals has been made more effectively by Finance?
5. Adding up. IT business cases can sometimes look like an exercise in counting smoke and stacking water. Take the imagination out and put in some good Finance reality.