AusCloud Forum May 2012

I had the pleasure this week of being OrionVM’s guest on the panel for this month’s AusCloud Forum (see tweets).

The panel I was on followed the three keynote speakers:

1. David Yuile, CEO of AAPT on Powering the Cloud
2. David Werdiger, CEO of Billing Brureau on SmartBilling
3. Sheng Yeo, CEO of OrionVM on Carrier Clouds

The speakers were interesting in the most part, I think David had us the most entertained, but unfortunately he was in the dark for most of it (and really needs to read Beyond Bulletpoints as his first slide had tiny icons I couldn’t even read from the 5th row.
The panel was about “Enterprise in the Cloud” and put me in some very flattering company:

• Roger Lawrence, CTO Enterprise Cloud Services at HP
• David Yuile, CEO at AAPT
• David Hodges, CEO at Loc8.com
• Jamie Pride, Partner at Deloitte (CRM/SaaS practice)

We had several great questions to answer, and some interesting variances in opinion. I wasn’t tracking well enough to keep everything in order, but some of the high points from my point of view were:

Cloud Has Arrived

It is clear that enterprises are switching to use the cloud, at least on new/internal projects. This was backed up at yesterday’s AWS Summit where News Ltd and Realestate.com.au both shared they have moved their development/test environments over to Amazon’s cloud. This is what we’re doing at Elcom. Our release testing now occurs on servers at OrionVM that get spinned up when we need them and archived  in between.

Hardware Must Be Sweated

Both Roger Lawrence and David Yuile were emphatic that enterprises have significant hardware (and skill) investments that need to be sweated before they will feel free to move to the cloud. Sometimes these can be re-tasked for other duties, but all too often they can’t be (few banks are moving their mainframe code just yet (although MicroFocus and Heirloom Computing both offer COBOL in the cloud).

Give Me Standards

David Yuile was heavy on the need for cloud standards, and he thinks that larger players should put some money up to ensure standards get worked on properly. He likened the current trepidation about cloud to the same feelings enterprises had about VLAN – and in a similar fashion he thinks some standards will help it go mainstream.
Roger pointed out that there’s a difference between standards and certifications, with the later being what most enterprises care about. I agree to a point, as a small ISV we can’t always afford to get all the certifications we’d like to, and being able to assure customers we can adhere to a standard is often all we need to do.

CIOs See New Savings, CEOs See New Possibilities

Roger had a very interesting point to make about how different occupants of the C-suite tend to approach cloud. CIOs tend to see the cost savings and efficiencies to be gained, whilst CEOs come from the point of view of what new possibilities the cloud offers their business. A case in point was that of a large construction company where IT costs were around 1% of revenue – any saving being negligible – but being able to reduce the wait between delivery of goods to clients and payment of invoices from 27 to 26 days was worth $34M in extra cashflow.

We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

I think we have barely seen what the real effect of the cloud will be in the enterprise arena. Most technology shifts are not really embraced until the generation that grows up with it gets the chance to flex their muscles in the workforce and for the cloud that is still 5 years or so away. When you have grown up with streaming media as the norm, mobile access the primary means of internet access, true ubiquitous computing and commoditised cloud services how differently will you regard the problems enterprises (and countries) face today?

Cloud Helps Startups, But Not That Much

There is some lurking optimism that if we just commoditise the cloud and computing enough then startups will suddenly multiply and change the world. Unfortunately for that rather utopian idea the lowering of the barriers to entry helps everyone, big enterprise innovator and  garage startup alike – it also means more competition and noise to rise above.
An example comes from my wife’s cousin who has worked in the Australia games industry for over 15 years. The industry is currently deep in recession, but it looks like it’s healthy because so many developers are trying their hands at mobile games. The problem is that few (if any) of them are making any money (Halfbrick being a notable exception).

Microsoft’s Future (bonus)

Not particularly cloud related, but a subject dear to Roger and my heart and something that came out of one of the questions asked. We both have strong opinions on this, but what it boiled down to was the success of Windows 8 will define how much affect Microsoft has on the future.
Roger pointed out that Microsoft might lose it’s way, but like IBM, still remain a giant in the IT space. He also noted that Microsoft’s partners, as heavily invested as they are in its success, are a mighty (not so) secret weapon when it comes to their success in the business world.
Personally I think their Windows 8 Metro UI is inspired, and will probably be a great hit on tablets and mobile devices … it’s penetration into the business world will be limited by old non-touch LCD monitors (see “Hardware Must Be Sweated” above). However, Microsoft will both find ways to maximise the switch, and will care less than it used to if it can wrest majority control of the mobile/tablet space from Apple/Android.

My geek origin story

Delicate Genius (aka Microsoft’s Michael Kordahi) tweeted me a while ago about putting this up, and in the interest of historical accuracy, here it is! Other geek origin stories can be found from his blog post.

I wasn’t terribly geeky as a young lad, except I loved Lego and got into roleplaying games in a big way. At university I fell into a crowd that were much geekier than I (hat tip to Justin McLean), and along the way got pulled into doing an Information Systems major for my Bachelors of Commerce degree.

Something must have happened because by the time I met and married my lovely wife I looked like a true geek! (gotta love the Doc Martens)

Looking back I think the same qualities that caused me to fail Accounting Financial Management 1B led to my success as a geek. Things like:

• Always wanting to improve the system,
• Searching for truth,
• Wanting my work to matter.

None of those things applied to rote learning T accounts and double entry accounting, but they sure do matter when you are building fantastic tools for web developers to build awesome, award-winning sites with.

So that’s how I ended up becoming the geek t-shirt wearer I am today – although I no longer have those DMs ...

Context may be key to blended learning

I have been reading two excellent books recently, John Medina’s Brain Rules and Dan Coyle’s The Talent Code (see other Personal Transformation Books), both deal with how our brain works, and there are interesting things they tell us about learning skills that we can apply to how we structure and run blended learning programs.

I have mentioned before David Maister’s article Why (Most) Training Is Useless in the context of saying that behaviour is what we should be aiming to change, and measure, not simple skill identification. The point was that it is not good saying I want to train your consulting skills if I don’t know what behaviour indicates that you are have learnt and are applying them. Maister also wants incentives made to match those behaviours, based on seeing his training undermined by the structure of the organisation’s incentives.

Coyle breaks down two ways we can affect skills development, ignition, which is a combination of incentives/encouragement/vision and deep practice, which is the focused practicing of technique at the edge of our ability, with the aim of achieving perfection in the small components of a skill, and then building into perfection in the larger components. Maister’s complaint about incentives not matching behaviours is talking to the ignition side of skill development.

Medina’s book is interesting because it gives us lots of clues about how memory relates to instructional methods, with the main points being that repetition is important, but so is learning in the context in which we want to be able to remember what we learn. In this sense it relates well to Coyle’s idea of deep practice.

This last point is the one I want to focus on. If Medina is correct when he says that we recall things more easily when in the physical/emotional context we learned them in, then most teaching is done in the wrong context!

This suggests that eLearning is best used when the skills being taught are to be expressed online, with use of much the same tools that the learning occurred on. It is one reason learner drivers are encouraged to use their own cars when learning and when going to do their driver’s test.

Classroom learning may suit well skills that need to be exhibited in front of other people, in social or meeting situations, where the ability to perform before your peers may be required (it may also help people perform better in classrooms - any professional students listening?). Even then the layout of the room may benefit from being closer to their likely environment. When Anthony Milner and I did the excellent NIDA Corporate Performance Course the format was that of a class, but the frequent practice sessions were done in front of the group with us facing them as a very real audience, an experience that made it easier to recall the skills learnt when actually presenting in front of audiences later.

One on one mentoring may be the best approach when the skill must be exhibited in the context of a  personal relationship, and even then it is best done in the workplace. This is how we handle important parts of facilitator training in the Careforce Lifekeys’ courses – the small group facilitator is given the opportunity to practice their skills in the context of a one on one conversation with a trainer playing the role of a small group member.

There is one caveat to this, both Medina and Coyle point out that the ability to comprehend the big picture is a vital component of skill competency – one of the factors that differentiates experts form beginners in a particular field is that the experts have a mental abstraction that allows them to deal with the complexities of the problem domain more easily. Getting that big picture view across need not necessarily take place in the environment the skill is exercised in – in fact it may benefit from the distance provided by being away from that environment.

Why web will win the mobile app race

Everyone wants a mobile app, banks, health funds, airlines, pubs and all sorts of marketers want us interacting, playing with and using their mobile apps. This is fine and dandy, and is a Good Thing for the future of humanity, but … which OS do you want to target?

Is your app going to target iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7 or (heavens!) Symbian?

The right answer will, of course, be all of the above. It really isn’t hard to figure out, and there is a precedent you see.

What do you do if you want to target users on MacOS, Windows 7, Linux (a bazillion flavours itself), Google OS or (heavens!) Unix?

The answer to that question is you created a web app, because the browser environment was designed to be (reasonably) neutral between vendors. The same paradigm exists in the mobile world. Creating a specific OS version just limits your app to that OS, and who wants that?

However there is one big difference, the mobile app needs to deal with being occasionally (dis)connected, right? Solving that problem has been hard enough that mobile apps are still sprouting up that basically show content offline.

Riding to the rescue of the beleaguered user comes HTML5 with its cache manifest offering to give web apps a completely sane way of specifying what content should be held offline and what resides online. The  only problem is the memory limits most browsers place on the cache – except for Opera they all only let you have 5MB (or 10MB if you are on IE) – and in these days of fast connections and rich media that simply isn’t enough to get the job done.

There are various ways around this, with Google Gears, Microsoft Sync Framework and Flash also offering ways of getting offline storage to work, and there are some jQuery plugins that hint at the promise of getting this working in a framework that leaves the browser sensitivities to someone else (although I’m always leary of potentially leaky abstraction layers).

Personally I don’t care how we solve the problem of sufficiently large offline storage, but I think the future of web development demands that solve it we must.

In the meantime we will continue to see niche agencies offering native applications for various phone OSs, but not necessarily delivering the value the business needs because the cost is so high to develop cross-platform apps – and some other applications that target specific OS flavours, most notably Apple iOS or Android, and get away with that because the user base can be targeted that way (for now).

EDIT – 23rd Jun 2011

GigaOM recently weighed in, telling us that native mobile apps were beating HTML5 ones. One commenter, Roshan Shrestha, mentioned that:

“I see that many of the apps are just a wrapper against an HTML browser component. Most of them do not store much data locally and require internet connection, so these are basically web apps.”

I agree that most apps could be web apps, and I think it will end up there, but not yet. In the meantime everyone needs an Android app, wants an iPhone app and should have a Windows Phone 7 app.

Arthur Douglas Burgess

I just got delivered a very nice present. The National Library of Australia maintains an online archive of Australian newspapers for the last hundred years or so called Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/). A couple of weeks go I found a reference to my grandfather on my mother’s side, and a few days ago I ordered a copy of it via PDF. Thanks to the miracles of scanning + the internet, here it is:

My other grandfather was also involved with Fairfax and the Sydney Morning Herald, but in the capacity of a typesetter on the printing presses.

Is knowledge all there is?

I spent a fair bit of time this week helping a client with their information strategy and information management policy. Their definition of information included “Emails, Databases, Documentation and Knowledge”, which is a mixed bag if ever I saw one!

Clearly they needed to get a better handle on what they were dealing with, so I introduced them to a little pyramid that I had worked on several years ago (back when I was thinking about pursuing a career in knowledge management). I call this the Wisdom Pyramid, and use it to help differentiate between raw data, meaningful information, contextualised knowledge and applied wisdom.

Wisdom Pyramid

The example I usually use to bring it to life is that of a traffic light changing colour from amber to red.

At a data level there is a single bit of information, isolated from context and basically without meaning, unless one is familiar with that particular data type.

That data becomes information when meaning is given to it so that a human can more easily understand it.

The information becomes knowledge when context is considered, in this case that the traffic light is one I am heading towards.

Wisdom is exhibited when that knowledge is applied to my situation, so that I stop the car at the red light.

The pyramid is pretty useful, although there is a catch with wisdom as we only call an action wise when knowledge is applied correctly to a situation. Incorrect application is at worst foolish, and at best thoughtless.

Much ado has been made about the management of corporate knowledge, especially the attempt to capture explicit knowledge, although tacit knowledge is also sometimes acknowledged as something that must be transferred. The real issue however is how do we inculcate wisdom into our staff so they make wise decisions and not foolish ones?

“Take hold of my words with all your heart; keep my commands, and you will live. Get wisdom, get understanding; do not forget my words or turn away from them. Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”
Proverbs 4:4-7 (NIV translation)

You grow wisdom by growing people, and that’s where most knowledge management should start – tools are useful (and Elcom has some good KM tools) but mentoring, teaching and encouraging wisdom in our people is where the real benefits come from.

Fresh design!

In case you’re reading an RSS feed, I have updated my blog design to use a core Blogger template, and done some (slightly) artistic tweaking to get a look that I’m happy with.