Today’s announcements at the Open Compute Project (OCP) 2013 Summit could be considered as tangible markers for the OCP crossing the line into real relevance as an important influence on emerging hyper-scale and cloud computing as well as having a potential bleed-through into the world of enterprise data centers and computing. This is obviously a subjective viewpoint – there is no objective standard for relevance, only post-facto recognition that something was important or not. But in this case I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that OCP will have some influence and will be a sticky presence in the industry for many years.
Even if their specs (which look generally quite good) do not get picked up verbatim, they will act as an influence on major vendors who will, much like the auto industry in the 1970s, get the message that there is a market for economical “low-frills” alternatives.
Major OCP Initiatives
To date, OCP has announced a number of useful hardware specifications, including:
Nothing like starting off the day with a koan, right? How would one develop a mobile app without developing a mobile app? In my latest piece of research on the future of mobile application development, I make the point that if developers overrotate their focus to building mobile clients, we risk creating the same sorts of vertical stovepipes we’re trying to work our way out of right now with all the web apps we built to run on Wintel in IE6. Rather, I think it’s time we broadened our focus and shifted our efforts toward building modern applications. Mobile apps are an important component of a modern application architecture, but only part of the whole picture.
So what’s a modern application? A modern application is:
Omnichannel. Modern applications are designed to work across tablets, smartphones, phablets, heads-up displays, automobiles — and, yes, desktops and laptops. They are designed to anticipate new client demands and new methods of interaction, including voice, touch, mouse, and eye tracking. Modern apps may start with a consistent cross-channel expereince, but they quickly move beyond that to a cross-channel and a channel-optimized interface.
Elastic. Successful modern applications are designed to spin up or spin down as needed. They take advantage of cloud economics. They comprehensively use open source software because it adds licensing flexibility to scale-out architectural flexibility.
While not the top priority, more than a quarter of respondents to Forrester’s Forrsights Services Survey, Q2 2012, stated they were looking to implement or expand their use of offshore resources. Motivation for new offshore geographies is driven by a range of factors, from seeking new sources of talent to risk mitigation, cost savings, innovation, and local market knowledge and access.
My recently published report analyzes the attractiveness of the three largest economies in Latin America as outsourcing locations: Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Latin America presents an attractive location, particularly for US and Canadian companies. However there is wide variation in the suitability between different countries. Some of the high-level findings of the research include:
Brazil has clear strengths with its size, scale, wealth of IT skills, and array of local service providers such as BRQ, Ci&T, and Stefanini. Most service providers are focused on the domestic market, however, and don’t have the same export focus as providers in other countries. In addition, overly complex legislative and bureaucratic hurdles, as well as, to some extent, language issues, continue to prevent it from reaching its potential. Ci&T however is one exception, providing a model for Agile development and entrepreneurship.
The rapid rise of social media, cloud computing, and mobility in India has started to affect how organizations do business in the country. This is driving a fundamental shift in the CIO role as it moves from classic “plan, build, run” cycle management to a business-oriented, leadership-focused position. To gauge systems integrators’ (SIs’) readiness to support the changing CIO role, Forrester interviewed CIOs at 30 Indian companies and has just published a report on the same. For the purposes of this report, “Indian SIs” includes SIs headquartered in India and multinational SIs doing business in the country. We conducted interviews with CIOs in the form of open discussions; our aim was to determine CIOs’ opinions about their SIs, including how effectively those SIs are shifting to a more value-added, business-oriented engagement model. These interviews yielded some grim findings, as CIOs believe that SIs:
Don’t understand the business requirements of the CIO role. Only 28% of CIOs think that SIs understand their changing business requirements, while 70% of CIOs think that SIs focus too much on technology delivery.
Focus too much on upselling or cross-selling their products and solutions. SI teams, including account managers and consultants, usually focus more on promoting products and services; they have very little knowledge of what CIO and client organizations are looking for and don’t care to learn.
Lack the tools and templates to define the business value of emerging technologies. Most of the CIOs indicated that they believe that SIs are not able to define the business value of emerging technologies.
One of the great things about working in enterprise architecture is the opportunity to work on a diverse range of initiatives. Findings from our Global EA Maturity Survey in Q2 2012 show it is going to be a busy 2013 for enterprise architects:
While variety is to be expected in the enterprise architecture role, EAs will be multi-tasking more than ever. As businesses increasingly experience the value of enterprise architecture, the demands on the EA function increases also. It is a good problem to have - but it is a problem nonetheless. Equally, many of the priorities are linked and progress (or lack of) in one area informs another. For example, strengthening emerging technology processes and simplification of the application and technology portfolio are interlinked. At the same time, many businesses expect results in shorter timeframes and some of the priorities are inherently longer-term and deliver over an extended period of time - which is not always fully appreciated by stakeholders. These are clearly challenges and although it will be a busy year, EAs can look ahead with confidence. Demand for EA services are growing. Businesses are looking for more from their EA functions, in more parts of the business - and the opportunity for developing the scope, importance and relevancy of EA is ever growing.
One of our recent surveys on business applications shows that more than 60% of business and business technology (BT) decision-makers consider consolidating, rationalizing, and transforming their business applications a high or critical priority — business applications drive three of the top four software initiative priorities (see the figure below). If we include closely related analytics, business intelligence (BI), and decision support tools, we cover all four top priorities.
At the same time, business and BT execs responsible for a variety of different business and IT domains across multiple industries typically explain that customer experience has moved to center stage; digital value has increasing importance in an information society and an information economy; and better use of things like real estate, intellectual property, available inventory, skilled personnel, and digital assets has become mandatory to manage costs and create new revenue streams. Managing and reducing costs in a continuously changing business and IT environment remains a key driver for functional departments in many firms.
DevOps is a movement for developers and operations professionals that encourages more collaboration and release automation. Why? To keep up with the faster application delivery pace of Agile. In fact, with Agile, as development teams deliver faster and in shorter cycles, IT operations finds itself unprepared to keep up with the new pace. For operations teams, managing a continuous stream of software delivery with traditional manual-based processes is Mission Impossible. Vendors have responded to DevOps requirements with more automation in their release management, delivery, and deployment tools. However, there is a key process that sits between development and operations that seems to have been given little attention: testing.
In fact, some key testing activities, like integration testing and end-to-end performance testing, are caught right in the middle of the handover process between development and operations. In the Agile and Lean playbook, I’ve dedicated my latest research precisely to Agile testing, because I’ve seen testing as the black beast in many transformations to Agile because it was initially ignored.
Apple ignited the smartphone market with the innovative, super-desirable iPhone. But is the company’s innovation engine starting to sputter? That’s the question I pose to Forrester mobile analysts Jeffrey Hammond and Michael Facemire in this episode of TechnoPolitics. Of course, the answer isn’t so simple. Apple’s ultimate challenge is not about tit-for-tat feature innovation. Jeffrey Hammond says that this is a battle between two fundamentally different innovation models: directed innovation and open innovation. Apple is the high church of directed innovation, whereas Google’s approach is to let a thousand flowers bloom. Both mobile platforms have been enormously successful. But Michael Facemire thinks that conditions are ripe for the open innovation model to dominate. Jeffrey and Michael have amazing insights that you can only get at TechnoPolitics.
As 2012 came to a close, we studied the financial position of many CISOs and asked about their expectations for 2013. Unsurprisingly, it was apparent that 2012 was another difficult year and that CISOs had been keeping their belts tight once again. When compared with the other IT departments, however, it became clear that this budgetary flat-line actually represented quite a success, as 2012 had seen most other teams face further cutbacks and spending restrictions.
When we looked ahead to 2013, we saw the usual hopeful optimism from the CISOs – proving once again that any allegation of a correlation between ‘pessimists’ and ‘security professionals’ is complete nonsense. It was interesting, however, to note a marked difference in attitudes dependent upon which side of the Atlantic the respondent was located. Put simply, North American based CISOs had a much more buoyant view of security related finances in 2013 than their European peers.
2012 is still a vivid memory for most of us. But it’s time to look ahead to 2013 and focus on the key trends that customer service professionals need to pay attention to as they plan for success this year. Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report is here.
PERSONALIZE CUSTOMER SERVICE
Trend 1: Channel Preference Is Changing Rapidly
Across all demographics, voice is still the primary communication channel used, but is quickly followed by self-service channels, and digital channels like chat and email. Channel usage rates are also quickly changing: we’ve seen a 12% rise in web self-service usage, a 24% rise in chat usage, and a 25% increase in community usage for customer service in the past three years. Expect customer service organizations to better align their channel strategy this year to support their company’s customers’ needs. Expect them to also work on guiding customers to the right channel based on the complexity and time sensitivity of interactions.
Trend 2: Mobile Solutions Are Becoming A Must-Have