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The document discusses social business and how leading organizations are applying social technologies and adopting a social mindset. Some key points: - Social business allows companies to fundamentally change how they operate and serve markets by focusing on engagement over isolation and tapping into shared interests. - Early efforts focused on social media monitoring and command centers, but social business is now being applied across functions like HR, product development, and operations. - Tools include internal collaboration suites, expertise finders, and communities that form around topics. This helps distribute knowledge and foster engagement. - Adopting social requires a shift in mindset from the corporation to the individual and allowing more direct connections across divisions and with customers. - Examples

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Tech Trends 2012 Elevate IT for digital business 2012 Technology Trends
Preface Welcome to Deloitte’s annual report examining trends in technology put to practical business use. Each year we begin with a wide range of potential topics, and then work with clients, vendors, academics, analysts and Deloitte practitioners to refine the list. We select as trends those topics that have the most potential to impact businesses over the next 18 to 24 months. This year’s theme, Elevate IT for Digital Business, examines the broad impacts of five technology forces that have influenced our reports over the past several years – analytics, mobility, social, cloud and cyber security. It’s an uncommon, and perhaps even unique, time to have so many emerging forces – all rapidly evolving, technology- centric and each already impacting business so strongly. Whether or not you have previously thought of your business as inherently digital, the convergence of these forces offers a new set of tools, opening the door to a new set of rules for operations, performance and competition. This is an opportunity for IT to truly help elevate business performance. Our 2012 report shares ten trends grouped into two categories. Disruptors are technologies that can create sustainable positive disruption in IT capabilities, business operations and sometimes even business models. Enablers are technolo- gies in which many CIOs have already invested time and effort, but which warrant another look this year because of new developments. Enablers may be more evolutionary than revolutionary, but the potential is there to elevate the business game with technology. Each trend is presented with at least two examples of adoption to help show the trend at work. This year, you’ll also find a new section called My Takes, which provide commentary and examples from CIOs, academics and other luminaries about the utility of the trend in business. Each of these 2012 trends is relevant today. Each has significant momentum and potential to make an impact. Each war- rants timely consideration. Forward-thinking organizations should consider developing an explicit strategy in each area – even if that strategy is to wait and see. But whatever you do, step up. Use the digital forces to your advantage. Don’t get caught unaware or unprepared. Thank you for reading this year’s report. We welcome your feedback and questions. To the many executives who have provided input into Tech Trends 2012, thank you for your time and insight. We look forward to having more of the es- sential dialog between business and IT. Mark E. White Bill Briggs Principal and CTO Director, Deputy CTO Deloitte Consulting LLP Deloitte Consulting LLP
Contents Disruptors Social Business............................................................... 1 Gamification.................................................................. 8 Enterprise Mobility Unleashed......................................15 User Empowerment..................................................... 22 Hyper-hybrid Cloud..................................................... 29 Enablers Big Data Goes to Work................................................ 36 Geospatial Visualization............................................... 43 Digital Identities.......................................................... 50 Measured Innovation................................................... 57 Outside-in Architecture............................................... 64 Conclusion...................................................................71 Authors....................................................................... 72 Contributors................................................................ 73
Disruptors
1 Social Business Reimagining business with a social mindset approach to social. Beyond social monitoring and listening Even today, business leaders may dismiss the potential of posts, leading organizations are establishing command social business, either relegating it to the realm of Internet centers to interact with consumers and the marketplace via marketing or ignoring the buzz as a passing fad. But that’s the social sphere. Some interactions are transactional, such changing as boomers evolve into digital natives, millennials as customer relationship management, servicing or order permeate the workforce and social media becomes a part management, while others seek to drive loyalty and brand of daily life. The doors are now open for social business. activation. Functional areas such as Human Resources and recruiting are following sales and marketing’s lead, with Leading enterprises today are applying social technologies customer service, product development and operations like collaboration, communication and content close behind. management to social networks – the connected web of people and assets that impact on a given business goal or Enterprise solutions are moving from communication tools outcome – amplified by social media from blogs to social to collaboration suites, white pages, yellow pages and networking sites to content communities. Yet it’s more than expertise finders, where specialized knowledge can be tools and technology. Businesses are being fundamentally found regardless of individual connections. Distributed changed as leaders rethink their core processes and teams can work together on deliverables without worrying capabilities with a social mindset to find new ways to create about versioning or “over-the-wall engineering.” more value, faster. Communities can form and engage around topics based on individuals’ common interests – personal or professional, Forays into social business typically start with an long-running or perishable. organization’s external-facing concerns. Sales and marketing organizations, looking to understand customer Behind it is a simple truth: people are the core of business. sentiment and product positioning, listen carefully to The balance of power has shifted from the corporation to opinions expressed in the social sphere. Similarly, the individual. Technology has made it easier to discover organizations roll out internal micro-blogs that allow and participate in social networks, but it has not changed employees to broadcast and push interests, ideas and their currency: content, authenticity, integrity, reputation, expertise to the enterprise. These types of efforts are commitment and follow-through. Social business allows excellent entry points, but not the only points of impact in organizations that share these values to fundamentally the enterprise. Think across the full value chain. Compose reshape how their companies run and serve their markets. “social” with a key business function such as Social CRM, A flattened world – allowing direct contact between Social PLM or Social Supply Chain. customers and product developers, between divisional VPs and front-line workers, between salespeople and suppliers Social business can shift an organization’s dynamic from – could be inherently more effective and efficient. isolation to engagement by providing vehicles for Companies that align the passions of their people with the discovering, growing and propagating ideas and expertise. interests of their customers hold the potential to capture This shift requires organizations to take a more active the marketplace. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 1
Social Business History repeating itself? Social business inherits its associations – and perhaps misconceptions – from previous efforts in collaboration, knowledge management and content management. Similar-sounding terminology – social networking, social media, social computing and social business – only adds to the confusion. What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? Social media (e.g. LinkedIn, • Non-digital natives were slow to adopt public • The enterprise market for social collaboration, Twitter, Facebook) social media services, which made business content and communication tools has exploded leaders skeptical about their usefulness in a over the past 12 months; on-premise or cloud business setting. versions of social media tools can help balance • Security, privacy and compliance risks were real. openness with acceptable risk. Intellectual property could be compromised, • Public social media sites are viewed as only one competitive plans could be shared, and brands part of an overall social business strategy, used could be harmed by individuals’ behaviors. primarily as sources for social sentiment signals, • Companies have invested in technology-centric vehicles for brand management and external pilots and systems that mimic the successful use communication, and channels for customer cases of the consumer social sphere. Sometimes management and sales. a “build it and they will come” approach, they • Millennials joining the workforce are wired to use didn’t follow the successful pattern: articulate social and mobile channels to bond, socialize and a business objective; map the related social solve problems1. Organizations that lack internal, network or graph; implement targeted social governed social media and computing channels technology and media; evaluate results, tune may find their younger employees using public and refine the focus. The most frequently missed tools as a well-intentioned, but risky, alternative. step being mapping the right social network in • Businesses large and small are now making which to act. focused investments in deploying social tech- nology and media into well-mapped social networks for specific business objectives across the enterprise value chain. Collaboration and knowledge • Many organizations confronted the inefficiencies • Social business inside the enterprise can facilitate management (KM) tools of how work gets done and shared in their shops discovery and connections among employees, by implementing collaboration solutions for static real-time collaboration on tasks and documents, or ill-defined groups. These solutions were mainly and a systematic view of who knows who, who ERP workflow, or limited to content sharing or knows what, and how work actually gets done. messaging. They don’t embrace the necessity • New social computing tools can support both of allowing communication to evolve into collaboration and task execution, so contributors community. They may be limited to one function, are motivated to use them in executing daily geography or job role and unable to tap the tasks. Context is preserved alongside the content breadth and depth of the enterprise. to aid in both discovery and use. • Previous versions of content and knowledge • The categorization of knowledge, work steps and management tools majored on collecting and relationships can be used to document, mine and managing the content without successfully find information. Taxonomy discovery can bridge capturing the context and workflows that across structured, unstructured and semi-struc- transform that intellectual property into business tured sources, finding new relationships between value. KM systems became static repositories or content and offering a way to both discover and libraries without curation or circulation. create business intelligence. This can be especially important for organizations with aging work- forces, where leaders are looking to ease the pain of large-scale knowledge transfer. • The Curator and Moderator join the Librarian in harnessing content, communication and conver- sation into both long-and short-lived communi- ties around key business issues and opportunities. 2
Social Business Technology implications Social business taps into the shared interests of individuals to guide communal value. Technology can help make these interactions effective – aiding in discovering new information, sharing content, collaborating on ideas and work products, and potentially allowing parts of transactional systems and data to be used through social channels. Topic Description Social computing tools Implementation of internal collaboration suites, wikis, ideagoras, expertise finders, enterprise search and prediction markets are not trivial undertakings. Naming conventions, hierarchies, entitlement and privacy rights and archiving can inform the scope and usefulness of each solution. The value of social computing investments can be enhanced by integrating email for traditional correspondence, instant messaging and other converged communication tools, and content repositories for easy access to information that transcends geographies. Sentiment analysis tools Social media monitoring tools such as Radian 6, Mantis or Lithium reflect the broader shift in analytics where the mechanics of software configuration are not complex, but still require in-depth industry and modeling experience to help define and fine-tune models to obtain reliable, insightful results. Also, intelligent oversight is needed, because automated systems have trouble interpreting nuance, subtlety or sarcasm. Advances in contextual mining and artificial intelligence sense-making will likely lead to continuous product improvements, but today’s offerings require specialized knowledge to set-up, monitor and maintain. Digital content Product information, brand collateral, store/employee data and other content should be consistent management across channels: brick-and-mortar locations, web, call centers, mobile, social, kiosks and tomorrow’s innovation. This omni-channel world increases the importance of traditional digital asset management (DAM), content governance and stewardship, as well as the need to manage content and communities simultaneously across channels. Digital identities2 Social business amplifies the potential value of individual personas and relationships, whether they are employee, customer, prospect or partner. Correlation of discrete identities across enterprises (both private and public) requires a federated or brokered digital identity service that should also have the ability to render individual, authenticated, non-repudiated assertions on who an individual is and what they have access to. Within the enterprise, a uniform approach to identity, access and credential management should be a must. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 3
Social Business Lessons from the frontlines Breaking down the research and development silos Quenching customer insight A leading high-tech firm took a hard look at its software Gatorade’s mission-control center for social media can development process. Like many other companies in the demonstrate the potential of social business3. A hub in the industry, departmental stove-pipes and over-the-wall company’s marketing department tracks tweets, Facebook engineering approaches were the rule. The design and activity and blog postings that mention the brand, its engineering teams worked on separate paths, even though endorsers, competitors and broader sports-nutrition topics. their efforts were highly dependent on one another. In a Detailed sentiment analysis tracks products, campaigns and typical scenario, engineering would create technical customers across their lifecycles. Brand attributes are specifications for weeks and hand it off to design, who watched, correlated with media performance, and used to would go away and work on treatments and design reach out proactively to influencers and customers. The concepts. They would then come together for two weeks results drive strategic marketing plans and product of joint sessions, poking holes in each other’s thinking development, as well as tactical activities, such as while moving slowly toward consensus. This process would improving landing pages and content delivery4. Initial repeat, with the hope that next time would bring shorter results are impressive, with claims of a 250% increase in cycles and fewer gaps at the end of each round. It was the engagement and 65% reduction in early page exits. Social epitome of sequential collaboration driven by a activities likely contributed to Gatorade’s U.S. volume sales manufacturing mentality. growth of 10% in the second quarter of 2010, after three consecutive years of slumped sales5. To break through business as usual, the firm shifted to an open collaboration platform across project teams, with Forging the future of social commerce progress documents openly shared using discussion boards Tesco, the United Kingdom’s largest retailer, has been a and micro-blogs instead of deliverable review templates leading proponent of social business. From early entries and email. Social business started to flourish. Cultural into social monitoring and command centers, to ambitious resistance existed at first, driven by fears that interim social commerce campaigns, to the acquisition of social deliverables would be reviewed using the same criteria as marketing firm BzzAgent6, Tesco is embedding social finished products. But team members quickly came to sensibilities into virtually all aspects of its business, from understand the value of the new process, and finished loyalty programs to stocking and procurement decisions7. products saw a quality boost and got to market faster. In this competitive sector, shorter product development cycles Another large retailer also has ambitious plans for social can have heart-of-the-business impact and, in this case, it business. In 2011, it acquired an organization that uses was driven by open, collaborative, social business. social-sphere signals to deliver relevant ads based on an individual’s interests; and acquired a platform for real-time sentiment and social stream analysis. Beyond brand awareness, engagement and loyalty, its goal is to develop intent-based inventory and logistics driven by the buying patterns and signals of local residents. 4
Social Business My take Sandy Pentland Director, Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program MIT Media Labs For years I’ve been working in the field of “connection Like any emerging technology trend, social business can science” – studying how relationships and personal seem perpetually just out of reach. Let’s wait a year, the interactions shape society and business. Social business is a thinking goes. It’s not quite real, not quite ready for prime manifestation of that thinking, with companies time. If that’s your approach to social business, you may be transforming how they organize and operate based on overestimating the amount of effort it takes to start putting individual roles, social networks and the power of this trend to work for your organization today. connections. Social business can have huge potential inside and outside the enterprise, across employees, customers, Here’s what I mean: Social business is built on top of social prospects and business partners. networks, which most organizations already have in place. I’m not talking about social networking technology. I’m It’s exciting to see the convergence of new social channels talking about the social networks themselves – the webs of and traditional communication channels, where the whole formal and informal groups reaching across and beyond can be greater than the sum of the parts. When social your organization every day. That’s a huge existing asset – computing tools such as Yammer, Chatter or Jive are but likely it is only informally mined for the greater good. combined with established communication channels such You should explore explicitly connecting your people and as face-to-face interactions, email, phone calls, intranets your customers in ways that could be driving performance and even advertising media, we’re seeing rapid adoption improvements and growth. and elevated impact. There’s a halo effect when the passions of stakeholders can be harnessed and aligned Fortunately, moving ahead is pretty straightforward. Start with the goals of an organization. Social business amplifies by finding out which channels are already most important this phenomenon, bypassing tactical constraints of to, and most used by, the people in your organization. traditional communication: discoverability, scalability, From there, the path to rollout should become a lot clearer. responsiveness and adoption. Once you begin, the value of social business can spread like a wildfire. The key is to simply get started. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 5
Social Business Where do you start? • Break boundaries. The chief marketing officer, chief Social business requires broader thinking than currently talent officer and head of sales are typically early found in many organizations, and institutional biases can adopters of social business. But it doesn’t have to stop prevent it from receiving the priority status it deserves. there. What about a social chief financial officer? How Fortunately, there are some simple ways to help break could reporting, classification and audit be transformed through dated perceptions and cultural inertia and start the by linking finance and control to knowledge streams and social journey. Pursue an incremental path that builds on trails of how, where and (here’s the kicker) why work experiments that may demonstrate potential. got done? How would a social plant manager run a shop floor differently? With social business, the • Start at the beginning. Social business is about individual once again matters in performance achieving specific business outcomes. Start with improvement. At many levels, organizations that align reasonable scope in early efforts. Map the individuals in the passions of their people with the interests of their your potential social networks, and know what behaviors markets can have a strong competitive advantage. you are trying to affect and how you might meaningfully engage these into persistent communities. Use this • Authenticity matters. Social business is about the information to guide the development of tools, individual. An anonymous corporate presence using roadmaps and roll-out plans – not the other way around. social channels as a bully pulpit will not likely yield Focus on results that can be measurable and attributable. results. In recent decades, marketing or HR has sometimes evolved to mean what we do to people, a • Deploy the basics. Certain aspects of social business are far cry from the original intent. Social business can bring nearly universally relevant, such as social monitoring and us back full circle, thriving on personal voice and listening posts for customer sentiment and brand genuine interaction. Building those authentic positioning, as well as corporate yellow pages and social relationships requires time and investment. networking tools for experience-finding and leverage of intellectual property. These should be on each business’ radar – and they can provide an excellent entrée to social business in R&D, PLM, HR, IT and even Finance. After all, “close the books” is an inherently collaborative and repeatable activity with clear business goals, a well- understood network of players and both structured and unstructured content use. • Move from sensing to actuating. With basic monitoring tools in place, social business can move from passive to active. Instead of just listening, establish a command center for social customer relationship management (CRM), social sales and social product lifecycle management (PLM). Move from experience- finding to insight management by using micro-blogging and content management tools to promote sharing and re-use of knowledge and assets. 6
Social Business Bottom line Social business is still in its early days. These initial waves are about unlocking insights based on people’s behavior and relationships, and on supplementing the enterprise’s traditional view of markets and employees8. Even more value can be gained as companies restructure how work gets done through social engagement – and by customizing messaging, promotions and even products, based on individual and community desires. Social awareness can give way to social empowerment – once again placing people at the heart of business. Endnotes 1 Ramde, D. Beloit College Mindset List: The Internet Is Older Than Incoming College Freshmen. Retrieved January 15, 2012, from http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/23/beloit-mindset-list_n_933847.html 2 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ techtrends2012, Chapter 8. 3 Ostrow, Adam. Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center. Retrieved January 15, 2012, from http://mashable.com/2010/06/15/ gatorade-social-media-mission-control/ 4 PepsiCo Video: Gatorade Mission Control. Retrieved January 15, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InrOvEE2v38 5 “Research and Markets: Gatorade Case Study: Using Consumer Segmentation and Social Media to Drive Market Growth,” Research and Markets press release, February 4, 2011, on the Business Wire web site, http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110204005653/en/Research- Markets-Gatorade-Case-Study-Consumer-Segmentation, accessed January 15, 2012. 6 Edmund Lee, Tesco Acquires Social-Marketing Firm BzzAgent for $60 Million, http://adage.com/article/digital/tesco-buys-social-marketing-firm- bzzagent-60-million/227695/ (May 23, 2011). 7 “Sharp, Sony and Tesco First to Gain New Insight into Their Social Commerce Strategies Using Reevoo’s New Analytics Tool,” Reevoo press release, September 6, 2011, on the Business Wire web site, http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110906005638/en/Sharp-Sony-Tesco-Gain- Insight-Social-Commerce, accessed January 15, 2012. 8 Weigend, A. The Social Data Revolution(s).Retrieved January 15, 2012, from http://blogs.hbr.org/now-new-next/2009/05/the-social-data- revolution.html 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 7
2 Gamification Gaming gets serious Gamification can also enhance transparency and Gamification is about taking the essence of games – fun, compliance, since games almost always operate within play and passion – and applying it to real-world, non-game a well-defined set of rules. When aligned with desired situations. In a business setting, that means designing behavior, gamification can help guide awareness and solutions using gaming principles in everything from adoption of standard policies and processes, often back-office tasks and training to sales management and operating in the background without the user’s conscious career counseling. Game mechanics lie at the heart of effort. Gartner predicts that one quarter of day-to-day gamification. For example, achievement levels, point- business processes are likely to take advantage of some tracking and bonuses are ways for desired activities to aspect of gamification by 20151. That number jumps to be recognized and rewarded. Leaderboards and 50% for organizations with formal innovation progression indicators can steer individuals to reach the management process2. next tier of performance. Quests and countdowns can help shape behavior – the former as a way to structure For businesses working to manage generational workforce long combinations of tasks for a larger goal; the shifts, gamification can be especially helpful. Millennials latter to motivate a flurry of activity within a finite, already show a proclivity toward using gaming, social tools specified timeframe. and emerging technologies in their day-to-day lives3. Educational systems – particularly elementary and high The “so what” for business is not any single one of these schools – are also pursuing gamification in learning4. But items. Instead, the value lies in finding the right gaming is not just for digital natives. The average game combination of game mechanics that will resonate with player today is 37 years old, and 42% of game players stakeholders to drive performance. are women5. One desired outcome of gamification is engagement – The potential of gamification for the enterprise is likely getting stakeholders passionately and deliberately involved to grow with time. Organizations that embrace the trend with your organization. Interaction, collaboration, have the opportunity to gain loyal customers and find a awareness and learning are related effects, where competitive edge in recruiting, retention, talent individuals are encouraged to make new connections development and business performance. and share information. The key is defining a powerful “win” condition that can work across a range of personality types, align with business objectives and foster sustained engagement. 8
Gamification History repeating itself? Games have been a mainstay of culture throughout history. Indeed, academic disciplines, simulations and even virtual worlds have been launched to understand and harness the power of games. In 2012, gamification moves beyond entertainment to business performance, using intuitive design, intrinsic motivation and the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing activities with clear – and personal – value. What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? Serious gaming • Simulations, table-top exercises and war gaming • Gamification applies game mechanics and have long used sophisticated models to emulate dynamics to produce results that go far beyond complex behavior, delivered through a game-like simple entertainment. It embeds these principles interface. These tools are good for testing into how people work, collaborate and transact potential strategies against predicted market business – a systemic change. This is distin- conditions, driving situational awareness for guished from serious gaming, where a walled executives and field personnel, and shaping garden with a compelling gaming hook is behavior through interactive training. But there used to educate, motivate or achieve a has been an inherent disconnect between the secondary outcome. boundaries of the game and real-world opera- tions, behaviors and business outcomes. They are • A number of serious gaming companies have studies, not systemic implementations. created statistical studies and industry/function- specific repositories of rules and models, along • Heavy business simulations and war-gaming with underlying technology platforms that can be applications have had a high barrier to entry reused across scenarios. This has led to moderate in that serious games are only as good as their growth in the areas in which serious gaming is underlying rules and models. Social, economic, applied. It has also fostered effective approaches cultural and interpersonal factors should not only to help maintain the integrity of, and ongoing reflect the actual business environment, but also interest in, the game. be presented in an engaging manner that drives participation, learning and action. • If the rules are transparent or discoverable, the player experience can be dominated by the micro incentives of the game itself, not the macro implications to the enterprise. Cognitive psychology/ • Well-established fields in science study how • Effective design of game mechanics and dynamics behavioral economics/ people acquire, process and store informa- are often predicated on models and research game theory tion – and how these concepts apply to classic from these fields. In a sense, gamification is the economic theory (e.g., rationality of markets industrialization of these academic concepts and players) to model real-world conditions6. – shifting from research and theory to tactical However, most real-world situations have too business processes and front-line employees. many variables, players and extenuating factors to be analyzed. Outside of political science, economic theory and social psychology, the concepts have been difficult to apply, especially in day-to-day business scenarios. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 9
Gamification Technology implications Future generations of enterprise systems are likely to have game mechanics embedded in their design. For now, however, most organizations are likely to layer their gamification strategies into established packages and custom solutions. A number of technical building blocks should be considered to realize gamification’s potential. Topic Description Enterprise systems Almost every game mechanic is fueled by activities or events, such as knowing what a player is doing, being able to change the state of the game, or providing appropriate rewards or acknowledgements. The lack of openness of underlying packages and custom systems can be a constraint against driving external gamification elements (e.g., making activities visible, timely and with enough context for the game dynamics) or embedding gamification into the current platform. Game mechanics A number of solutions have emerged in the past 12 months that provide plug-ins or third-party platforms services for leaderboards, achievements and virtual currencies and rewards to help motivate and monitor employee engagement, compliance and performance – especially in areas such as education and learning, health and wellness, call center/customer care, and sales and marketing. These same mechanics can also be applied to customer-facing offerings to drive retention, loyalty and advocacy. Social business Connectivity, collaboration and knowledge-sharing are key dimensions of gamification. Understanding how communities are connected in a social graph and how games can be linked to social computing and social media tools can affect the ability to meet the goals of the effort. Mobility Location-based services fueled by mobile devices allow advanced techniques known as appointment dynamics, where specific actions or rewards are available only if a user is in a predetermined physical place at a specific time7. More broadly, mobile channels can be natural candidates for the gamification of business processes, especially when anytime/anywhere, short-lived, meaningful touch-points are desirable. 10
Gamification Lessons from the frontlines Cubicle gaming Health and wellness is not a game (unless it is) Several productivity software vendors are using Encouraging members to live healthier lives has long been gamification to help train users on overlooked features of a Holy Grail for health plans – not only because of the civic their tools. Many are built around cascading information good, but also because of the bottom-line impact. Five theory, where complicated functions are hidden until hundred billion dollars in annual spending goes to treating needed. Level progression, achievements and points largely preventable conditions such as hypertension, tracking are present (e.g., “+50 points for not using a diabetes and heart disease – representing 70 to 80% of US hint”), guiding users to discover useful new features and health care costs8. One provider rolled out Mindbloom’s build proficiency. The gaming layer can also provide Life Game, an interactive platform for users to establish incentives to follow standards – from corporate templates health goals, which uses game mechanics to monitor their in word processors to coding standards in integrated progress, and can tap into social channels for extra development environments (IDEs) – helping spur learning, motivation. In Life Game, users can cultivate a virtual tree compliance and engagement. representing their physical, emotional, financial and spiritual well-being – earning “water” and “seeds” by Restaurant service gets gamified completing tasks such as taking a walk, eating more On the surface, Not Your Average Joe’s resembles a typical healthy foods or putting savings into an emergency fund. restaurant chain, offering creative, casual cuisine within In a beta trial, users visited the site an average of 35 times their 17 locations. Behind the scenes, though, certain per week, spending about 15 minutes during each visit. restaurants are using gamification to link point-of-sale data These users set out to perform 13 million actions – and and scheduling software – where employee behavior such performed about three-quarters of them. This represents a as up-selling, cross-selling and timely returns from breaks 50% increase over prior attempts without gamification. are used to drive achievements and awards. For example, employees with the most sales and tips can earn their desired shifts. The early results include a 1.8% increase in sales and an 11% increase in gratuities throughout the Not Your Average Joe’s chain9. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 11
Gamification My take Gilman Louie Partner Alsop Louie Partners I love snow skiing. And the last time I hit the slopes, I was Having spent much of my career in the gaming industry, thrilled to find that through the magic of RFID, I was able there are a few principles of game design that, if followed, to keep track of my accomplishments on my smartphone could make a big difference. For example, when I first – everything from how many black diamonds I had skied helped license Tetris, I learned the 80/20 rule: 80% of a to the vertical feet I had traversed over the course of the player’s experience in a game should be positive. The rest day. Even more exciting, I was able to share this data with of the time, players should be barely missing their goals. family and friends, and see how well they were doing, too. Basically, everybody wins – at least for part of the time. And, not surprisingly, how I stacked up. Ultimately, we And when they lose, they understand why – and feel that were in a friendly competition to rack up awards and win overcoming whatever obstacle ahead is within their grasp. badges based on our accomplishments and scores. This should be coupled with constant positive reinforcement and incremental, attainable rewards. That We were modifying our behavior in direct response to a potent combination can make a game addictive. lighthearted, fun little game. We were taking on slopes that we wouldn’t have considered before. Squeezing in a And yet in the business world, many games only have a couple more runs before calling it a day. Pushing ourselves handful of winners, and lots of losers. Gamification should to go a little faster and harder. And that’s also why not simply be another spotlight on your top performers. If gamification is catching the attention of so many business a “player” is dominating the game, the rest of the leaders. The ability to change behavior by encouraging population is likely to either try to derail the winner, or personal growth via game-like engagement could be a sabotage the game. Hyper-competition rarely leads to management bonanza, for obvious reasons. sustained improvements performance – or positive behavior change. The concept itself is not new. In fact, my venture capital firm saw a serious gaming/gamification pitch over a In some ways, gamification isn’t really a new trend. It’s just decade ago. But the idea didn’t take off. I think the one of the latest manifestations of the foundation of renewed interest today has a lot to do with the rise of business: the desire to compete. The desire to keep score. social business. Before social media tools, one of the But don’t forget to start with clearly defined business biggest hurdles was creating and sustaining a network of objectives, and align gaming mechanics with metrics and players. Without that, there’s little hope of a game taking incentives. And remember the importance of fundamental off. By tapping into public social media channels and social gaming principles. Gamification done well tells an computing platforms being adopted in the workplace, employee: you are doing better than you did yesterday, serious games can take advantage of existing social you are contributing to the goals of the enterprise, and the networks – inside and outside of the business. This is a tools for growth and personal development are in your natural environment for successful gaming, as the swift rise hands. Game on. of social gaming companies has demonstrated. Applying the principles to day-to-day business processes can have great potential. 12 12
Gamification Where do you start? • Ride the wave. Social and mobile players have been Gamification is about influencing behavior. At its roots are early adopters of gamification techniques as means to simple psychological constructs of ability, motivation and stand-out and gain traction (e.g., Foursquare, Twitter, triggering10. “Ability” reflects the individual’s skill, time, Getglue). Businesses that are rethinking their processes attention and mental capacity to perform a task. to take advantage of mobile and social dynamics can “Motivation” describes desire to engage – personal find many opportunities for gamification. From strategy interests, the perceived value of potential outcomes and to creative to user experience to engineering, consider their willingness to participate. A “trigger” is something to the potential of game mechanics to improve prompt targeted behavior. Triggers can be either explicit engagement and performance. Ride the coat-tails of (directing the user to take action) or experiential (providing mobile and social initiatives that the business already a sandbox where possibilities can be explored). All three understands – and likely has already funded – to factors must converge at the same time to achieve desired start layering in gamification concepts for enhanced results. This basic framing will help inform you where business outcomes. to start: • Knock down the fourth wall. Look for ways to use • Pick your target. Establish clear, simple objectives that gamification to engage with business partners, are well-suited for gamification. Not all business customers and the general public. A mobile service scenarios have obvious triggers where behavior can be provider in the United Kingdom with no retail influenced. Tasks that are very complex are hard to distribution, no call center, no advertising, and only gamify. Tasks that are very mundane may be immune to 16 full-time employees uses social customers and motivational influences. Early adopters of gamification gamification principles to operate their business. They have targeted training, back-office processes, sales, use points and rewards to source service referrals, help marketing and promotions to consumers. to solve customer service issues and even create promotional material for the company. Gamification • Know your audience. Not every individual will react the can help organizations leap-frog into broader social same way to game dynamics. Different personality types business12, user empowerment13 and measured have different motivations. To this end, Richard Bartle innovation14, tapping into external constituents in identified four types of game players: socializers, new and exciting ways. achievers, explorers and killers11. Having a balance of game mechanics – collaborative, collect-and-curate, discovery and competitive – will be necessary. The balance should match the needs of your specific community and desired results. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 13
Gamification Bottom line Gamification is riding three waves. The first is the growing base of workers and customers raised under the influence of video games and consumer technology. The second is the meteoric expansion of mobile, social and cloud technologies across the business. The third is the ongoing efforts to improve business process execution and performance through technology. Gamification looks to embed game attributes into day-to-day business activities – interacting with the next generation in their native language, and tapping into an enthusiastic older generation that has embraced gaming. As the bridge to the postdigital era is being built, organizations are making big bets to take advantage of this transformation. Endnotes 1 Gartner, Inc. “Predicts 2012: Organizational Politics Hampers, Gamification Motivates BPM Adoption (Research Note G00223822)”, November 15, 2011. 2 Gartner, Inc. “Innovation Insight: Gamification Adds Fun and Innovation to Inspire Engagement (ID Number: G00226393)”, December 20, 2011. Beloit College Video: The Mindset List for the Class of 2015. Retrieved January 24, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_ 3 embedded&v=J4HJ6EHb3CI Donahoo, D. Gamification in Education: Should We Play? Retrieved January 24, 2012, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-donahoo/ 4 gamification-in-education_b_927842.html “Industry Facts,” on the ESA Entertainment Software Association web site, http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp, accessed January 14, 2012. 5 Richard H. Thaler and Sendhil Mullainathan, How Behavioral Economics Differs from Traditional Economics, http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/ 6 BehavioralEconomics.html (2008). “Gamification,” on the Gamification Wiki web site, http://gamification.org/, accessed January 14, 2012. 7 Milken Institute, “An Unhealthy America: The Economic Burden of Chronic Disease -- Charting a New Course to Save Lives and Increase 8 Productivity and Economic Growth,” October 2007, http://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/publications.taf?function=detail&ID=38801018&c at=ResRep, accessed January 14, 2012. Sarah Kessler, Can Gamifying a Restaurant Get You Better Service?, http://mashable.com/2011/11/30/objective_logistics/ (November 30, 2011). 9 10 Wu, Michael. Gamification from a Company of Pro Gamers. Retrieved January 14, 2012, from http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building- Community-the-Platform/Gamification-from-a-Company-of-Pro-Gamers/ba-p/19258 11 Richard Bartle, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDs, http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm 12 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ techtrends2012, Chapter 1. 13 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ techtrends2012, Chapter 4. 14 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ techtrends2012, Chapter 9. 14
3 Enterprise Mobility Unleashed Businesses are embracing mobility. Now type. Leonardo da Vinci’s description of simplicity as the comes the hard part. ultimate form of sophistication might be a foreign concept Rapid technology developments in wireless connectivity to many central IT departments today, but it is also a prime and mobile devices marked the beginning of the mobility directive. As mobile becomes increasingly important in revolution. Next came the apps renaissance, when intuitive, customer and employee interactions, the complexity of engaging pieces of software, tailored for smartphones and applications, or apps, will naturally grow with heightened tablets, began to change our day-to-day lives. The integration, security and maintenance needs. revolution has now reached business. Many organizations today find mobile initiatives popping up in every business The second challenge for CIOs is to help the business unit, in every region and in every department. The deliver innovative applications with significant potential for floodgates have opened. Now what? positive disruption. Experimentation can be a good way to show progress and help crystalize opportunities, but many For some, the path forward might begin by pushing use cases remain uncharted. Until users interact with an existing solutions and processes to mobile channels, early prototype, they may not know what they want, much without blue-sky thinking of how business might change less what they need. CIOs can become beacons of if location constraints disappeared. For others, disciplined big-picture thinking and tactical adjudication by embracing experimentation can reveal compelling scenarios, which the proliferation of mobile initiatives, and accelerating the can lead to doing traditional things differently, as well as mobile adoption learning curve across the organization. doing fundamentally different things. When left to its own devices, each faction – individual, department or The third challenge is that mobility introduces yet another organization – will struggle through the learning process level of complexity that CIOs must manage and support at towards its own vision of mobile enlightenment. an enterprise scale. What’s an effective way to deal with pressure to get behind each “next big thing”? Should In this chaotic environment, CIOs face three challenges. employee-owned devices be allowed on enterprise First, they need to build capabilities to deliver intuitive, networks? And if so, what data, applications and services user-friendly mobile applications that can meet or exceed should they be permitted to access? How should IT expectations set by consumer technologies. Mobile delivery practices change to support mobile applications? True requires new skills, new mindsets, new application enterprise-class mobility requires governance, security, architectures, new methodologies and new approaches privacy and compliance policies – with effective to problem-solving. Above all, solutions must focus on management of mobile devices, enterprise app stores, usability – design-led thinking with mobile mentalities. mobile middleware and more. The trick is to build a solid Scope should be reined in to create well-defined, elegant foundational infrastructure without throttling the business. solutions that address explicit problems, not broad As you likely know, the business can’t – and won’t – wait collections of functionality. User experiences should be for a fully formed mobile enablement roadmap to be mobile-centric, based on touch/swipe/talk, not point/click/ defined and put into place. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 15
Enterprise Mobility Unleashed History repeating itself? Mobility has evolved from an issue within a few niche industries and functions (think oil & gas and logistics services) to a potential source of innovation across wide-ranging vertical industries, processes and business models. And while many of the underlying components have been evolving for decades, the break-out potential is only now being realized. What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? “App for that” backlash • With the explosion of interest in mobile applica- • Many organizations now understand the impor- tions came the inevitable wave of ill-conceived, tance of design-led mobile solutions that focus on underwhelming releases – confirming skeptics’ usability and how work should get done. beliefs that mobile is, at best, a distribution tool • Early experiments in business-to-consumer and and, at worst, a distraction. early business-to-business scenarios are leading • Early developers ported existing systems and to more compelling, complex applications across reports designed for desktops to mobile. The the enterprise value chain, making integration, resulting multi-purpose apps proved unwieldy security and manageability more critical. on the small screen, and replicating point/click/ • Cross-platform, multi-environment application type functionality using a touch/swipe interface suites and HTML5 implementations have evolved proved painful. to more credibly offer “develop once, deploy • Developers had a losing choice: deal with the many” approaches to mobile. complexity of designing multiple native apps or • As mobility reaches critical mass, the need for endure the sub-par user experience of simpler device management, product management, web-based apps. application management, security and privacy • Most organizations only had a handful of mobile management, and other enterprise capabilities solutions in production, making the required shifts from “good to have” to “must have,” and infrastructure and enterprise enablement support the vendors are responding. seem like overhead. Specialized mobile • Ruggedized, hardened and other fit-to-purpose • Consumer-grade device prices have fallen, equipment and devices were too expensive to allow mobile use causing some previous buyers of high-end network/carrier cases to propagate. specialized gear to consider switching to lower- infrastructure • Splintered ecosystems across manufacturers and cost, easily replaceable devices. operating environments stymied marketplace • As standards emerge in the mobile ecosystem, innovation. device manufacturers are beginning to adopt • Devices lacked the horsepower and flexibility open platforms (e.g., Android). to handle divergent tasks, which limited their • Advances in memory, display, computing and potential usage. peripherals allow portability between personas • Advanced mobile solutions had architectural and use cases moving freely between PC, tablet dependencies on carrier infrastructure (e.g., and handheld. wireless access protocol (WAP) gateways/proxies, • Mobile networks now enable true endpoint-to- authentication, authorization and accounting endpoint connectivity, agnostic of infrastructural (AAA)-driven session management.) details. Asset intelligence1 • Embedded sensors expand enterprise mobility’s • Machine-to-machine middleware and application potential, but compatibility between machinery logic are improving compatibility in hardware/ and sensors was limited. manufacturer protocols and communication • Sensor prices have been too high for commodity channels. adoption. • Prices have decreased dramatically for embedded • Visibility without sense-making led to data prolif- sensors, communications and onboard compute/ eration, not insights. memory. • Cost-efficient solutions are emerging for business rules engines to perform edge-based logic, allowing signals to be processed that can initiate actuation, not just data broadcast. 16
Enterprise Mobility Unleashed Technology implications Enterprise mobility can unleash business transformation from the top down, but it is inherently a technology-driven advance with potential consequences that the CIO should be prepared to manage. Topic Description Bring your own device Whether or not to allow employees to bring their own devices to work is top-of-mind for many CIOs. (BYOD) It’s not clear that mobile device policies and management controls are enforceable, especially across international borders. Country regulations regarding e-discovery and the legality of remotely wiping personal devices with a corporate footprint vary. If BYOD is pursued, data and application containers should be considered to partition user and corporate assets. Mobile device Organizations will need an arsenal of tools, policies and back-end scripting to monitor, manage management (MDM) and control devices. MDM can protect applications, patches and security agents that are properly provisioned and can allow data to be automatically backed-up and protected while at rest and in transit. It can also allow devices to be triaged, disabled or wiped clean if compromised. The vendor landscape is crowded. There is the potential for consolidation over the course of 2012. Security and privacy Organizations need policies and tools to authenticate users; control devices, applications and data; provide end-to-end encryption while at rest, in flight and in use; run content filtering and malware protection; and allow security event monitoring, logging and response. Security policies and profiles should be tied to specific users and scenarios, focusing remedies on likely incidents, not the infinite range of risk possibilities. Mobile application Deployment of in-house and third-party mobile applications is not a trivial matter; nor is the management management of provisioning profiles, entitlements, licensing, compliance and user-access termination. In-house enterprise app stores have emerged, as have tools for administering access lists across internal and external application portfolios. Mobile middleware Organizations will need to manage mobile solution integration to on-premise and cloud-based enterprise systems and data, as well as improve data transmission to mobile devices based on layout and bandwidth consumption. This includes management of variability in network connectivity and performance – including tools for enabling off-line mode and ways to deal with frequent air-interface switching between 4G (LTE/WiMax), 3G (EVDO/HSPA), 2.5G (1xRTT/Edge) and Wi-Fi networks of varying signal strengths. Desktop virtualization Some organizations may opt for a data-centric approach to mobile enablement, choosing to limit the data actually resident on the mobile device. Relying on virtualized environments allows organizations to provide access without relinquishing control. Mobile application Debate continues over the preferred approach to application development. Native application coding architecture allows greater control over operating systems and device features. Cross-platform development allows a “build once, deploy many times” delivery. And new browser-based or web standards like HTML5 hold the potential for easier porting with better functionality. Mobility testing suites Emerging services can automate the testing of solutions across devices and operating systems, simulating varying levels of connectivity and network performance – including diagnostic tools to identify data and system dependencies to shrink time-to-deployment while increasing multiple device support. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 17
Enterprise Mobility Unleashed Lessons from the frontlines Faster than a speeding bullet Innovation on the rails Disaster recovery and continuity planning are rarely the Amtrak is investing in mobility in a big way – targeting source of innovation. This has an unfortunate side effect: conductors and customers – to build on record-high disaster-response knowledge is often trapped within bulky ridership and revenue performance in 2011. Historically, printed materials sitting inside the very office buildings conductors have been saddled with paper-based, manual most likely to be affected during an emergency. Plus, with processes for dealing with everything from ticket collection increasingly mobile workforces, the challenge of tracking to service maintenance, but mobility is changing that. A and helping your people during a crisis is virtually solution combining a mobile app with a magnetic stripe impossible without technology’s help. Bamboo is a service reader is modernizing railway operations – and the to address these needs by providing a mobile vehicle for industry. Conductors use the app to process tickets, reporting incidents, facilitating communication between perform prompt fraud validation, prove customer team members and potential first responders, and allowing notification of potential scheduling issues, and feed into a individuals to understand what they should do during and sophisticated model that tracks customers and their after an event. Continuity plans are stored locally, allowing location on the train. This improves the conductor’s teams to mobilize even if connectivity is lost. efficiency by identifying which doors to open during stops, arranging for the right number of wheelchairs at the right The future of retail place upon an individual’s departure, and providing a A large retail organization has embraced mobility – not as sense for the capacity and likely needs for each car. In the a siloed commerce channel, but as a means to empower past, faulty toilets, damaged seats or broken kitchen customers and drive loyalty through new services and equipment would be serviced only at the end of an offerings. Smartphone, tablet and mobile web offerings extended route. With the new mobile app, incidents can provide mailings, product browsing, inventory searches, be reported in real-time, allowing maintenance to be coupons, gift registries and shopping lists. Emerging mobile scheduled at intermediate stops along the way. This and e-commerce platforms have generated innovations in functionality led to enthusiastic adoption by conductors in interactive advertisements, individualized coupons that can a matter of minutes after deployment, versus weeks of be scanned at the point-of-sale, and integration to their training for IT services that have historically led to poor brick and mortar stores. The organization marries digital traction, usage and results. content with inventory, price and in-store location – down to the aisle and shelf detail – showcasing an omni-channel For passengers, there’s a complementary app available strategy bigger than the web, mobile, social or storefront that offers scheduling, ticketing and check-in capabilities individually. as standard features – presented with a highly usable interface. The concept has been extended to include gamification principles: customers earn stamps while traveling, link achievements to social networks and see visualizations of their personal travels compared to peer groups or frequent travelers. This information is linked to Amtrak’s reward and loyalty program, encouraging customers to pursue new methods of engagement beyond traditional channels. 18
Enterprise Mobility Unleashed My take Shehryar Khan Founder and former CEO Übermind, Inc. The mobile revolution is underway. Companies big and Unleashing mobile has tremendous potential. But to fully small, across virtually every industry, are clamoring to realize this, it is important to acknowledge how mobile can unlock the potential of mobility in their business. At impact many aspects of your business – from how your Übermind, we have helped some of the largest and most customers can engage with you in new and interesting recognizable brands define and execute their mobile ways, but also in how you can make a difference in the strategy2. Our goal is not just to create killer, intuitive lives of your employees by equipping them with tools that mobile apps that are breathtakingly beautiful as they are help enable them to do their jobs more effectively. Keeping functional (though we love to do that); it is to help an enterprise frame-of-mind is also important, factoring in companies transform their business through the use of the special considerations and gotchas that come with new generation of smartphone and tablet devices. And to enabling mission-critical aspects of the business through rethink operating and business models – constrained only mobile innovation. Security. Scalability. Reliability. by our imagination of how a digitally advanced, always- Maintainability. Flexibility. Integrated into back-office connected customer base, coupled with a truly untethered systems, data and workflows. workforce, can transform an industry. How business is conducted. How markets are shaped. Developing, deploying and supporting mobile solutions is quite a bit different than traditional IT. Doing it well Surely in some cases the most effective answer is to build requires a special blend of business insight, deep technical from today’s reality – to do what you’ve historically done, chops and strong design. Companies that recognize this but to take advantage of mobile capabilities to do it better. required mix of business, art and science can set But what really excites me is when we can help define a themselves apart from their competition and help to new tomorrow – not just doing things differently, but reshape entire industries. doing different things. And when you are using mobile coupled with other technology-based innovations like analytics, social, gamification, cloud computing and visualization as a Trojan horse for transformative thinking. But this time, realizing how a very sophisticated “always on, always connected, in your pocket” computing device (which some people call a phone) can help empower everybody that engages with your business – be they customers, employees or business partners. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 19
Enterprise Mobility Unleashed Where do you start? • Centralize. Given the freedom to run, each pocket For many organizations, the mobility opportunity is clear. within an organization is likely to either build skills in But understanding where to begin isn’t as straightforward. mobile app design and development, or outsource it. CIOs are in the middle of the mix, facing their own Even worse, they could establish competing policies concerns about the strategy, infrastructure and delivery with varying levels of enterprise-class features (security, capabilities required to meet mobility demand with privacy, integration, data management). This could enterprise-class solutions. To position IT as a driver of confuse users and jeopardize your brand. Plus, each silo business innovation and agility, consider these next steps: will go through its own learning curve. Having a core group or center of excellence that shares experiences • Fuel the arms race. Move mobile toward the top of the among functions and business areas can accelerate the CIO agenda. Put together a three-person swat team – move from the mobile veneering of existing operations designer, architect and developer – and have them to true innovation. rapidly train on a platform of choice. Find the early seeds of mobile opportunities in the business, and zero in on • Think differently. Mobile is a different beast than one that has clear business value. traditional IT. To achieve your goals, you’ll need a unique mix of creativity and design talent that might not be a • Build a foundational strategy. The mobility landscape core discipline within the CIO’s shop. Take cues from is moving at warp speed. CIOs need a mobile strategy leading consumer applications, and improve scope, limited to a six-month horizon. Decide on an initial usability and back-end performance to leverage the mobile app architecture. Establish foundational unique characteristics of mobile. recommendations for management, deployment and support. Create a roadmap of prioritized use-cases and apps. And establish a plan for how to meet demand. The strategy doesn’t need to be exclusionary of any specific technology options: choose where to develop natively, where to use a cross-platform enablement tool, and where to build a mobile-tailored web app. Do them all at once, or in rapid succession, and you are likely to buy yourself strategic flexibility for the medium-term. 20
Enterprise Mobility Unleashed Bottom line Mobility is quickly becoming one of the most important battlegrounds for business innovation. Operating models are being redrawn for consumers, employees and business partners alike. This puts enormous pressure on CIOs to determine whether mobile solutions are ready for the enterprise. In the push for usability, however, ideas like reliability, security, performance and maintainability should not be forgotten. Regardless, there’s no excuse for not pursuing mobile. The revolution is well underway. Every business should be exploring how it will operate when location constraints are obliterated. Every CIO should have a clear vision of a world in which every customer, worker and supplier is hyper-productive, hyper-available and hyper-engaged. Endnotes 1 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2010), “Depth Perception: A dozen technology trends shaping business and IT in 2010”, http://www.deloitte.com/us/2010technologytrends, Chapter 11. “Deloitte Acquires Übermind; Establishes Lead in the Mobile Revolution,” Deloitte LLP press release, January 4, 2012, on the Deloitte LLP web 2 site, http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/press/Press-Releases/5fa2480b618a4310VgnVCM1000001a56f00aRCRD.htm, accessed January 25, 2012. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 21
4 User Empowerment The end-user renaissance forces a sourcing apps. BYOA (bring your own application) will likely disruptive shift in IT become part of many organizations’ solution footprints. In their personal lives, business users are enjoying a technology renaissance that continues to deliver simple, These changes should not be chalked up to nefarious elegant and often innovative technology products. Then motivations among empowered users. They simply they come to work expecting the same experience. To represent market dynamics at play. Users expect intuitive, meet those expectations, IT leaders should understand and dynamic solutions now, and corporate IT has historically deliver capabilities that engage each key persona of their focused on underlying architecture and completeness of users, enabling a given role in the way they actually solutions – the foundation and the plumbing, not the perform their job. But it shouldn’t stop there. The real trick decor. IT’s success in this area is part of the challenge: is envisioning how emerging technologies and new form while process automation has been generally satisfied, end factors can improve how work actually gets done. users have begun to expect something more. In general, Enterprise users are clamoring for mobile and social they want more than utility, they want elegance – and they enablement – collaboration, information and insight are typically not afraid to tap into any channel at their wherever, whenever. They’re looking to leave behind the disposal to get it. legacy “point, click, type” world for one of “touch, swipe, talk and gesture,” and they won’t hesitate to go around CIOs can use this movement to their advantage, but it may central IT to get the capabilities they need. The CIO require some uncomfortable change. For starters, creative must envision the digital future and deliver the and user experience (UX) talent with a deep understanding empowered present. of human behavior will likely be required as a core competency. Agile and Scrum delivery capabilities will User empowerment builds on this reality, embodying the complement heavier methodologies, supporting rapid tenets of user engagement and embracing free-market prototyping and a design-led iterative approach. Broad principles that are becoming a central feature of today’s integration, security and data management services should IT environment1. Said another way, it reflects the be developed – and marketed – along with proactive democratization of corporate technology. guidance for business users on how central IT can help in this new user-empowered world. Think service-oriented End users have plenty of opportunities to bypass IT and architecture – not only in the technology stack, but also in procure off-the-shelf or low/no-code solutions that are just how business capabilities are described2. good enough to meet their needs. Through mobile and desktop application (app) stores, cloud-based marketplaces Without succeeding in this shift, a CIO may be treated as and rapid development and deployment platforms, an obstacle or viewed as irrelevant to the business vision. business stakeholders are one swipe of the corporate credit That’s why it’s important for CIOs to guide the business card away from procuring rogue “almost-enterprise” through the inevitable disruption of technology applications to fulfill their unmet needs. As a result, CIOs innovations, and to be seen as co-conspirators by their should consider adopting a design-led, user-centric empowered users, enabling – and accelerating – the approach to new application development, while also upward journey. accepting the inevitability of business users directly 22
User Empowerment History repeating itself? User empowerment in 2012 is the culmination of a journey evolving from the industrial revolution and advancing through the information age. It is heavily influenced by technology and trends that have been guiding consumer product design and branding for decades. It also reflects the disintermediation of central IT – something foreshadowed during prior evolutionary leaps from mainframe to client server to the onset of the Internet. What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? User experience (UX) • UX is meant to be broad in scope – affecting • User empowerment requires UX to be raised how a product is discovered, learned and used. beyond ergonomics, color palettes and the It could be applied to any system: physical or placement of web elements. The principles logical, informational or transaction. UX saw a of user engagement require creative and UX resurgence with the web explosion in the early disciplines – but there is a more ambitious, trans- 2000s, but unfortunately became tightly associ- formative agenda at stake. Creating a design-led, ated with site design and page look/feel, layout creative-infused approach to solutions requires and flow. building from a vision of how users could do their jobs. This effort should not be limited by • UX has not been embraced by many IT depart- underlying systems, data or constraints of how ments. Some organizations that attempted to jobs are done today. develop creative or UX competencies found it difficult to attract and retain the talent they • The scope of user empowerment reaches across needed. As such, the influence of UX has employee- and customer-facing functions, been limited. business processes and channels. • Users expect intuitive interfaces that require minimal training to get up and running – func- tional simplicity on top of elegant designs. • Composite application frameworks allow a combination of highly usable, engaging form factors hiding the complexity of underlying back-end systems – be they legacy or emerging solutions. Human factor science • A multi-disciplinary approach was taken to • User empowerment looks to build from the understand and improve how individuals interact breakthroughs of human factor sciences – but with the world. Volumes of research existed, but tailors the findings to practical IT solutions. they were largely theoretical and abstract, so the impact on information systems and enterprise IT • Advances in big data and analytics lowers the was limited. entry barriers for some flavors of insights – with lightweight tools now available to analyze volu- • User engagement employed exacting research minous, granular data describing user behavior with influences from psychology, statistics, and preferences. industrial design, operations and various branches of engineering. This required a highly specialized skill-set, making it difficult and costly to cultivate talent. Desktop-ware/macros/ • Democratization of IT occurred in several waves: • Unlike past incarnations, user empowerment is almost-enterprise macros in the early mainframe days; desktop- not about enacting control or punishing innova- applications3 ware in the early client/server days; departmental tion. It is about reinventing IT as a compelling set web solutions as the Internet went mainstream; of service-based capabilities in line with consumer and now line-of-business investments in cloud sensibilities, fluent in emerging technologies and and mobile apps. The delivery model and under- able to guide and accelerate almost-enterprise lying technology changed, but the pursuit is the application adoption. same – agility and control. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 23
User Empowerment Technology implications The sentiment of user empowerment can sometimes feel esoteric and abstract. But, in practice, realizing the vision of design-led solutions that integrate almost-enterprise solutions at the fringes of the business – with legacy systems – is a daunting technical challenge. Fortunately, the required tools already exist. They just need to be effectively applied. Topic Description Composite application These frameworks are designed for orchestrating long-running, end-to-end business processes over frameworks / business a series of steps and discrete systems. They can be used for more simplistic business processes as process management well as complex ones, and for integrating processes from multiple back-end systems. Tools have emerged to allow a given transaction to be assembled from public and private cloud services, legacy on-premise enterprise systems and data, and manual tasks – by employees, by business partners and even by customers or prospects. Often coupled with business rules engines and messaging layers, these advanced platforms are designed to allow for dynamic routing and composition of services, with steps and services dictated by data in the workload, or by external factors such as supply chain status, traffic updates and customer service interactions. Agile/Scrum Adding to your software development lifecycle (SDLC) and operational processes and tools to support an agile approach can be a sizable effort. Release management, configuration management, portfolio tracking, project management and testing standards are likely based on traditional waterfall mentalities – and have become hard-wired in enabling systems and infrastructure. Wireframing/ The ability to rapidly iterate through design concepts and create representative prototypes is prototyping necessary for executing any vision for user empowerment. Don’t get lost in the weeds trying to choose the right tools. Instead, attempt to standardize in order to help build critical mass in the team. Next generation A number of no- or low-code development approaches are gaining traction – including Ruby on development languages Rails, Python, Force.com and Google’s Enterprise App Engine. Enterprise standards like J2EE, .NET and COBOL will not be completely replaced, but will likely be coupled with new languages to drive edge experimentation and rapid concept-to-prototype-to-finished-product cycles. Integration Back-end system integration is usually a bottleneck in the way of rapid solution build-out. Moving from representative prototypes to stand-alone applications to a critical system with interfaces to legacy systems and data can happen very quickly, especially if user adoption takes off. The most useful apps are those that are fully integrated. IT should build a service bus and integration framework capable of handling tiers of service levels – a spectrum of reliability, performance, transactional integrity and security capabilities. Recognize that user empowerment will likely introduce new integration patterns to support the required flexibility, based on SOA principles. In addition, integration from cloud offerings to the core, and from the core to external services, should be considered – from social platforms to business partner services. Vendor, contract and Standardized processes supported by specialized tools should be deployed to track and manage asset management vendors, contracts and associated assets. Asset tracking needs to move beyond physical devices and software licenses to become a services repository – tracking cloud services, application and integration objects, mobile apps, on-premise solutions and other IT resources, many of which may not be owned by central IT. 24
User Empowerment Lessons from the frontlines A digital interaction platform to enable the multiple Say cheese channels of engagement was the answer. By giving guests A world leader in cheese manufacturing was seeing rising the ability to engage and interact using mobile, web and costs in maintaining its ten plants. Even with veteran skilled kiosk applications, the company is looking to gain insight technicians, users were struggling – mostly because of and control over how, when and where guests interact aging systems with complex interfaces. Commonplace with a restaurant brand. They took the first step by activities like transferring stock between warehouses, deploying online and mobile app ordering, resulting in a creating work orders for maintenance and interacting with double digit sales increase for that sales channel. The next notification events were difficult to complete. Users were step will be to allow guests to see the real-time availability making a lot of errors – and getting frustrated with the of multiple restaurants on a smart phone, determine tools that were supposed to be making their lives easier. locations with short wait times and get their names on waiting lists before they get to the restaurant. The In conjunction with efforts to standardize on a modern ERP restaurant can detect their arrival before they walk in the platform, a new user interface was created, tailored to how door – and be prepared with a personal greeting. These plant workers do their jobs. Simplification was the key – empowerment initiatives, coupled with digitally enabled showing only the information needed to complete a task, loyalty and reward programs, put the power of the with visual cues to guide users along in the process. The relationship in the hands of the customer. They are looking intuitive front-end was integrated into the complex plant to their empowered users to define the restaurant of systems and back-office ERP – built upon their back-end tomorrow. processes, data standards and transactional integrity. With the new interface, tasks are completed using 70% fewer Empowering the value chain clicks. Technician productivity has increased by double A high tech hardware manufacturer saw the opportunity digits, and further cost savings have been realized by to transform how its global sales force collaborated, both reducing the need for extensive user training – all because internally with engineering and R&D teams, and externally of an engaged, empowered user base. with business partners. The opportunity was driven by challenges associated with new product training, technical Your table is ready support, capturing feedback on new product and feature A global leader in the restaurant industry, with brands requests, and simple sales and fulfillment servicing. The spanning from quick service through casual dining sectors, culprit? A suite of convoluted technology solutions was looking for new ways to attract and connect with where each persona and each process had a separate customers – hoping to bolster brand loyalty, increase visits siloed system. and grow average check sizes. The proliferation of mobile devices and applications, social media and analytics piqued A new platform to facilitate everything from collaboration their interest, as did stories of retail and other hospitality and activity management to design prototyping and sectors adopting these technologies. The company decided relationship management was created. Capabilities were to deploy digital technology and social media to create a built around the roles key stakeholders played. Where new “digital experience” for customers – which allowed appropriate, information was visible across organizational the business to learn more about guests’ wants and boundaries. The user empowerment solution was not a preferences. substitute for existing design tools, CRM systems or reporting suites. But it tapped the relevant data and services that users needed to do their jobs, and simplified to the essence of individual roles. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 25
User Empowerment My take Randy Burdick Executive Vice President and CIO OfficeMax “Why not?” That is my mantra when our business users Along with user empowerment, of course, comes the need are looking to adopt some new piece of technology they for stepped-up security. The consumerization of business believe can help them do their jobs better – flipping the technology threatens to expose our organization to burden of proof, and being open to the evolving role of IT. additional risks. Give everyone the keys to the cloud, for Sometimes there are very good reasons why not, and in example, and you could be asking for problems – not those cases we’re quick to say so. These may include only in terms of data breaches and theft, but also the security, maintainability or reliability. But these days, we’re unintentional sharing of confidential corporate data. As the seeing a host of commercially available tools that combine lines separating business use from personal use continue to ease-of-use with deep capabilities that we could have only blur, the risks increase for everyone involved. An effective dreamed about a few years ago. So, when we’re asked to security infrastructure is more important than ever. confirm a new technology, I challenge our team with this question: Why can’t we let our people do more on their User empowerment has also strengthened our focus on own? Especially when doing so gives us room to take on process. In fact, this is probably the most important shift bigger, higher-value issues. we’ve made. It’s easy to overlook the process implications of new, user-friendly technology, given how quickly This approach has been a positive development for our IT adoption can happen. It’s not surprising that some users organization, and for our business. But we’ve had to adapt expect new technology to be a panacea for deeper issues our priorities along the way. A great example is in the rooted in their processes. But simplicity should to start from information space. As the tools became user-friendly the business process. That’s where my IT organization can enough to allow the business to play a more hands-on add a lot of value, making sure that our people have role, we shifted from building reports to building a specified their needs clearly from the outset – and are reporting platform to allow users to create their own planning for the process changes needed to help confirm information views. Our charter became educating our that new tools deliver the expected value. business users on proper usage, teaching them to be good stewards while we moved on to different challenges. But This can be frustrating for business leaders, who may think we stay close, because if we’re not getting value from we’re presenting unnecessary obstacles and gumming up those investments, we all lose. It’s our job to make sure the works. But as long as we take the time to explain the our empowered users take advantage of the functionality thinking behind our approach, it’s easy to get them on offered by a new tool. board. When that happens, they can be smarter about the technology investments we’re making together, and we’re able to maintain a high level of quality across our portfolio. 26 26
User Empowerment Where do you start? • Accept reality. CIOs no longer hold a monopoly on Embracing user empowerment does not require a technology talent in a workplace that is increasingly wholesale scuttling of corporate IT. If done well, it should comprised of tech-savvy workers who can bring be a framing force that permeates the entire IT delivery programming backgrounds to their jobs, regardless of model, positively redefining the brand of IT in the business. job function or educational background. The Considerations: displacement of boomers by digital natives is part of this trend. Widespread adoption of consumer electronics – • Begin with the user. User engagement takes a especially smart phones, tablets and gaming systems – user-centric, role-based, persona-aware view of your is another. As the internal customer base becomes more stakeholders. Who are they? How do they do their jobs? technologically capable and open to experimentation, (This is especially important for understanding how so do the number of channels through which they can customers and consumers interact with the circumvent IT and source their own solutions. organization.) What devices do they have at their disposal? What are their current challenges? And, • Productize. Adopt a product-management mentality. perhaps most importantly, how could new technologies Start with small pilots and create a mechanism for (think cloud, mobile, social, analytics) and philosophies receiving end-user feedback through customer research like outside-in architecture contribute to rethinking how and competitive scanning. Borrow a page from the people work? In the end, simplicity is the ultimate form business – thinking about IT’s services in terms of the of sophistication. Aim for usability, intuitiveness and four Ps (product, positioning, pricing, placement). focus. Design IT processes to fit better with Agile and Scrum approaches that focus on quick releases and faster • Walk in their shoes. Do a gut check. Take a hard look time-to-market. Running IT as a business isn’t just at how well users’ needs are being met, using about efficiency and efficacy – it’s also about making consumer-facing tools and third-party solutions as sure the perceived value of your offering is higher benchmarks. Send some of your team to the front lines than the next available offering. That’s the way to to get a feel for how work actually gets done – and embrace consumerization, stay relevant in the face of where IT’s capabilities currently miss the mark. democratization and leave engaged, empowered users in your wake. • Know your competition. Consumer app stores with enterprise-oriented wares continue to expand, whether cloud-based, desktop-based or mobile-based. Find out which third-party solutions or “almost-enterprise” applications might engage your users, even if they are only “just good enough” architecturally. Adopt a services mentality that allows leading solutions, even if they are sourced outside of central IT. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 27
User Empowerment Bottom line The forces behind user empowerment can elicit a defeatist or even scornful response from the CIO. Isn’t it enough to keep the lights on? Haven’t users gotten the job done with the user experience of ERP and large- scale custom systems? Users may complain – but it still works. Am I really expected to try to create dazzling, engaging solutions? Well, yes. Expectations for technology have irreversibly changed. Now that the bar has been reset, users are unlikely to accept a stark drop-off in experience from their personal to professional lives. The means are already in place to circumvent core IT. Capital is flowing to mobile application and public cloud provider ventures for each user, each process and each job function – and they’re looking to take over more than their share of the IT budget. CIOs should reimagine IT services, starting with a commitment to the user. Inject creative and design thinking into the delivery model. Move from “thou shalt not” mandates to services that guide and aid the adoption of almost-enterprise applications. Aspire to deliver innovative, intuitive, usable and simple solutions – and harness the power of your empowered users for higher business performance. Endnotes 1 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, http://www. deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 8. Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2010), “Depth Perception: A dozen technology trends shaping business and IT in 2 2010”, http://www.deloitte.com/us/2010technologytrends, Chapter 10. Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, http://www. 3 deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 2. 28
5 Hyper-hybrid Cloud Adoption moves from cloud to clouds, and to cloud offerings outside of the trappings of traditional IT, hybrid emerges as a dominant model underlying business processes can become riddled with As cloud offerings added vertical business capability multiple cloud players that the organization itself must offerings to the horizontal IT capacity services, the integrate and orchestrate. As a result, much of the “IT-free” adoption question changed from “if” to “when” – and value proposition can dissipate at the enterprise level. the answer is frequently “now.” Along the way, leading organizations moved from cautious exploration to the A true cloud broker may eventually emerge, delivering reality of multiple individual cloud offerings handling bundled, composite business capabilities that are critical pieces of their business operations – and sourced meaningful to the end subscriber, while hiding the from multiple public and private providers. In each complicated integration, orchestration and rules instance, these offerings needed to be connected back to management plumbing. But today’s reality forces the core of the business, often through traditional enterprise IT to fulfill these services. Leading CIOs will do data-driven on-premise integration solutions. Advance one so in terms the business can understand – outcomes, step further, and the organization is managing both value, assurance and service levels – to create the next exception and routine workflow across a growing range of level of IT services catalog. disparate cloud offerings with point-to-point links to legacy systems and data. This shift from “cloud” to “clouds” The debate around “to cloud, or not to cloud” is beginning provides new opportunities, but it also brings challenges to subside. As adoption becomes more widespread, beyond just integration – security, data integrity and businesses are increasingly willing to deploy multiple reliability, and business rules management for business applications and infrastructure services on cloud platforms. processes that depend on enterprise IT assets composed For large corporations, efforts remain focused on “edge” with one or more cloud services. Welcome to the world of applications such as sales, services, marketing and human hyper-hybrid cloud. resources. As usage grows, however, ambitions will likely follow. Enterprises will source more capabilities – leading to Integration, master data management and enterprise custom extensions, more interfaces back into the core, and architecture have historically served as the linchpins in a growing mix of cloud-based solutions to fulfill business modern IT shops – a role that has only become more needs. CIOs need to build the foundation for a hybrid- important with the adoption of multiple cloud solutions. As cloud future today, and use it as a stepping stone towards more functional business leaders independently subscribe tomorrow’s outside-in architecture1. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 29
Hyper-hybrid Cloud History repeating itself? Though cloud is still emerging on the business technology agenda, the underlying technology is built on long-established principles of distributed computing, automated provisioning, high-speed networking and virtualization technologies. And, like other technology maturity curves, the cloud marketplace has already seen multiples waves of fragmentation, consolidation, big bets and commensurate hype. What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? Capacity clouds • Early cloud offerings were focused on delivering • Increasing investments in infrastructure cloud capacity efficiency for the traditional layers of IT offerings must integrate with broader Software – infrastructure, platforms and software packages as a Service (SaaS) application environments. – often commoditized, isolated resources delivered at scale, within attractive sourcing and • Cloud procurement is becoming accepted, and pricing models. Infrastructure-as-a-service was a in some cases is standard practice, across the fixture of this wave, offering subscription-based business and IT. compute, storage and network resources. Even early platform and software plays were capacity- • Business use cases are growing more complex. driven, providing logical environments or licenses Previously isolated cloud workloads require per software seat. integration with each other and with core back- office systems. Dependencies on security, data • Primary buyers were IT departments and niche correlation and service lifecycle management functional owners whose needs directly aligned have also grown, requiring specialized disciplines with individual platform and software offerings. for delivery and maintenance. Trust is extended beyond the enterprise, and integration moves • Siloed cloud services with relatively contained from data-driven to service-driven, or even scope led to modest initial investments in event-driven. integration, orchestration, security and policy management services – inside the enterprise • The evolution to capability clouds brings with trust zone and frequently data-driven operational it new buyers across the business and IT2. The data store (ODS) approaches. business case is still found for cloud to provide capacity-efficient layers of the IT cake, but business users are looking for the capability- oriented slice of layer cake. Capability clouds • The move from horizontal IT capacity layers to • Cloud vendors are investing in software to vertical slices of cloud capability services with provide more sophisticated application program higher business value became a leading practice. interfaces (APIs) and service control points for But the speed of adoption led to challenges in multi-cloud/multi-provider environments. In the the ability to support integration, correlation meantime, organizations are required to build and security requirements – limiting the pace of out integration, data management and security adoption and reducing the value provided to the services to allow hybrid-cloud capabilities with business. shared policy and management platforms. • Proprietary workflow platforms between capa- • Cloud brokers are emerging that aggregate and bility cloud providers and subscribing organiza- orchestrate cloud-to-cloud transactions as-a- tions constrained the ability to offer combinations service, subject to enterprise-class service level of multiple cloud services to solve a higher-order agreements (SLAs). business problem. End-to-end business processes entailing multiple services had to be managed • As-a-service business rules engines are likely explicitly, sequentially and point-to-point. to emerge in the cloud that will allow routine processes to flow across composite services from heterogeneous providers, with only exception conditions returned to the subscriber “hub.” 30
Hyper-hybrid Cloud Technology implications Many organizations are adopting a hybrid-cloud approach that combines on-premise enterprise assets with multiple cloud-based services (both private and public). Managing the underlying technology requires an enhanced set of technology disciplines. Topic Description Federated identity Identity, credential and access management becomes essential when multiple cloud offerings are integrated and applications coordinated. As industry standards such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) emerge and are adopted, federated identity solutions will mature. This will allow strategies to manage user roles and facilitate enterprise single sign-on between cloud providers and traditional enterprise technologies. Cloud-based integration Cloud-based and cloud-aware integration offerings continue to evolve, accelerating interface development and data translation between various public cloud services, and offering lightweight orchestration for processes involving multiple cloud environments. Feature sets are still in the early stages of development, but independent software vendors (ISVs) are aggressively extending products to manage composite cloud-based applications. Operations Support In much the same way that capability clouds introduced new needs, hyper-hybrid cloud adoption Systems (OSS) / Business requires management capabilities from deployment to usage, management of pricing across a Support Systems (BSS) number of cloud services, and automated provisioning of business processes from a range of sources. Hyper-hybrid clouds also require new services to order, provision, manage, monitor usage, bill and remediate these services, with control points at the infrastructure, application and business levels. Standalone cloud services bring plenty of complexity on their own. With hybrid clouds, the complexity is multiplied. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 31
Hyper-hybrid Cloud Lessons from the frontlines Human capital in the cloud What, me integrate? Cloud service brokers emerge A leading insurance firm began investing in public cloud Mohawk Fine Papers was looking for a way to manage offerings to improve its human resources processes. One their hyper-hybrid application footprint, with several cloud initiative targeted resume sourcing. Another investment solutions at the infrastructure, data, platform and went after background checking. Yet another was focused application level3. They bypassed the internal build-out of on employee performance management. Each initiative integration and orchestration services, choosing instead to required interfaces into legacy ERP systems for functions partner with an aggregator and orchestrator of cloud like payroll, time tracking and benefits planning. Because services that managed the relationships and the various cloud services were discrete offerings from interdependences required. Any back-end complexity is different vendors, the organization and the CIO were on transparent to Mohawk, which simply contracts with its the hook for managing the different point-to-point partner to manage service levels that are informed by interactions. The chief talent officer had been aiming for business objectives. simplicity by looking to cloud services, yet new complexity across her hyper-hybrid “hire-to-retire” process was the Moving from data pipes to cloud fabric unexpected result. The company handled the first wave of Enterprise mobility services are experiencing explosive interoperability needs through traditional data-driven growth4. Mobile solutions are increasingly dependent on interfaces. Now they’re looking to take advantage of a variety of cloud services for everything from content cloud-based integration frameworks to ease development streaming to distributed computing, creating even more and maintenance – and to make the architecture more hyper-hybrid scenarios for businesses. For example, a flexible for wherever the next round of investments takes multinational telecommunications corporation plans to them. monetize this combination of trends by creating a commercial service delivery platform built on cloud-based infrastructure to give external developers access to their core wireless network APIs. These APIs include location, messaging and subscriber charging. The goal? To create an ecosystem of application developers – leading to new revenue sources for the carrier and increased customer retention. 32
Hyper-hybrid Cloud My take John Seely Brown Independent Co-chairman Deloitte Center for the Edge Many CIOs are rightfully wrestling with the technical When there is a clear vision for a services grid, with realities of growing cloud adoption. Security. Integration. progress defining and deploying business control points, Distributed data management. Workflow and then integration, workflow and the services grid itself can orchestration. Now that the hybrid model of cloud services reach outside a single enterprise. In fact, the disruptive has become common, those issues are compounded with potential may be most significant in more dynamic multi-cloud and cloud-to-cloud complexities. But beyond expressions of the business across hyper-hybrid cloud the IT stack there is a challenge on which many services, and contingent workflow planning should be organizations haven’t yet focused: what does it mean to brought into the fabric of the architecture, shared between rethink my business as a collection of services? Business parties. In short, the outside-in mentality5. services that can be consumed internally or externally, independently orchestrated, provided in-house, via an Go past cloud point solutions. Don’t assume cloud external cloud – or most likely a hybrid of both. Tackle this automatically results in an effective services-oriented question head-on to get results in a hyper-hybrid world. (business) architecture. And keep in mind that it’s nearly impossible to execute a coherent cloud strategy without Cloud is about services. So, the first step in exploiting the addressing social, mobile, big data and visualization. These power of cloud involves “services thinking.” That’s about are coupled as long-term socioeconomic, global factors defining operating models, business processes and increasing pressures on firms in an environment of technology components as services – within and beyond constant, and disruptive, change – the focus of our Big the enterprise. And it demands that companies develop a Shift and annual Shift Index research6. In my view, you disciplined set of control points for an emerging services should look at how these trends are converging from the grid - control points with policies in place that flow up and outside in to appreciate the enormous potential – and down the stack. Unfortunately, getting a clear handle on challenge – ahead of us. the policy layer is often more easily said than done. Policies are often embedded across multiple layers of enterprise Whether your organization will shift to cloud services software, making them difficult to see, let alone is unlikely to remain an open question. The question orchestrate. It takes focus and resources to dig them out now becomes how that shift is likely to happen. Will and make them fully explicit. your approach add complexity to your technology environment – or will it bring elegance and simplicity? The choice is yours. 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 33 33
Hyper-hybrid Cloud Where do you start? When preparing to move ahead, start by articulating the IT investment should start with clear business objectives, business goals, identifying key security, risk and compliance a well-defined business case and outcomes that can be considerations, and investigating potential cloud and measured and evaluated. This is equally important for traditional solutions. Speed to solution through rapid, cloud services. Deliberate considerations were true for low-risk implementation can be a benefit of cloud standalone cloud tests and rapid innovation pilots, and computing: get ready to think big, start small, fail fast and become even more crucial as the scale, scope and scale soon. The path to hyper-hybrid will likely lead to cardinality of cloud services grow. Specific tactics may custom extensions of initial cloud services, increased differ based on your current level of cloud maturity. For interfaces to core back-office systems and data, and the many companies, CRM, sales, HR, payroll and collaboration pursuit of SaaS application capability cloud offerings. are among the first functions to move to a cloud. These are obvious points of entry for organizations that want to From cloud to clouds introduce changes that will feel familiar to many in their Organizations that already have sizable cloud footprints workforce. should evaluate how well these solutions are meeting the original business intentions and business cases. Further Cloud greenfield integrating non-performing cloud services can only Organizations in the early stages of their cloud computing increase technology dependencies and complicate future strategy should first determine if cloud services models are migration strategies. Consider creating shared platforms for well-suited for their business problems and technical identity, access, data correlation and business rules – environments. The following five attributes (derived from separating these crucial policy services from specific the NIST definition7) should be assessed. If all five are cloud-based functions or traditional on-premise integration relevant, cloud is a potential fit. hubs. Consider cloud-based integration platform-as-a- service solutions to complement enterprise integration • Predictable pricing: Subscriber incurs a charge only layers or service buses. These platforms can manage the when consuming resources, based on subscription and interactions between in-house enterprise apps and usage, not on perpetual licensing or allocation associated cloud services. Forward-looking organizations can initiate conversations with early-stage cloud service • Ubiquitous network access: The service is available brokers, helping to drive the emerging market around wherever and whenever the network is available – cloud endpoint orchestration, aggregation, remediation enterprise network for private cloud, Internet for and billing. public cloud • Resource pooling and location independence: Multi-tenant, with shared resources that the subscriber cannot explicitly partition or specify • Self-service: Users can directly access the service, provisioning is on-demand, and services are readied in near-real-time • Elasticity of supply: Ability to scale up or down to meet resource demands, with seemingly limitless upper bounds 34
Hyper-hybrid Cloud Bottom line Today, hyper-hybrid clouds are an advanced form of cloud services in the early stages of adoption, but the approach is rapidly becoming the norm for cloud services architecture. All types of organizations are trending towards hyper-hybrid clouds. Start-ups have a cloud-first mentality, since spending is prioritized towards market-facing products and services, rather than capital-intensive data centers, infrastructures and on-premise licensed software. In fact, these organizations are setting the standard for the hyper-hybrid environment, using it to guide both new operating structures and IT delivery models. Larger enterprises are seeing cloud services extend and enhance their ERP and large legacy system investments. Core in-house systems can form the foundation upon which emerging technologies can be deployed, without sacrificing business compliance and controls. Organizations that can bridge hyper-hybrid clouds with their core systems will be at the forefront to elevate business performance with the next wave of digital innovation. Endnotes 1 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/techtrends2012, Chapter 10. Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, 2 http://www.deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 10. Gartner, Inc. “Case Study: Mohawk Fine Papers Uses a CSB to Ease Adoption of Cloud Computing,” Benoit J. Lheureux, July 19, 2011. 3 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, 4 www.deloitte.com/us/techtrends2012, Chapter 3. Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ 5 techtrends2012, Chapter 10. Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “The 2011 Shift Index: Measuring the forces of long-term change”, http:// 6 www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-UnitedStates/Local%20Assets/Documents/us_tmt_2011shiftindex_111011.pdf Peter Mell and Tim Grance, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, http://www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/upload/cloud-def-v15.pdf (October 7, 2009). 7 2012 Technology Trends – Disruptors 35
Enablers
6 Big Data Goes to Work The competition between big data and new insights to extend the value of long-standing traditional enterprise data is over: they operational reporting and analytics programs. both win Just as businesses start to appreciate information as a “Forecasts such as 200 billion intelligent devices by 2015 strategic asset, they are overwhelmed with big data – from and 275 exabytes per day of data being sent across the growing volumes and increasing complexity to the Internet by 2020 – and the growing desire to leverage proliferation of unstructured data sources and a surge in email, documents, audio and video – are indicators of external data streams. Internal and external, structured and looming challenges.”1 But big data is not about becoming a unstructured. Volume. Variety. Velocity. But where’s the librarian of this content explosion; it is not about fourth V for Value? cataloging, cleansing and finding a home for the entirety of the data deluge. The business focus of Big Data should be The potential of big data is immense. Remove constraints on signal detection and sense-making – determining what on the size, type, source and complexity of useful data, information is valuable, storing what is relevant and and businesses can ask bolder questions. Technology bringing valuable new knowledge to the enterprise. A small limitations that once required sampling or relied on percentage of external unstructured data may drive huge assumptions to simplify high-density data sets have fallen insights. The trick is figuring out where to focus. to the march of technology. Long processing times and dependencies on batch feeds are being replaced by Similarly, the ability to take advantage of big data does not on-demand results and near real-time visibility. Processing require a fully realized analytics capability. It may be becomes focused on flows vs. stocks of data. External and tempting to sit out this new wave until your information unstructured data have moved from indecipherable black house is completely in order, but big data opportunities are boxes to sources rich with insight. Web logs, social media real today. A delayed response may only widen competitive streams, RFID and other sensor data, click-streams and a gaps. A more effective approach may be to consider host of other sources can be used for practical business pursuing big data in parallel with investments in enterprise advantage. This transformation changes the questions that information management, descriptive analytics and can be asked, but it also requires new tools and techniques advanced analytics2. to get to the answers. While big data tools and techniques continue to evolve Technology has risen to the occasion, though solutions rapidly, the biggest impediment to capturing value from big often differ from those found in many traditional data is talent. Technical resources are scarce. Even more relational, structured enterprise information footprints. precious – and rare – are the skills and experience to know NoSQL frameworks, in-memory column-based databases which pieces of the big data puzzle can be applied to and database appliances have advanced to answer the specific crunchy questions that can drive effective action explosion of semi-structured and unstructured data. and measurable results. This challenge calls for business Visualization tools have matured. And traditional business analytics architects who can scope business problems, intelligence and data warehouse tools have added support facilitate the underlying model build-out and for big data inputs to their models. This last piece is turn insight into action. That’s what it means to put big especially important. Big data complements existing data to work. information disciplines, tapping new sources and providing 36
Big Data Goes to Work History repeating itself? Big data is an evolution of long-standing information disciplines. It expands the range of data sources, the amount of data that can be processed and the speed with which answers can be derived. But what separates big data from conventional approaches to information management? What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? Operational reporting, • Many organizations have long-standing informa- • Big data is well-suited to complement existing business intelligence and tion management programs, with the expected information assets – running specialized data warehouses (BI/DW) trappings of data warehouses, business intel- algorithms on massive data sets and feeding ligence suites, reporting platforms and relational the results into traditional BI/DW solutions. database experience. Unfortunately, the tools Instead of “rip and replace,” think “augment and techniques that guided us through transac- and enhance.” ACID4-icity of the traditional tional, structured, relational data are not all well- information techniques is kept for reporting and suited for the deluge of big data – where signal conventional decision support, but it is enriched intelligence is more important than transactional by the scope, speed, availability and scale of big integrity, distributed performance trumps consist- data inputs. ency needs, and unstructured external data combines with internal data at the heart of many • Big data technology is designed specifi- valuable analyses. cally for volume, variety and velocity – with columnar databases, in-memory platforms and • Relational databases and traditional data ware- the ability to distribute complex jobs across houses allow modest compression, typically nodes – internally or in the cloud. Just as most 3:1 or 4:1 ratios. When coupled with pricing data warehouses are ill-equipped to deal with of ~ $20K per terabyte, large volumes of data large volumes of unstructured data, big data lead to high costs – even if the majority of platforms are not preferred for well-structured unstructured data does not require durability, scenarios requiring transactional integrity. Not integrity and consistency3. surprisingly, a new hybrid class of database management system is emerging to bridge structured and unstructured management in one platform. Analytics • Structured, transactional data within the organi- • The fundamental concepts of core data zation has been an all-consuming labor. Analytics disciplines (stewardship, data management, efforts were not intentionally nor deliberately data quality, governance) and the potential of ignoring semi-structured and unstructured data, descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics5 but the magnitude of traditional information are even more relevant in the big data era. challenges were the dominate focus. But, they should be selectively applied for each data source, extended for the unstructured and semi-structured sources, and guided by desired business outcomes. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 37
Big Data Goes to Work Technology implications Big data not only introduces new database and analytics platforms; it also leads to new database management, coding, querying and tuning tools and techniques. New technologies should be deployed, integrated to existing assets and managed. Some of these include: Topic Description Data architecture Many tradeoffs are included in the design of the information architecture to support storage and analysis of big data. Commodity or special-purpose hardware? Relational versus non-relational data stores? Virtualized on-premise servers or external clouds? In-memory or disk-based processing? Store the data in uncompressed format to speed up access, or compressed format to minimize storage costs? Should tables be split by row and distributed across multiple servers (a practice known as sharding) to improve performance? Do column-oriented or row-oriented operations dominate the processing? Enterprises should decide whether to create a hybrid platform – combining existing assets with new solutions and extending legacy architecture – or building and connecting new green-field solutions and supporting architectures. Column-oriented Relational databases are inherently row-based, with a single entry containing the related attributes databases for a logical item. This can be most effective for transactional systems, which are typically dealing with multiple facets of entities such as customers, products or warehouses. But relational databases are not well-suited for tasks such as comparing a single attribute across a large universe of rows. Column-oriented databases store content by grouping similar attributes together. For example, instead of zip code being one field of many in thousands of customer records, there is a record containing virtually all of the zip codes – and other records for each of the other customer attributes. The benefit is rapid, selective querying with significant compression advantages based on the homogeneity of columnar data. In-memory databases As the name suggests, this refers to database platforms using CPU memory for data storage instead of physical disk. By reducing the number of disk input/output (I/O) calls, complex queries can be executed at much greater speeds than conventional databases requiring discrete cycles for data retrieval, aggregation and processing. NoSQL “Not Only SQL” is an alternative to relational database systems designed to accommodate semi- structured and/or inconsistent, sparse data. It is not a replacement for structured data. Rather, NoSQL looks to provide a foundation for various types of content. It does not require fixed table schemas, avoids join operations, and can scale horizontally across nodes (locally or into the cloud). There are many flavors of NoSQL, with both open-source and licensed alternatives, many built to meet the needs of leading social and web platforms. Some examples are Hadoop (Google, Yahoo!), Cassandra (Facebook), Dynamo (Amazon), Project Voldemort (LinkedIn), Riak, CouchDB and MongoDB. Database appliances These are self-contained combinations of hardware and software to extend storage capabilities of relational systems or to provide an engineered system for new big data capabilities such as columnar, in-memory databases. Some examples include: Oracle with Exadata and Exalytics; SAP with BW Accelerator and HANA; IBM with Neteeza; and the EMC Greenplum appliance. MapReduce This technique is for distributing computation on large data sets across a cluster of commodity processing nodes. Processing can be performed in parallel, as the workload is reduced into discrete independent operations, allowing some workloads to be most effectively delivered via a cloud-based infrastructure. 38
Big Data Goes to Work Lessons from the frontlines Booking with big data Boosting marketing IQ Orbitz Worldwide has collected 750 terabytes of A leading Internet marketing organization uses a unstructured data on their consumers’ behavior – detailed combination of big data and traditional analytics to drive information from customer online visits and browsing marketing effectiveness studies. Torrents of clickstream sessions. Using Hadoop, models have been developed data are combined with social media profiles, location data intended to improve search results and tailor the user and web campaign data. MapReduce analysis is used to experience based on everything from location, interest in determine which web sessions were relevant to a given ad family travel versus solo travel, and even the kind of device campaign, with the results fed into a conventional data being used to explore travel options. The result? To date, a warehouse for segmentation and predictive analysis. The 7% increase in interaction rate, 37% growth in stickiness of number of impressions increased and click-through rates sessions and a net 2.6% in booking path engagement6. grew via improved targeting, and the results are fueling algorithms for future advertising placement decisions. Business as usual? Not exactly. A car rental company was trying to stay in touch with customer opinion through the thousands of pieces of feedback it receives daily across their 8,000 locations in the form of web surveys, email commentary, text messages and feedback cards. But the geographic dispersion of their business and the unstructured form of the content made it tough to put to use. Big data changed that. Previously unwieldy data volumes were able to be processed centrally – with consistent rules, metrics and analysis. Insights were uncovered regarding potential service improvements, addressing staffing issues at specific sites during specific times – which led to measurable gains in customer satisfaction levels. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 39
Big Data Goes to Work My take Barry Libenson Senior Vice President and CIO Land O’Lakes Like any other large business, our company has amassed However, taking advantage of big data isn’t primarily a enormous amounts of data over the years – most of which technology issue; it’s more of a mindset issue. Big data has was generated in a fairly structured environment. But today given us the opportunity – and the need – to start thinking we’re gathering new kinds of data from a wider range of in new ways. sources, including in-house customer information, meteorological data, supplier data, census information, That said, we do have an expanding suite of tools for other government sources and even the “digital exhaust” business intelligence and analytics. One of my top from social media. It’s virtually all focused on two business priorities is to standardize around a common toolset that imperatives: growth and performance. can meet our dashboard and reporting needs – and also handle the growing amount of unstructured data flowing Demands for better information and more insights come through our enterprise. from the business: finance wants profitability reports; the dairy business asks for improved forecasts; the seed How do you quantify the value of being able to do this? It’s division needs better information for the salesforce. You easy when you’re focused on the right outcomes. For get the picture. We’re even analyzing satellite imaging example, by examining seasonal buying patterns among data about individual farms and fields, and combining it our largest customers, we were able to take three days out with geological data to help farmers make seed choices of butter inventory. It required a massive amount of that can improve their yield. But the picture isn’t entirely analysis – and it was worth every penny. In some cases, rosy. Bottlenecks are virtually everywhere. In some cases, we’re even monetizing our analytics capabilities by selling a business leader may not realize what kind of questions information to large customers and distributors. he could be asking. Technology hurdles are real, especially in a diverse landscape like ours. And the Bottom line? If we can use big data to help a farmer go talent needed to deliver big data and advanced analytics from 160 to 180 bushels per acre, we’re doing something is in short supply. From technology platform experience really valuable. When our customers can deliver more yield, to statisticians to business analysts, it’s difficult to hire we can all win. and develop our people fast enough to stay ahead of our information needs. 40 40
Big Data Goes to Work Where do you start? • Co-existence. Avoid religious arguments between Big data is not an all-or-nothing affair. Companies today conventional analytics teams and big data advocates. can consider a multitude of new data sources with Most leading organizations can use both. Some volumes, varieties and complexities that would have been education may be needed to establish an understanding unfathomable just a few years ago. It is easy to get lost in of the most effective applications for each domain. Just the possibilities and become overwhelmed by the enormity like the debate between OLTP and OLAP, the answer will of the implications. To stay focused, find practical entry likely be mutually beneficial co-existence, at least until points to big data that are digestible in scope, and that can hybrid offerings make the argument moot. enrich your current analytics journey. Along the way, keep the following in mind. • Avoid vendor churn. The vendor landscape around big data players is huge, with the potential for consolidation • Crunchy questions. Start with highly specific questions possibly years away. Credible, compelling offerings may and total clarity around the business problems driving exist at each tier – from the biggest players to start-ups. the journey. Those – and only those – data sources There is no specific answer, though there are important deemed important and linked to the business objective differences in technology, approach and delivery models. should receive care and feeding. That way, big data can Balance cost, needs, the ability to leverage existing go to work generating the desired results that inspire vendor relationships and contracts and the appetite for broader potential initiatives to pursue. experimenting with open-source or cloud-based solutions. The big data world is rapidly changing. • A 15-degree view of the customer. Attempting to Prioritize rapid experimentation over drawn-out vendor inventory, cleanse and manage the breadth and scale of comparisons, especially when getting started. Wait to big data is impossible. The answer is not a single, make more strategic, binding vendor decisions until the unified, canonical data store across virtually all sources goals and significance of big data are understood. and types. Instead of trying to take broad view, determine the two or three discrete items that can shed light on the targeted crunchy questions. Fiercely protect scope around these areas, leaving the other 345 degrees of visibility untouched until needed. • Nimble governance. One of the challenges of big data is the need to be agile. The structure of incoming data is often not known in advance, or it can change over time. New data sources may be added. Different business outcomes require data at different levels of accuracy, granularity and availability. Tradeoffs must be made in cleansing and de-duplicating data, models and analyses – quality versus responsiveness. Standards and stewardship can play a role, as can transparency of the source and visibility into confidence levels about data accuracy and quality. The artistry comes in fine-tuning the rigor of governance with the need for agility. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 41
Big Data Goes to Work Bottom line The explosion of big data was likely inevitable. What once was the stuff of science fiction has become an everyday occurrence. Exabytes. Zettabytes. Yottabytes. Sensors, asset intelligence, mobile devices and constant streams of unstructured communications have created digital exhaust that can capture who we are and how we live, work and play. Powerful new insights can be gleaned, with the most value realized by those who learn to detect signals from the noise, derive meaning from the signals and turn meaning into action. Focus on specific crunchy questions tied to well-defined business problems and attributable results. Organizations that put big data to work may pursue a huge competitive edge in 2012 – and beyond. Endnotes 1 Gartner, Inc. “Information Infrastructure and Big Data Projects Key Initiative Overview (Research Note G00214426 )”, Ted Friedman, July 22, 2011. 2 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, http://www. deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 6. 3 Doug Henschen, Big Data: Introduction, http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=233926& (October 1, 2011). 4 Theo Härder and Andreas Reuter, Principles of Transaction-Oriented Database Recovery, http://cc.usst.edu.cn/Download/5b953407-339b-46c3- 9909-66dfa9c3d52a.pdf (December 1983). 5 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, http://www. deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 6. 6 Schaal, D., Orbitz CEO plans to revolutionize hotel sort — holy Hadoop. Retrieved January 15, 2012, from http://www.tnooz.com/2011/11/18/ news/orbitz-ceo-plans-to-revolutionize-hotel-sort-holy-hadoop/ 42
7 Geospatial Visualization Where matters “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are The human brain is naturally wired to process visual images more related than distant things.” Its power comes from by recognizing patterns, inferring relationships and exploring both quantitative and qualitative spatial discerning features. Analytic visualization connects these relationships within large data sets of structured and perceptual and cognitive strengths with modern statistical unstructured content represented geographically. computing capabilities and can enable decision makers to Correlations based on these relationships normally provide pull significant results quickly out of tremendous volumes a useful way of organizing large volumes of data and often of complex and diverse data. In turn, connecting this data reveal fresh insights that might otherwise remain hidden to geography is key to building compelling visualizations among rows and columns of data without the interpretive from diverse information sources. combination of analytical integration and our visual cortex. Time and place underpin everything that happens in our In the past, only a handful of Geographic Information lives and everything we know and learn about the world. System (GIS) analysts in specific industries (oil and gas, Today’s technology allows us to collect information about governmental agencies, transportation and logistics firms) nearly all of these events, fueling an explosion of real-time, invested in using location as an organizing principle for location-aware data. Some of the many sources feeding advanced analysis. New tools and access to data are now this torrent of geospatial information include: allowing the power of location to be unleashed across many more business areas and to a much broader base of users. The benefits can be many. Geospatial visualization • New structured data from mobile devices (e.g., phones, can enable the human mind to process and detect patterns GPS-assisted assets, tablets) hidden among huge volumes of information. Spatial analysis provides quantitative evaluation of subtle • New streams of georeferenced sensor data from traffic relationships. Time-based animation and other forms of sensors and stream gauges to RFID readers interactive visualization reveal long-term trends and subtle events. Geospatial analytics combined with visualization can • Geo-tagging and geolocation of existing enterprise drive new ways of doing business: once a model has been structured data (e.g., using address information to add developed and deployed to describe ongoing business longitude/latitude attributes) performance, real-time visualization can help drive better decisions on a daily or even hourly basis. • New streams of location-aware unstructured data (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr) Perhaps most importantly, geospatial visualization’s familiarity and intuitiveness make it one of the most Geospatial visualization marries the broad insights available accessible manifestations of analytics. In this age of through visualization with specific types of analysis that information automation and competitive positioning based can be performed on location-related data. Tobler’s first on deriving insight from big data, the potential of law of geography has never seemed more relevant: visualization is essential. Geospatial visualization provides both a compelling and widely usable form of these insights. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 43
Geospatial Visualization History repeating itself? For decades, the oil and gas industry has used geospatial visualization in resource exploration and extraction analysis. Geospatial capabilities can allow the healthcare industry to track infectious disease outbreaks and evaluate the equitability of health care delivery. The federal government has used these tools to analyze population shifts, resource utilization, impacts of regulatory changes and much more. So what’s different in 2012? What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? Early spatial modeling tools • Tools required proprietary knowledge and • More and more data now includes geographic advanced training to import data, build explicitly components, especially from mobile, social and geographic data models and create cartographi- sensor-based sources. It’s hard to underestimate cally valid visualizations. Specialized resources the impact of ubiquitous GPS readings. and software were required, limiting who could participate in discovery and analysis and how • Techniques are now available to geocode or the results could be embedded into decision- geo-tag non-location-aware data, allowing making processes. visibility and analysis into historical geospatial performance, coupled with new data to under- • Location-aware data was scarce and expensive, stand trends and patterns. limiting the potential insights available from spatial modeling. • Spatial tools and analytics have become much easier to use, apply and communicate. Today’s • Typically models were based on laboriously platforms can allow complex data to be trans- processed historical batch data disconnected formed into intuitive, interactive, descriptive from transactional systems, providing few views ready for exploration, discovery and opportunities for performance management and decision-making. real-time operational reporting. A printed map was often out of date as soon as available. • Smart-phones, tablets and other mobile devices have made geospatial visualizations readily available almost everywhere that people work and make decisions. Mash-ups • Google, IBM, IDV Solutions and a myriad of • Advanced tools can provide the ability to move open source developers had provided tools for beyond static, single-dimensional “push pin” analyzing and disseminating geolocated informa- views – allowing correlation of several sources of tion, but they didn’t go far enough to provide high cardinality data, with visibility of trends and actual analysis data to enable users to make changing relationships over time. decisions that aren’t somewhat binary in nature; they lacked additional context and consideration attributes needed to be effective. 44
Geospatial Visualization Technology implications Effective geospatial analysis and visualization requires tools and computational power for handling massive data volumes, rendering complex visuals and disseminating contextual geographic maps widely through the Web. The most advanced visualization and analytics tools are useless without good data – tested, correct and current. Reliable, scalable enterprise information management techniques and core informatics disciplines are critical. Topic Description GPU-based processing Systems based on graphic processing units (GPU) are improved for techniques at the heart of geospatial modeling: RASTER algebra across points, lines, polygons; processing of high resolution imagery collected from satellites and airplanes; executing change detection of individual pixels (determining if a value at one location/time differs from a separate image in different point/time). Organizations are likely to need more computing power. GPU-based systems can perform geospatial modeling calculations over 100 times faster than general purpose CPUs1. Master data management Relationships depend on identity, and linking distinct entities across enterprise systems and external feeds continues to be a critical challenge. Without correlation of master data, subtle associations could be missed or wrong decisions could be made based on bad data. Spatial testing can actually be a valuable addition. Data quality Visualizations are only as good as the source data. Incomplete or incorrect location information compromises geospatial analyses. When external feeds from social media or other sources are incorporated, even organizations with broad data stewardship programs will have sources with dubious or unknown quality. Completely cleansing potential inputs is not a viable option. Instead, organizations should tag and communicate questionable sources, making end users aware of possible issues and giving them the option to identify and discount unreliable data. Big data2 Geospatial visualization can allow organizations to tap into location-aware unstructured external data sources, giving them further tools for analyzing, storing and integrating big data into conventional business intelligence and warehousing solutions. Cloud3 Cloud-based storage and processing capabilities can provide organizations with a cost-effective way to build, scale and project geospatial visualization capabilities to their users. Augmented reality (AR) Geographic Information System (GIS) is providing views in three dimensions by taking advantage of smartphone cameras and on-board processing to layer visualizations on top of real-world landscapes. Recent advances in indoor location-based services could unlock new uses for enterprises ranging from retail stores to warehouses to front-office headquarters. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 45
Geospatial Visualization Lessons from the frontlines Historically, the company had targeted doctors with the Uncle Sam leads the charge highest pedigree documented through their publication The U.S. Congress has passed legislation to provide citizens record, speaking appearances and tenure. Cluster analysis access to data and documents regarding its policies and within regions was performed to identify those with the operations. This includes a wealth of geospatial data – most social and physical connections. They were surprised from census reports to national maps to weather history. to learn that the influential doctors identified by geospatial The U.S. Department of Commerce released visualization were not the “old guard” they had previously BroadbandMap.gov that aggregates 25 million data points targeted. By balancing go-to-market efforts between the of official and crowd-sourced data to show broadband established opinion leaders and the newly identified availability and adoption across the nation. This influencers, the company was able to boost revenues by information can be combined with population data, double digit percentages without a significant increase in congressional budget allocation data, carrier sales or marketing spending. advertisements around coverage/speeds and more to provide new insights to legislators, activists, customers Road rage and customer satisfaction levels and enterprises4. A hardware company saw drops in customer satisfaction levels in several key regions, so they used geospatial Prescription for connectedness visualization to unearth the source of the problem. They A leading pharmaceutical company’s new product launch mapped customer sentiment against service center was not meeting sales projections. To help pinpoint the locations, traffic patterns and competitor presence. The problem, the company used geospatial visualization to issue was quickly apparent. To save costs, the company understand the prescription habits, relationships and had moved their customer service facilities away from influence of doctors. The size of each doctor on the map downtown areas, which had caused a huge jump in reflected the number of drugs he or she prescribed. Links commuting time for customers who relied on center-based between doctors were drawn to designate affiliations – support. These customers were the source of negative common patients, shared medical organization feedback. To address their concerns, the company membership or other relationships such as social clubs and launched an education program on how to use their virtual medical school. Finally, their physical location was mapped support channels, initiated on-location services for a to reflect proximity, typically indicating co-practitioners in a handful of large accounts and simply acknowledged the hospital or clinic. issue with customers. As a result, the company was able to win back many of their disgruntled customers. 46
Geospatial Visualization My take Mike Liebhold Senior Researcher, Distinguished Fellow Institute for the Future It’s easy to get excited about the growing stream of new These kinds of opportunities for innovation are already in developments that are bringing geospatial technology to play. Location sensors in smartphones, for example, can life. From emerging standards in geodata management, to trigger a host of communications, especially when it is advances in asset intelligence, to an explosion of potential integrated with personal profiles. The smartphone can applications, the foundation for a geospatial future is being deliver an intelligent presentation of information based on built today. At the center of that future lies the geospatial identity, agenda, itinerary, activities, roles and other web – an integrated platform of GIS information, relevant filters. Yet phones and tablets are but primitive geocoded web data and sensor data. This holds the strong forms of viewing technologies, which will likely give way to likelihood (and risk) of dramatic disruptions for markets and headsets, glasses, lenses and other display systems that business models – in entertainment, transportation, public operate fully synchronized with the physical world. That’s health, telecommunications, manufacturing, defense and what augmented reality is about, with companies like more. Geospatial capabilities are certain to upend “business Layar, Junaio and Aurasma already breaking new ground in as usual” on almost every front you can imagine. enhancing real-world objects with digital information. These capabilities rely on a world in which pieces of data For businesses wanting to capitalize on the disruptive are attached to physical places. Accessed through devices potential of geospatial visualization, one path to ranging from smartphones and tablets to specialized sustainable advantage lies in how locational data is glasses and even contact lenses, data is made instantly captured, analyzed and stored. This is where the concept available to those needing the information, at the moment of “liquid data” comes into play – an approach to data it’s needed. A maintenance technician examining an management that allows information to flow wherever aircraft engine with specialized glasses can see three- and whenever it’s needed. dimensional schematics showing the parts inside. As an epidemiologist drives through a neighborhood, her To some, geospatial visualization and the geospatial web smartphone can deliver demographic profiles of the may sound like futuristic fantasy. But for many leaders in residents living there. Or, when a tractor salesman visits a the industry, the future is already here. The blending of farmer, his tablet can automatically download maintenance augmented reality with analytics – enabled by a shift records for his equipment. toward liquid data – is driving us inexorably toward breakthroughs in visualization that would have been science fiction just a few years ago. The Internet we know and love is converging with the Internet of things to create a brave new world of people, places and things being annotated with ever-more-relevant data. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 47
Geospatial Visualization Where do you start? • Know your baseline. Understand your current state Geospatial visualization should be built on a foundation relative to the state of the art. Many organizations have of solid data management disciplines. Once master data no idea what data sources and analysis they currently management, stewardship and integration capabilities are have available, much less the different tools and in place, there are a few natural places to start. infrastructure under license across departments and individuals. Identify the organization’s current state, and • Answer the “so what.” Can geospatial visualization compare it with the capabilities needed for modeling, provide answers to the organization’s key questions? rendering and interacting. If there’s a gap, consider Can it help identify where money can be saved, experimenting with subscription-based models which customer satisfaction levels may be improved or where have a low entry cost. competitive advantage could be found? Would visual insights aid communicating decisions to stakeholders? • Find new data, prep old data. Take a look at the new Like most efforts, the more granular the business data sources, such as social analytics and geospatial objectives and specific the metrics, the more powerful analytics, and consider how they could augment your the argument will be. The allure of flashy new tools or traditional models. This new information could present broad-stroke generalities of abstract value will not cut it. new questions – and additional insights. To get there, historical systems will probably need prep work – • Fish where there are fish. Each business has pain cleansing addresses, geocoding data or adding GPS points; use those to guide early geospatial scoping. sensors to assets. Don’t go overboard; limit efforts to Logistics and supply chains across distributed those data which are relevant to the immediate organizations are ripe with opportunities. Ask questions questions and goals at hand. that might lead to new insights. Where are your customers? Where are customers relative to your work • Democratize. Visualization can place the power of force warehouses or service centers? Where have your analytics in more hands across the organization – customers been? Where are your next customers likely Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards in the boardroom, to be? Where are your suppliers? Where are your browsers in customer service centers, sales projections competitors? If these answers are not easily available, by region on field management’s mobile devices. Moving geospatial visualization may provide them. analytics to the front line can help shift insight to action. Seek experience in supporting broad decision making effectively. Not all drivers need to be automotive engineers, but someone should be making sure the car is safe to take on the road. 48
Geospatial Visualization Bottom line Location is not only ubiquitous, but a meaningful and interpretable attribute. Creating visual, interactive, location-based models of complex data can multiply the power of data analytics. Organizations that combine the explosion of location-aware data with the power of geospatial analysis and wide accessibility of geospatial visualization can provide game-changing support for business decision making at levels never considered before. Geocoded data and fancy presentation layers are not enough, however, to make good on this potential. Underneath seemingly simple renderings lay complex analytical models and sound data management disciplines. Visualization, like many business efforts, should be supported by concrete objectives and well-defined questions that can benefit from geospatial analysis, and tested by those with specific experience in both analyzing and communicating location-aware data. Leading organizations that follow these principles to provide geospatial visualization tools to employees, business partners and even customers that allow them to explore, manipulate and act on the insights they gain, will be putting Tobler’s law to use for competitive advantage. Endnotes 1 “NVIDIA Collaborates With Weta to Accelerate Visual Effects for Avatar,” on the NVIDIA web site, http://www.nvidia.com/object/wetadigital_ avatar.html, accessed January 25, 2012. 2 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ techtrends2012, Chapter 6. 3 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, http://www. deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 10; and Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www. deloitte.com/us/techtrends2012, Chapter 5. 4 Howard, A. Broadband availability and speed visualized in new government map. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from http://radar.oreilly. com/2011/02/national-broadband-map.html 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 49
8 Digital Identities Managing identity in an increasingly Organizations see the power in providing this identity – digital world and in owning the resulting relationship. In this pursuit, The digital expression of identity grows increasingly complex the use of federated identities within an enterprise is every day. Not so long ago, an employee’s entire digital growing. In this scenario, a logical, single, overall digital presence belonged almost exclusively to the employer, a identity with a unified view is brokered across several practice that culminated in the mainframe ID. As enterprise different systems and security profiles. This is especially technology expanded to include new tools and platforms, useful in larger companies with distinct trust zones the number of digital identities grew. Today, many workers separated by business unit, geography or user role. Today, must manage a dozen or more user names and passwords industry groups and government bodies are pushing across different roles on different systems to do their jobs. broader efforts on federation across enterprises, efforts that may become the backbone of a more substantial With the rise of the internet, corporate systems expanded digital identity. beyond traditional firewalls, with users adding new “foreign” personas to the mix. Outside their workplaces, Does this trend lead to a universal digital identity, users established personal credentials on banking portals, seamlessly crossing between professional, private and consumer products sites, loyalty and reward programs, social lives? Does it lead to a world in which appropriate e-commerce retailers, local government services, home context is managed across the range of credentials that insurance policies and even remote access to cable TV. an individual carries and the personas they inhabit? Time Recently, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and will tell. It’s easy to envision a true mobile wallet LinkedIn, as well as other services like Foursquare, Spotify delivering a single, unique and trusted identity that is and Netflix have only amplified identity sprawl. Along the accepted across all interactions. One that understands and way, personal digital identities – everything from employee, manages the context of the transaction. One that serves customer, critic, citizen, spouse, parent, club member, up different layers of a person’s identity with different home owner, teammate, hobbyist or all of the above – controls and assurances, depending on who you are, have continued to blend into the digital enterprise. where you are and what you have been doing. For security, privacy and regulatory control, digital identities To illustrate the point, consider that a stranger asking you must be unique, verifiable and non-repudiable. “Unique” for your social security number would elicit a different means that the identity refers to a single entity and cannot response than the one you would give a loan officer be duplicated or re-used. “Verifiable” requires the ability to during a mortgage application. Ideally, a digital identity authenticate that users are who they say they are. And would follow you through life, across employers, “non-repudiable” provides confirmation of the integrity of geographies and life changes. While this may at first seem the identity and any subsequent communications. To meet like a “flying car” future, the trend is clear. Enterprises the demands of enterprise efficiency, compliance and today have a mandate to more seamlessly manage and consumer expectations, identities must also be unified or enable digital identities for the personas of their federated, appropriately separable or portable with the employees, customers and partners, within and across credential holder, and layered to expose profile detail only enterprises; all of which lays the groundwork for shaping at the level required by the use case. and creating a truly universal digital identity. 50
Digital Identities History repeating itself? Digital identity management has been around for decades – from its humble beginnings as mainframe logins, to enterprise credentials, and eventually to the plethora of user names and passwords swirling around our lives in 2012. How is this latest thrust different? What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? User ID and password • UID/PW controls have been frequently limited to • Biometric tokens replace or supplement control (UID/PW) a single system, creating identity sprawl and a risk passwords to increase strength and reduce of weak password management. authentication risk. • Proliferation of credentials has created duplication • Certificate services support role-based access and errors in authentication, authorization, access control across multiple applications. control and accounting for a single user (identity) across multiple use cases (systems and functions • Default Identity Providers (IdPs) such as Facebook, within a system). Google and LinkedIn emerge for multiple cross- enterprise services providers (SPs), especially in the social sphere. • Single sign-on (SSO) is being pursued not only across employer organizations, but also for banking and retail transactions, social networks and the local library. Everyone may eventually have one digital identity that allows contextual data based on the transaction requirements. Single sign-on (SSO) • SSO scope is commonly limited to enterprise • Near field communication (NFC) and emerging boundaries. body area networks (such as 802.15 standards) propose less intrusive approaches to two-factor • With SSO, compromised identities pose a larger authentication – from smartphones today to risk of exposing all related/connected systems. wearable, embedded chips tomorrow. • Many SSO implementations use two-factor • Industry groups and governmental bodies are authentication to bolster security – typically creating digital identities that can bridge some involving a physical credential (something you subsections of enterprise, social and personal have – such as a common access card (CAC) or a credentials. Ubiquitous support will require key fob) with a logical cert (something you know convergence to a single trusted body – which is – such as a password). This can be cumbersome not likely in the near term. to the end-user, leading to dissatisfaction or, worse, circumvention of security procedures. • More widely expanding standards like OpenID and SAML, as well as initiatives like Shibboleth • Even with advances in tools, single sign-on is and NSTIC, aid interoperability between still a complex endeavor, largely due to legacy organizational and system boundaries. systems requiring case-specific extraction of entitlements. Identity, credential and • Many organizations have basic identity, access • A few point solutions for digital identities exist access management and credential management systems. Isolation for consumer and trade networks, but only within (ICAM) across business units and geographies is still well-defined sub-communities or consortia. These prevalent – leaving end users to manage the are the stepping stones for full-on, interoperable various personas across their day-to-day systems digital identities, and a pre-cursor to a true mobile and services. wallet where personas and specific attributes can be selectively exposed based on the context of the • Visibility into external digital personas has not relationship and transaction. been a priority; nor has management of the various relationships. As big data1 and social • Some public services are evolving as de facto business2 grow in stature, scope and scale, enter- standards for pieces of the digital identity puzzle prises will need the ability to correlate internal – today, Facebook Connect, Google Accounts and and external identity use cases. Twitter’s API are all beginning to serve this role. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 51
Digital Identities Technology implications Executives of enterprises large and small are faced with the same challenges of managing and securing identities. The swift proliferation of digital identities, increased regulatory requirements and increased corporate fraud and security risks are creating the need to better manage these digital IDs. This may require several technology investments – that move from leading practices to necessities – in the world of digital identities. Topic Description Identity, credential and Security requirements continue to be critically important, building from traditional enterprise access management identity, access and credential management solutions (ICAM). These form the foundation of risk (ICAM) management, and are at the heart of digital identities. Leading organizations are integrating logical and physical security – another step towards one unifying view of authorization and entitlements for an individual. Security and OpenID, SAML 2.0, ID-FF, WS * (WS star) and others have emerged to aid the exchange of authentication standards authentication and authorization across security domains, whether they are systems, divisions or organizations. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) packages and emerging cloud offerings are natively supporting these standards, easing some of the technical challenges around interoperability. The U.S. federal government, led by the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), is pushing for standards to create a shared ID credential ecosystem, including partnerships with private industries to sell authentication products that could be shared across enterprises3. More rigorous compliance For almost all industries, there are increasing regulation requirements around managing digital requirements identities. For banking, the FFIEC has been creating more guidelines around how banks should secure transactions and even dictating the frequency of re-attesting to user access rights. Likewise, energy, retail, healthcare and governments are doing the same. Overall, companies are trying to improve their security stance in reaction to growing regulation. 52
Digital Identities Lessons from the frontlines Share of wallet Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail A global bank grew through acquisition, adding investment Switzerland is leading the charge into digital identities, management, wealth management, corporate services and launching a country-wide electronic proof of identity various retail and commercial arms to the original project called SuisseID4. Launched in partnership with Swiss depository business. Each line of business retained its siloed Post, citizens and businesses can sign up for a unique, systems, including separate, disconnected identity verifiable, non-reputable digital identity. Any post office management systems. In this environment, everyone lost. branch can be visited to verify personal information. Customers were frustrated since each type of relationship Customers can choose either a card-based or USB (e.g., depository accounts, investment accounts) with the stick-based digital identity that can be used for electronic bank required its own unique user name and password. signatures, commerce, accessing civic services and more. The business itself had no way to understand total More than 10,000 SuisseIDs have been issued, and more customer value, leaving it blind to up-selling and cross- than 450 municipalities, churches, schools and businesses selling opportunities. A global federated identity system have embraced the standard. Also, because the service is was the answer. Customers were given a single digital SAML 2.0 compliant, it can be used to authenticate into identity providing access to every type of relationship they leading independent software vendors (ISVs) like Oracle, had with the bank. With new visibility into customer SAP, Salesforce.com and Google Apps Engine5. Other profitability, the bank was able to grow share of wallet. countries have signaled that they will follow suit, notably But, along the way, the bank decided not to allow outside India, which is actively pursuing its goal to create the parties to make use of the customer identification – not world’s largest biometrically identified identities database even trusted business partners. For this bank, the potential representing its 1.2 billion citizens6. revenue stream that may have come from identity servicing wasn’t worth the added risk exposure from transactions it did not control. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 53
Digital Identities My take Harry D. Raduege, Jr. Chairman Deloitte Center for Cyber Innovation Leaders today, both in government and industry, have a Share vulnerability. Leaders should manage cyber growing recognition that managing security is about security risk by broadening the scope of the security and managing risk. Every month, their digital-age organizations identity management mission across the organization and face billions of attacks from infiltrators seeking to moving it permanently from back rooms into board rooms manipulate, steal, deface or shut-down networks. The and situation rooms. “Just as security is built on trust, trust threats are increasing exponentially, as are the is built on sharing vulnerability,” explains John Hagel III, vulnerabilities. Every organization should assume that its co-chairman, Deloitte Center for the Edge. That means network has or will be compromised. cyber security isn’t limited to technical and policy considerations, but also includes positive identity The rapid evolution and adoption of new technologies, recognition, patch maintenance and building a cyber including the emergence of cloud computing and mobility mindset throughout the workforce. Awareness, education poses advanced security risks. As the number of digital and training will become more important than ever, as identities that must be managed continues to grow, organizations work to keep employees and service security awareness, education and training will become providers equipped with the knowledge, policies and increasingly critical for achieving an effective cybersecurity culture to operate responsibly in a cyber environment. posture. The top three priorities I see for organizations that want to manage and secure digital identities in the coming Address expectations. In days gone by, employees went year are: to work and logged onto a network at a computer terminal. Today, that terminal is in their pockets and purses. These mobile users are looking for ease of access and Trust – but dynamically monitor. With pervasive cyber speed of use – and are assuming security and privacy. This threats targeting networks and systems, cybersecurity environment requires a different security approach. As should not be limited to building static defenses. organizations integrate new technologies and IT systems Organizations should also add strength through dynamic expand into the cloud, cybersecurity must adapt to address monitoring and situational awareness. This requires a the expectations of users – recognizing that, empowered focus on forensics (analyzing an attack after it happens) with these technical evolutions, individuals will deliver both and predictive analytics (using insights to take action in mission and business objectives. reducing future risk). A goal in 2012 should be to establish policies and procedures to achieve digital identification of everyone entering and exiting your networks. 54 54
Digital Identities Where do you start? • Know your ambition. What is the desired scope for Digital identities should be an integral part of an your digital identity effort? Should it extend across a organization’s broader cyber intelligence pursuit, with geography? Across business units? To business partners? identity, access and credential management forming the To other industry players or groups? To the government? core of cyber protection7. Moving beyond isolated, To social or consumer platforms? Know your identity self-contained identity silos to cross-enterprise services can roadmap, balancing the potential benefits of greater open many doors – both to better security and control visibility and information sharing with risk and management, and as an enabler of innovation in cloud, technical complexity. mobile, social and analytics. Without a unique, verifiable, non-repudiable identity, these emerging technologies may • Create boundaries around federation. If your digital have difficulty integrating with enterprise systems and may identity roadmap extends beyond your organization, lack context even if they do. clear expectations, service levels and warrants must be put in place. Build trust with your most crucial partners. • Take inventory of identities. Start taking stock of Spend time on legal contracts and agreements. Establish personas and identities. Determine where digital clear liability and responsibility. identities live, what user groups they map to, what they have access to and what job functions and processes • Execute. After taking the steps outlined above, it’s all they correspond to. Work to understand which external about executing the roadmap. Organizations have personas users are interacting with for their professional benefited from launching cross-functional teams led by lives, and if they’re willing to share those in their the business and joined by technology, vendors, outside personal lives as well. Note the places where users experts and business partners. Making the digital identity depend on multiple IDs in their day-to-day activities. journey an explicit priority can improve its chances of Identify new services or process improvements that delivering the expected value. would be made possible if silos were removed. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 55
Digital Identities Bottom line The number of credentials that define an individual has grown exponentially in recent years, and the majority has some form of digital footprint. This is especially true within large enterprises, where digital footprints have spiked due to the growth in personal or consumer-facing identities. As a result, there are an overwhelming number of personas, attributes and relationships that could potentially be managed under a single digital identity. In light of the tenets of outside-in architecture, and the onset of enterprise- dependent cloud, mobile and social forces, businesses have ample motivation to understand and capitalize on these external personas and attributes, as well as link to their corporate credentials. In the end, whoever understands employee, customer and prospect identity data will likely control the currency upon which postdigital innovation is traded – and on which new business models are likely to be defined. Endnotes 1 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ techtrends2012, Chapter 6. Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2012), “Tech Trends 2012: Elevate IT for digital business”, www.deloitte.com/us/ 2 techtrends2012, Chapter 1. Rob Garver, Another Stab at Federated Identity, http://www.americanbanker.com/magazine/121_5/another-stab-at-federated-identity-1036017-1. 3 html (May 1, 2011). “Swiss Post to begin nationwide rollout of SuisseID in May,” Swiss Post press release, February 11, 2010, on the Swiss Post web site, http://www. 4 post.ch/en/post-startseite/post-konzern/post-medien/post-medienmitteilungen/post-mm10-suisse-id.htm, accessed January 13, 2012. “Swiss e-business fast-tracked by Post SuisseID,” Swiss Post press release, May 19, 2011, on the Swiss Post web site, http://www.swisspost.ch/ 5 post-startseite/post-konzern/post-medien/post-archive/2011/post-mm11-digitale-identitaet/post-medienmitteilungen.htm, accessed January 13, 2012. Lydia Polgreen, Digital I.D. program benefits the poor, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/sunday/2011-09/18/content_13727071.htm (September18, 6 2011). Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, http://www. 7 deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 3. 56
9 Measured Innovation Innovation is shifting from “eureka” This “measured” approach recognizes that there are several to an institutional discipline different kinds of innovation. Sustaining innovations, for Innovation has long been accepted as an important driver example, are advances in an existing business model that of modern economic development. From economist improve operations and processes, drive efficiency gains, Joseph Schumpeter’s work in the 1940’s1 to Clayton add new products and features (without compromising Christensen’s more recent research2 to conventional pricing) and contribute incremental value. Sustaining wisdom about technology’s meteoric impact on our daily innovations might be pursued to improve an incumbent’s lives. Corporations have taken note – recognizing that position – or used by new market entrants to steal share. effective innovation can create new market value, drive They often capitalize on known deficiencies in current efficiencies, extend the lifecycle of products and services, offerings – the “known known” opportunities for and help launch new business models. Emerging improvement. In addition, sustaining innovations can also technology is a continuing source of potential for apply to areas of predictable future advances, where innovation in business, and the CIO is the executive to expectations are clear around technology improvements, or deliver on that opportunity. Sounds great. But how? other process, organization or marketplace breakthroughs. These are the “known unknowns.” Either way, sustaining Therein lies the challenge. For some companies, innovation innovations often seek to break through trade-offs in the is seen as a mysterious, almost serendipitous process, a productivity frontier. They focus on the value delivered at a distraction from their core business. For the more given price compared to competitors, versus the adventurous, innovation involves feeding investments in dimensions of performance that a customer desires3. creative minds with free license to explore concepts and follow their muse. Still others tend to pursue innovation Disruptive innovations are fundamentally different. They that’s highly engineered. They create programs to solicit require creating a completely new business model. ideas from across the organization, explore those ideas Disruptive innovations can be used to enter new markets or that seem to have potential, expose promising candidates to defend an existing business. They can even be launched to the market, fail fast and scale soon. Then they iterate, as preemptive strikes against emerging players posing rinse and repeat – focusing more resources on what works, viable threats. These are “unknown knowns” and and less on what doesn’t. “unknown unknowns,” respectively. Leading organizations invest in a portfolio of innovation spanning these multiple Any of these approaches, as absolutes, are flawed. dimensions – sustaining versus disruptive, across existing Innovation is not a single monolithic thing. That’s why an and new markets. alternative model of “measured innovation” is gaining traction today. Measured innovation has two precepts: The CIO is in a rare position to guide innovation First, innovation deserves a deliberate, disciplined investments given technology’s prominence across the approach. And second, the results of innovation need to business. And, because emerging technologies are be measurable, repeatable and linked to both business important components of many innovative ideas, CIOs are strategy and operational metrics. likely to be in a better spot to help focus and drive resulting initiatives. CIOs can lead this digitally fueled ascent, realizing their potential as business revolutionaries and not just technology visionaries or “mind the store” stewards. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 57
Measured Innovation History repeating itself? The role of CIO is constantly scrutinized. Why? Because the IT department’s reach across business functions is substantial and costly enough to attract interest. What’s more, high-profile emerging technologies such as cloud, mobile and analytics add a level of sizzle that is sure to draw attention. Finally, the consumerization of technology has raised comfort levels and lowered barriers of understanding across the enterprise. This combination of factors explains why CIOs are constantly in the spotlight, and it also underscores why CIOs should lead the drive for measured innovation within their organizations. What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? Idea hunts / innovation • Open-ended, company-wide requests to • Measured innovation calls for a focused approach quests / innovation generate breakthrough ideas tend to produce to soliciting ideas. Instead of an unbounded tournaments overwhelming amounts of early stage, low- search, leadership decides on clear strategic goals. quality ideas. Barriers to participate are intention- What are the expectations around investments ally low, which results in limited check-points t and results in sustaining and disruptive innova- o vet ideas or confirm the level of commitment tion across existing and new businesses? Simple of supporters. guard-rails can dramatically improve the results of • Companies typically subsidize the exploration crowd-sourcing initiatives. of unfounded ideas because submissions are • CIOs need to play an active role in shaping ideas, completed “on the clock.” illuminating the state-of-the-possible, and in • Review processes and stage-gates can fall victim guiding activities towards either sustaining or to organizational biases and corporate politics, disruptive innovation. leading to potential conflicts of interest when • Organizations are recognizing that sustaining and disruptive ideas challenge the status quo. disruptive innovations require fundamentally different approaches related to autonomy, metrics and time horizon. CIO operational excellence / • CIOs who focused solely on the business of IT • Establishing an IT service catalog for most facets of built-to-run focus4 rarely move past delivering incremental sustaining the CIO’s organization remains a leading practice. innovations. As the business becomes accus- Success stories have reinforced its importance, and tomed to the lights staying on, the behind-the- tools to manage the process make it attainable. scenes toiling to maintain service levels often But many service catalogs leave out innovation. Or, goes unrecognized. if considered, innovation is treated as a stan- • As end-users procure more technology assets via dalone, one-off capability. Innovation processes the cloud, mobile or desktop application stores, need to be embedded in the service catalog. the role of operational excellence for CIOs can • CIOs understand how technology changes can add be diminished. If widespread adoption of these value to the business. They need to develop the solutions occurs outside of IT, CIOs may be left foresight and fortitude to take a stand for poten- serving as the chief data center officer – or tially revolutionary change. worse, the chief electricity officer. • The CIO should not simply manage the portfolio • During economic downturns, it’s appropriate to of in-flight investments. They should also channel energies towards efficiency gains. During champion new opportunities that align with the periods of growth, a more nuanced IT leader business strategy. is needed who can spur investments and help transform operating and engagement models. CIOs as revolutionaries5 • Not every CIO has the interest, experience or • Strong leaders without depth in information tech- talent to drive innovation – either at the strategic nology are being placed in CIO positions, often or the tactical level. based on their entrepreneurial instincts or raw • Not every corporate culture considers IT as a managerial talent. strategic force. Some may have low tolerance for • While not a substitute for committed leader- the CIO driving an innovation agenda. ship, measured innovation includes a recipe for • Some CIOs were once intrigued by the charge to structure, discipline and culture to help drive the challenge the status quo and lead from the front. mission. But many returned quickly to practical reality, • While receptiveness to innovation theory may unsure how to respond to the call to arms. differ by industry, organization and even depart- • Some CIOs are not well-positioned for revolu- ment, there is an acceptance (perhaps reluctantly) tionary behavior, either because of market condi- of the strategic role of emerging technology in tions or company culture. fostering innovation. 58
Measured Innovation Technology implications Enabling tools can aid in the innovation journey, but they are no substitute for sparks of creativity or, more importantly, leaders who can recognize and nurture distinctive ideas and gain the organization’s commitment to pursue them. However, once a definition and approach for innovation has been adopted, processes and supporting technology can help corral and amplify innovation efforts. Topic Description Vendor and product CIOs can use technology vendors as potential sources of sustaining innovation. Moore’s Law, management Kryder’s Law, Koomey’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law all lead to perpetual IT performance gains. New releases from software vendors offer efficiency and efficacy of simplified legacy features, new capabilities filling productivity gaps and other improvements. By selectively following strategic vendors’ roadmaps, CIOs can incrementally grow their services and enhance value. Innovation lifecycle tools Specialized tools for portfolio and project management, idea generation and social collaboration have evolved to support the mechanics of idea collection, experience sharing, prioritization and measurement. These should be deployed in a focused manner consistent with the overall strategic objectives of the innovation portfolio, and actively managed by operational leadership. Cloud-driven prototyping Experimental, research-based innovation can be powered by cloud delivery models that help teams quickly explore new ideas at low initial costs. This allows operating expense based on actual usage to supplant historical upfront capital expenditure for initial prototyping and piloting – and ongoing burden of asset depreciation if ideas do not pan out. Innovation ecosystems CIOs can take advantage of outside-in thinking, opening their innovation processes to external and idea networks parties, open source options or sourcing niche third-party offerings to help flesh out their target solution architectures. This is especially true for sustaining innovations, where intellectual property ownership and usage issues may be less sensitive. Analytics Analytics can allow IT to deliver more value to the business by helping to answer “what do we need to know?” questions. It is also a tool to measure overall IT efficiency, guiding opportunities for incremental or breakthrough improvements in existing spend and service levels. Analytics is also essential for evaluating the innovation lifecycle and should have a heavy focus on the “so what” of actual business results and supporting metrics – a key tenet of measured innovation. Social + Mobile These emerging technologies are driving business transformation and bold new applications – sources of both sustaining and disruptive innovations. Social business and enterprise mobility are changing the way business is conducted and, increasingly, allowing new operating and business models to emerge. IT organizations should be educating their business counterparts on the potential of these new technologies – and preparing for the groundswell of demand once the implications are understood. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 59
Measured Innovation Lessons from the frontlines Innovating 20% at a time Innovation in the land of beans and baristas Much has been written on Google’s “Innovation Time Off” An end-of-year challenge was raised by Howard Schultz policy that encourages employees to dedicate 20% of their upon his return to Starbucks as CEO in 2008: Come back work week exploring new, potentially divergent ideas. after the holiday season with big ideas. Starbucks CIO, Offerings such as Gmail, AdSense and Google News have Stephen Gillett, rose to the occasion – proposing the their origin in the program9. But behind the seemingly launch of a new business unit to drive transformation of open-ended nature of the initiative lies a structured, the Starbucks store experience via emerging technologies. rigorous approach to cultivating ideas, prioritizing Digital Ventures was born, leading to a series of new investments and delivering on the potential. The ability to initiatives across social, mobile, cloud and analytics. A wide measure incremental progress and business impact are a range of sustaining innovation investments were required, big part of initial approval and ongoing project such as replacing antiquated point-of-sale infrastructure, management. Leadership has an active role in helping improving in-store networks and pushing desktop focus ideas for sustaining innovations, while also virtualization to allow employees to bring their own shaping efforts around the broader business strategy devices6. Digital Ventures has also been leading several to exploit disruption. disruptive efforts – pushing payments via mobile devices, providing subsidized in-store wireless networks with selected media content and finding new ways to bridge loyalty programs and digital marketing7. The company’s effective financial performance is one measure of the effort’s results. The growing importance of innovative technology in Starbucks business strategy is another – evidenced by the election of Clara Shih, CEO of a leading social media platform, to the board of directors in December 20118. 60
Measured Innovation My take Roy Rosin Vice President of Innovation Intuit In 2005, we changed our approach to innovation at Intuit. Technology allows us to pull a few customers into the Five years later, we had grown by 11 times that of the experiment immediately, at virtually no cost. And once an Dow, a dramatic transformation of a company that was experiment was complete, technology also allowed us to already successful. So what changed? get information about it to the right people internally. The concept of failing fast isn’t our mantra. We want to For starters, our definition of innovation evolved. We increase the odds for successfully launching new ideas. realized that innovation is about creating and capturing But, if something is going to fail, there is no doubt that value from new ideas – not just new launching new identifying it early and reacting is key – allowing funding product ideas. Maybe it doesn’t sound revolutionary to (and resources) to be reallocated. you today, but that insight fundamentally changed how we approached the job of innovation. It was the start of In the five-year span following the adoption of a new a major shift from a command-and-control, top-down innovation model, experiments in TurboTax, our flagship approach to the bottom-up model that so many people product, zoomed from seven to 200. Just as importantly, are adopting today. online sales conversions experienced a huge increase. People often want to know how many failures it took to At the same time, our model evolved to take on a larger get those types of results. Offhand, most experts on number of smaller innovation bets that could be validated innovation will likely say that the success rates for new (or invalidated) by the market relatively quickly. Much of initiatives are in the one or two out of ten range, but we this was enabled by technology. Consider that in the old were able to consistently hit a success rate of roughly six days it could take months –and usually a significant out of ten. But that number warrants a big asterisk: if you investment – to spin out a new idea, set up the technology look at the six that succeeded, they often didn’t bear much infrastructure required to make it work, test it internally resemblance to the original idea that animated the and externally, gather the results and make a decision on experiment. That’s because we used a disciplined approach whether to continue. But with the CIO and CTO tuned to refine, measure and modify the idea in smaller in, we were able to set up a platform to allow increments as we went. Measured in pace, and driving experimentation and measure effectiveness. This let us attributable, measurable value. That’s measured cultivate enough insight to make the case for expanding innovation. an initiative, or to shut it down before investing more. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 61 61
Measured Innovation Where do you start? • Structure counts. Innovation can be fostered several CIOs who are intrigued by the idea of measured innovation ways. Decide whether a centralized or distributed model should take a hard look in the mirror. Institutional change will work most effectively. Many leading organizations sometimes comes only through sheer will. That doesn’t employ a top-down structure, but some cultures may mean you have to be a technical genius or the singular favor a bottom-up or flattened approach. Who has the source of new opportunities, but it does mean you should vision, clout and attitude to lead the charge? Should take responsibility for inserting potential emerging innovation be continuous throughout the fiscal year? technologies, recognizing quality ideas, championing Should you focus on discrete events for selected concepts until sufficiently vetted and pushing for periods of time? Regardless, an ecosystem of ideas measurable results. Steve Jobs was an uncompromising and measured feedback are important, even for cultivator of ideas. He pushed Apple’s internal teams for incremental achievements. innovations to drive breakthrough after breakthrough, while continuously improving their value chain for • Don’t fish in the street. The time is ripe with digital sustaining innovation10. Elements of that can be replicated. technologies that make disruption possible. Instead of surveying from scratch, start with high potential • What’s in a name? Understand what innovation and topics: cloud, mobile, social and analytics. And don’t disruption mean to your organization. Agree on overlook opportunities in big data, gamification and definitions around sustaining versus disruptive user empowerment. innovations. What does success look like? How should it be defined and measured? • Innovation is hard work. Make it clear to your people that effective innovation looks more like the importing • Find your starting point. Organizations go through and exporting of ideas than “eureka” revelations that cycles of invention, improvement and innovation. Some occur out of the blue. Even significant breakthroughs are of your competitors may be pushing sustaining usually grounded in research, incremental thinking and innovations; others may be lurking to disrupt. Determine applied theory. Support the hard work of innovation by the competitive position of your businesses, and cultivating a culture of idea-sharing, crowd-sourcing, honestly assess your company’s DNA when it comes to outside-in knowledge and cross-organization driving change. Is your organization an early adopter? A collaboration. fast follower? A reluctant participant? 62
Measured Innovation Bottom line Creating a vision for driving innovation is the often-forgotten third role of CIOs. Beyond running the business of IT and delivering IT to support the needs of the business, CIOs should be leading the charge toward innovation through emerging solutions and technologies. The magnitude of needed change is likely to shift over time, but a mixture of incremental and breakthrough advances across sustaining and disruptive innovations will likely be needed to advance the organization toward a more competitive – and more profitable – position. CIOs should keep in mind the dual meanings of “measured innovation” – one describes pragmatic, disciplined growth; while the other reinforces to the need to measure outcomes and refine approaches based on results. Endnotes 1 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, socialism and democracy (UK: Routledge, 1943), 81-84. See: http://www.claytonchristensen.com/ 2 Michael Raynor, The Innovator’s Manifesto (New York: Crown Business, 2011), 62. 3 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2010), “Depth Perception: A dozen technology trends shaping business and IT in 4 2010”, http://www.deloitte.com/us/2010technologytrends, Chapter 5. Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2011), “Tech Trends 2011: The natural convergence of business and IT”, http://www. 5 deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends, Chapter 4. Caron Carlson, With Gillett at the helm, Starbucks percolates with emerging technologies, http://www.fiercecio.com/story/gillett-helm-starbucks- 6 percolates-emerging-technologies/2011-12-14 (December 14, 2011). Chris Murphy, Starbucks’ Stephen Gillett: InformationWeek’s IT Chief of The Year, http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/ 7 interviews/232200549 (December 12, 2011). “Starbucks Appoints Clara Shih to Board of Directors,” Starbucks Corp. press release, December 14, 2011, on the Starbucks Corp. web site, http:// 8 news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=602, accessed January 21, 2012. Bharat Mediratta as told to Julie Bick, The Google Way: Give Engineers Room, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/jobs/21pre.html (October 21, 9 2007).  10 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 63
10 Outside-in Architecture Finding the sweet spot between ‘need to investments; or by sourcing through platform, software or share’ and ‘need to own’ business services available through the cloud. Similar For decades, businesses have typically been rewarded for analysis should be performed at the data, information and consolidation around standard processes and stockpiling employee levels. assets through people, technology and goods. Operations were assumed to be confined within organizational Most organizations that adopt outside-in thinking are in a boundaries, with transactions viewed as short-lived events strong position to share information and outcomes with following well-defined steps. Systems were built primarily business partners – and even with the public – to foster to enhance execution within their own self-contained trust, gain insights and spur ecosystem investment. This is scope of control. partly because technical architectures are emerging that allow end-to-end business capabilities to be orchestrated Conventional wisdom about these principles is changing, across large numbers of corporate entities. They also enable and it’s changing fast. Flexibility in operating and business a combination of on-premise and cloud-based services. models today is emerging to be a key differentiator. Plus, outside-in organizations are able to efficiently find and Markets and business conditions are shifting rapidly, access specialized, independent contractors, allowing necessitating new capabilities that can adapt to changing experience to be sourced at the time of need. players, rules and desired outcomes. Sustaining innovation, both inside the organization and within broader An outside-in architecture vision represents a significant ecosystems, is emerging as a top priority. departure from the status quo. Bringing together third parties to grow services and create value effectively requires Many companies are discovering they need a new kind of the ability to manage, coordinate and orchestrate many leverage – capability leverage – to mobilize third parties moving parts. At the same time, defining and implementing that can add value. As a result, the traditional need to own policies across solutions, enterprises and providers is is colliding with the emerging need to share, shifting essential – at the infrastructure level, at the application solution architectures away from a siloed, enterprise-out level, at the people level and at the business level. This design pattern. These new architectures are designed to takes enormous discipline. anticipate service and people dependencies from the outside – and to require that data and systems be As outside-in becomes the new normal, standards will encapsulated for external consumption. Outside-in, not emerge and platforms will likely evolve to decrease the inside-out, is becoming the standard. cost of provisioning, managing and controlling each step in long-running processes. In the short-term, however, this Outside-in architecture requires an organization to think architectural transition requires new skills from the CIO about its operations and processes as a collection of and the IT organization. CIOs who anticipate and business capabilities or services. Each individual service understand the opportunity will likely have the ability to can then be examined to determine how it can be most become much more effective business collaborators with effectively fulfilled – either by strategically standardizing other executive leaders. on existing package solutions or custom technology 64
Outside-in Architecture History repeating itself? A service-oriented business architecture has been the Holy Grail of IT departments for years1. Outside-in architecture is an even more advanced concept – one in which workers, business functions, IT systems and supporting infrastructure are essentially interchangeable building blocks across many different organizations and participants. While outside-in architectures can be deployed more easily if service-oriented architectures are already in place, transition paths to outside-in can accommodate more traditional enterprise architectures through the use of wrappers and other measures. What were the challenges? What’s different in 2012? Enterprise application • Predominantly focused within organizational • Outside-in architecture requires that higher-level integration (EAI) boundaries, with proprietary middleware tools business capabilities are defined clearly, which and messaging protocols that made cross-organi- in turn allows for a level of abstraction that zation communication difficult. can ease heterogeneous communication and semantic context. • Many use cases were based on data synchroniza- tion and enforcing the integrity of distributed • A clean separation of services up and down the invocations of transactional systems. stack, from high-level business capabilities to This approach was incomprehensible to low-level infrastructure, requires loose coupling. business resources – and tightly coupled with Each service can call another service’s business underlying technologies. rules, data or infrastructure only through the well-defined interface. Any individual service • Advanced techniques such as workflow and can be swapped out without affecting other business process management assumed a pieces of the architecture. sequential, deterministic, short-running series of transactions. Solutions were less effective in • Outside-in architecture assumes long-running dealing with uncertainty, or when they required interactions with a master “hub” orchestrating significant human intervention. a predefined end-to-end process. Each node must be prepared to fully describe its business context. The policy layer is essential, as it can manage access, guide invocation and allow for distributed business rules to be applied. Service-oriented architecture • SOA and web services proved to be effective • Outside-in architecture advances SOA beyond (SOA)/ architecture patterns, but solely for the the technical stack, allowing organizations to Web services technical stack. dynamically assemble combinations of people, processes and systems to solve business • Refactoring of legacy packages and custom problems. systems was easiest when tapping into existing interfaces and APIs – sacrificing loose coupling for • Outside-in architectures can be formed by speed of integration. retrofitting legacy systems. But required layers of abstraction and extensibility will likely • Difficulties in sharing business context, process improve upon existing control points and inter- semantics and rules for manual interaction across faces, leading to internal and external actors. the need to build out additional inter- and intra- application components. • Policy-driven interoperability is designed to help solve several of the correlation and context issues – ideally operating on stateless, inde- pendent and self-contained services. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 65
Outside-in Architecture Technology implications The technology shift to outside-in has been decades in the making, as stove-piped and proprietary technical stacks have been giving way to standards, web-based communication. Adding to the momentum has been the drive for interoperability from the operating environment up to the capability level. Bringing the full vision of outside-in architecture to fruition requires a sophisticated platform of services to identity, provision, orchestrate, meter, bill and mediate events. Topic Description Atomic transaction As workloads span multiple systems and organizations, there is little confirmation of atomicity across processing discrete, self-contained units of work. In an outside-in world, failure must be addressed not by automated roll-back, but with compensating transactions, which either undo what has occurred up to the point of failure or address the issue that is halting execution. Human interaction Outside-in is inherently a pessimistic architecture, one that accounts for fluid business rules and capabilities while anticipating exceptions. End users – employees, partners and even customers – are seen as necessary adjudicators, applying business context to help make decisions in case of a conflict or failure. They also help monitor whether business and market evolutions require underlying rule or policy updates. Time sensitivity Because outside-in architecture must allow for long-running transactions, it is likely that policies and rules may change before a transaction reaches its conclusion. This can lead to a need for temporal awareness across services or for versioning so that this interaction is allowed to run to completion under the old policy2. Systems should allow for the evaluation of transactions, the versioning and persistence of services and policies, and the ability to recreate state and subsequent logic according to business context. Policy extraction Legacy systems and data sources can be encapsulated and service-enabled through several modern tools, from mining metadata to investigating integrated development and run-time environments, to generating code stubs and starting-points for policy externalization. Federated identities Governing authentication, access and entitlements of individuals and systems to underlying workloads – manual tasks, transactions or data – is a critical centralized policy required for effective outside-in architecture, with interoperability between actors and agents. Backwards compatibility Tactically, outside-in architectures should be tolerant of aging technologies and of traditional offline modes of communication, such as voice, fax and hardcopy, to allow for a wide range of potential participants. At a more sophisticated level, services, rules and policies must follow API leading practices to protect context and interoperability as updated versions are released. 66
Outside-in Architecture Lessons from the frontlines Fung describes the manufacturing of a men’s shirt with a Putting the customer in customer service typical nine-month window: The cheapest way to produce Rearden Commerce reimagined its travel and entertainment the shirt is to get fabric from certain parts of China, ship it services from the outside in, by providing service to end to Bangladesh, and make the shirt there. But if the shirt users through facilitating multi-party transactions (such as sees high market demand and requires an in-season travel itineraries with flights, car services and hotels) manufacturing run, it is better to take the same fabric and sourced from more than 200,000 member merchants. A produce the shirt in Shanghai – at higher costs, but with virtual common policy platform was created, which can be faster turn-around time and higher quality3. As a result, Li invoked by two million customers when searching for & Fung can move quickly to capture innovative product offers based on geography, vendor preference, logistics ideas or market arbitrage around any distinct part of its and expense policy constraints. The platform is also used value chain. by merchants when listing, describing and promoting their potential services. In addition, it is used by Rearden to drive Financing terms on their terms long-running transactions and resolve exceptions – such as TradeCard is a New York-based company providing supply rebooking tickets, changing hotels and canceling dinner chain management solutions to more than 4,000 business reservations in real-time if a flight segment is delayed. partners operating in 50 countries around the world. The New partner services can be continuously added to the company provides financing arrangements to participants ecosystem, so they can be discovered by customers who in the global supply chains of their clients. These supply may need them. Rearden moves beyond the business chains can involve diverse participants from many parts of capabilities layer by linking its functional services to the world, which means they involve long-lived the underlying infrastructure stack. Servers can be interactions. Because of increasingly volatile global automatically provisioned at the hardware layer due to economic conditions and the risk of disruptions, new policies encountered at the business layer. In addition, financing requirements can arise unexpectedly, often with response time delays that may violate service-level the need for new participants to be brought in. Since agreements (SLAs) can lead to packet prioritization at the financing decisions are heavily shaped by broader business network layer to help mitigate potential issues. policies that can change rapidly, TradeCard has evolved to an IT model with key components of the outside-in Supplying flexibility and scalability to the supply chain architecture, including an emphasis on explicit An ever-changing virtual supply chain is at the heart of Li & management and mediation of policies across diverse Fung’s growth in recent years. The company itself does not participants. For example, TradeCard became aware of the perform any of the steps in the supply chain. Instead, it impact of a change in a buyer’s payment strategy for a orchestrates the efforts of more than 10,000 business specific supplier. The buyer wanted to pay invoices on a partners in more than 40 countries, dynamically procuring 45-day basis, but the supplier needed to be paid on a the capabilities to produce a wide range of apparel and 30-day basis. TradeCard was able to broker a private goods. Li & Fung’s business architecture has been defined relationship between the supplier and a financing agency, in terms of services and capabilities, with attributes of where the financing agency paid the supplier, charging a price, timing, quality and reliability driving policy-matching fee to make the early payment. and constraints. As an example, managing director William 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 67
Outside-in Architecture My take Dan Pritchett Chief Technology Officer Rearden Commerce Rearden Commerce’s business is largely focused on the While this has been an enormous amount of work, it’s well travel industry. Our job is to help connect travelers to the worth the effort. Travel buyers appreciate the fact that services they need – housing, airfare, ground transportation these systems understand their individual preferences and and special services. By definition, we’re dealing with a requirements – the context is automatically defined. For fragmented industry, with a multitude of “outside” travel providers, having direct, transparent access to constituents and resources, from the biggest airlines to policies helps them to operate more efficiently and deliver mom and pop travel shops. Outside-in architecture is the the tailored services that keep customers happy. Sharing air we breathe. more information, more intelligently, is a good thing. Our technology platform needs to act like a global An outside-in approach has also made it easier to dive into distribution system – one that can integrate with cutting- new technologies such as cloud and mobile, because we edge technologies one minute or mimic the cryptic 3270 start with a services mentality. Mobile, for instance, is a terminal commands to a legacy booking system the next. logical extension of what we do, and our technology And one that can route requests based on the ever- platform has shown to be an excellent foundation as we changing needs of the traveler across a fluid collection of introduce mobile offerings. As we move deeper into the service providers. cloud, we expect to find the same to be true. These capabilities can also allow us to expand the reach of our From the start, we faced a number of outside-in transparent, outside-in approach among travel consumers challenges, starting with policies. In business travel, policy and service providers alike. is a big deal. For example, consider issues of determining which employees are allowed to fly first class, or the need to stay within preset budget limits, or the challenge of keeping track of individual travel preferences. Our approach evolved to externalize policy from the code itself, allowing policies to be expressed based on individual customer needs and preferences. As you can imagine, this wasn’t something we were able to accomplish overnight. We had to rewrite virtually all our code to make our policy external. And, as you add partners to the platform, there’s a greater demand for policies to be both transparent and external, rather than inherent to the platform. 68 68
Outside-in Architecture Where do you start? • Long-running interactions. Another source of Outside-in architecture should not be relegated to the role opportunity is any business service with extended of an academic exercise or thought experiment. The time between start and finish. The pessimistic concepts are real and tangible. However, they do represent architecture of outside-in can allow for exceptions to a series of significant shifts for the enterprise, which should be properly handled and any manual workloads to be reconsider everything from how business processes are effectively handled. envisioned to the lowest level of the technical operating environment. • Look at the edges. Early and effective outside-in migrations take place at the edge of an organization’s The good news is that companies can make the migration core platforms. Ancillary value creation opportunities to outside-in architectures pragmatically, starting with involve more active collaboration with third parties, efforts to access and mobilize third-party resources. These and allow both the business and the technology initiatives can often be launched with modest, short-term organizations to introduce outside-in concepts and efforts. Begin by exposing the necessary internal resources gain real world functional and technical design through wrappers – and by making them available to experience. That learning can then be applied to the specialized policy and interaction servers – rather than broader organization. trying to re-architect everything inside the enterprise. For example, Rearden Commerce has been migrating to an • Innovation revolution. A disciplined approach to outside-in architecture for several years through a staged innovation, whether internal or external, can identify effort, while continuing to run its core business and candidates to anchor an outside-in architecture support growth rates. transformation. Does a peer business unit have a better dynamic pricing engine? Outside-in architecture can take localized innovations and help drive them to enterprise Before the technical architecture and the migration path assets. Does an external rating service provide real-time get locked down, though, the following issues should be information that makes your product’s value proposition considered from a business and technical perspective: clearer to customers? Incremental additions from external sources can help illustrate the value of • Business service decomposition. Don’t make any outside-in and provide the catalyst to get business and moves around orchestration and policy layers until you technology providers on board. take a step back and deconstruct your business into coarse capabilities. These should then be decomposed into business services. Avoid process definition traps, since the order of sequential steps is less important at this point than articulating the steps themselves. Make sure the semantics and context used to describe services are business-based. The point is to loosely couple the architecture, separating business architecture from the applications, data and infrastructure. • Look for diversity. Focus early on business areas with a large number of existing or potential service providers, or areas with high volatility in business rules or policies. The real potential of outside-in is to create value by orchestrating demand with the most effective supply in dynamic markets. 2012 Technology Trends – Enablers 69
Outside-in Architecture Bottom line Outside-in architecture institutionalizes the ‘need to share’ philosophy that is required as ecosystems get more complex, constituents get more social and business factors change at Internet speed. There are some nuances and technical implementation details, but the most critical step is to identify specific opportunities to connect with a large number of other businesses in arenas where performance is under growing pressure. Consider starting by exposing IT resources, applications and data using wrappers with the specific goal of accessing complementary resources that can help drive performance improvements. The good news is that there are pragmatic pathways for enterprises to potentially reap early benefits of outside-in architectures, without requiring a massive re-architecture at the outset. Endnotes 1 Additional information is available in Deloitte Consulting LLP (2010), “Depth Perception: A dozen technology trends shaping business and IT in 2010”, http://www.deloitte.com/us/2010technologytrends, Chapter 10. Thomas B. Winans and John Seely Brown, Web Services 2.0 - Policy-driven Service Oriented Architectures, http://johnseelybrown.com/Web%20 2 Services%20POV.pdf (May 2008). William Fung, The Supply Chain is Flat, http://m.strategy-business.com/article/00018?gko=46d39 (February 3, 2010). 3 70
Conclusion Next floor – Postdigital Today, each of these trends can be valuable individually. This year’s trends are manifestations and applications The combination of two, three, or even more can help of digital forces – analytics, mobility, social business, accelerate progress towards this new set of business cloud and cyber security – already in play. As we observe capabilities – enabling a new set of business rules accelerating patterns of adoption, we envision a time for operations, performance and competition. in which these forces are mature, implemented and integrated. Baked-in vs. bolted-on. Creating a new normal. We close this year’s report with the familiar quote from It is then that we will be entering the postdigital era. writer and futurist William Gibson: “The future is already here… it is just not evenly distributed.” Our hope is In the post-industrial era, business didn’t set that the Tech Trends 2012 will help you elevate your industrialization aside – it just became the new normal. business and technology to the top of the distribution. The postdigital era is following a similar pattern, but it’s about leveraging digitalization vs. industrialization. The Postdigital Enterprise will be a business that thrives in that emerging future where operating models, business models and even markets and industries are transformed. 2012 Technology Trends 71
Authors Mark White Bill Briggs Chief Technology Officer Deputy CTO Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP mawhite@deloitte.com wbriggs@deloitte.com Disruptors Enablers Social Business Big Data Goes to Work JR Reagan Greg Szwartz Principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP jreagan@deloitte.com gszwartz@deloitte.com Chris Heuer David Steier Specialist Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP cheuer@deloitte.com dsteier@deloitte.com Gamification Geospatial Visualization Doug Palmer Matt Gentile Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP Principal, Deloitte FAS LLP dpalmer@deloitte.com magentile@deloitte.com Aaron Patton Josh Lieberman Manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP Senior Manager, Deloitte FAS LLP apatton@deloitte.com jolieberman@deloitte.com Enterprise Mobility Unleashed Digital Identities Kieran Norton Kelly Bissell Principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP Principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP kinorton@deloitte.com kbissell@deloitte.com David Smud Gordon Hannah Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP Principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP dsmud@deloitte.com ghannah@deloitte.com User Empowerment Measured Innovation Jaco Van Eeden Ragu Gurumurthy Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP jvaneeden@deloitte.com rgurumurthy@deloitte.com Pat Russo Michael Raynor Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP prusso@deloitte.com mraynor@deloitte.com Hyper-hybrid Cloud Outside-in Architecture Irfan Saif John Hagel Principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP Co-Chairman, Deloitte Center for the Edge isaif@deloitte.com jhagel@deloitte.com Chris Weitz Doug Shoupp Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP cweitz@deloitte.com dshoupp@deloitte.com 72
Contributors Liz Anderson, Scott Bassett, Bertha Ballard, John Seely Brown, Randy Burdick, Rajeswari Chandrasekaran, Paul Clemmons, Clint Cummings, Alex Dea, Bill Falotico, Stuart Fano, Trey Griffin, Nancy Holtz, Shehryar Khan, Ken Landis, Carl Lay, Barry Libenson, Mike Liebhold, Kasey Lobaugh, Andrew Luedke, Gillman Louie, Danny Multani, Jose Munoz, Umang Nagpal, Taylor O’Brien, Isabelle Park, Greg Pellegrino, Sandy Pentland, Dan Pritchett, Harry D. Raduege, Jr., Roy Rosin, Hugh Shepherd, Dan Stefanis, Tammy Swartz, Vikash Tiwari, and Sara Ulrich. Special Thanks Heidi Boyer, Kristi Lamar, and Cyndi Switzer – the heart and soul of our Technology Trends team. Thank you for your tireless spirit, artfully balancing patience and relentlessness, and for finding a way to exceed expectations through every detail – big or small. 73
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