A great article explaining contemporary programming in huge detail and with panache!
Author: Dr Will Venters
Lecturer in Information Systems, Department of Management, London School of Economics.
Talking coordination at BT next week.
I’m at BT’s Adastral Park giving a ‘Thought Leadership’ talk (available to all BT staff online) next week. It should be exciting and I plan to give them an idea of my current and future thinking on dynamic digital infrastructure. In particular I am keen to extend our thinking on how such infrastructure (constructed with cloud provided modular services and platforms) create new forms of coordination which extend beyond existing either technical, managerial or social coordination. I am keen to discuss how such coordination extends beyond traditional institutions (such as the firm) through cloud services limiting the power of existing institutional arrangements (e.g. The CTO) to control how their digital infrastructure is coordinated and dynamically evolves into the future. Obviously thoug I will also try to make it an enjoyable and fun talk without too many of these technical terms!
Looking forward to the “Researching Digitisation workshop next week @LSE!
RESEARCHING DIGITALIZATION
via Delivering Digital Drugs (D3) – D3-Workshop May 2015.
Indicative topics include:
- Digital materiality
- Assemblage theories
- Co-consumption and Personalization
- Digital practices
- Business models and value architectures
- Platforms, Services and Servitization
- Research data services and Big Data
- Digital supply chains
- Research methods and research practices for digitalization
Diamonds in the data: the LHC is back (and better than ever)
The New Statesman write a rather hyperbolic article highlighting the value of the Grid to the LHC data analysis effort.
via Diamonds in the data: the LHC is back (and better than ever).
The robot pharmacist | ROUGH TYPE
Nicholas Carr summarises the need to better understand the digitisation of medicines (the focus of a joint research project I am part of – http://www.Digital-drugs.org)
“…If you want to understand the complexities and pitfalls of automating medicine (and professional work in general), please read Bob Wachter’s story, adapted from his new book The Digital Doctor, of how Pablo Garcia, a 16-year-old patient at the University of California’s San Francisco Medical Center, came to be given a dose of 38 ½ antibiotic pills rather than the single pill he should have been given.”
See The robot pharmacist | ROUGH TYPE for the full article.
Netskope’s approach to Shadow IT security.
On Wednesday last week I attended “Cloud Expo Europe” at London’s Excel centre. One of particularly interesting product was Netskope (also a finalists in the UK Cloud Awards) who are addressing the challenge of ShadowIT – employees use of cloud-services which are not sanctioned by the corporate IT departments.
According to Accenture (2013) “78% of cloud procurement comes from Strategic Business Units (SBUs), and only 28% from centralized IT functions”. Without some form of control the data-protection and compliance challenges of this can prove a huge. Users are also poorly skilled in making rational decisions about the safety of company data and products like Netskope address this by examining fire-wall logs or running Proxy servers and providing an easy interface so IT departments can enforce cloud access policies. The product analyses users’ access patterns and sends alerts, encrypts content on upload, blocks cloud transactions and quarantines content for review by Legal or IT. It essentially monitors and stops employees doing anything risky.
For me, the value of this product is the database of different cloud services with detailed information as to their safety and compliance. The product is however also really frustrating. At its heart is the assumption that the job of the IT professional is to monitor, control and police employees. This puts IT in opposition to the other business functions. Why couldn’t this product have instead started from a different assumption – that employees are, mostly, just trying to do their work as efficiently as possible. While a few are bad, most are just ignorant to the risks. Netskope would have been fantastic if it instead helped reduce this ignorance rather than policing users’ failures. Had it provided an employee-portal to allow employees to evaluate cloud services prior to adoption it would have promoted the effective use of them, and allowed users to make rational decisions on their adoption. The IT department would be in a facilitation role rather than a policing role, and employees would feel in control (rather than in fear). The safety would be just the same (with Netskope policing policy) but with users feeling part of that effort. Productivity gains might also be achieved as users are freed to try using new valuable IT services knowing they were doing it safely and with management approval.
This isn’t to criticise Netskope for what it does do – but to call upon new approaches to thinking about the role of IT and the CIO in this cloud-future.
Strategy Security in the cloud – comments on Athens Cloud Computing Conference
Attending the Cloud Computing Conference in Athens today I was struck by the overarching interest of the audience in security. This is entirely understandable, and certainly should be the primary concern for IT directors whose overarching concern is to keep the company safe in this dangerous digital world. As fellow speaker Ian Murphy discussed – Hacking is available “as a service” today and for little money hackers can be directed towards any organisation whose security protocols are substandard.This point was reiterated by Amar Singh.
What worries me though is that organisational strategy is not also considered a significant security concern in the face of the cloud. For me IT directors should be taking a primary position in considering the strategic risks to their organisation from cloud-based services ripping the heart out of their business. Without considering how the business model of a business might be undermined by cloud based digital services companies look like the vacuum-valve or Cathod-Ray-Tube manufacturer obsessing about whether their product can be stolen in production and delivery!
My rather random list of possible risks would include.
1) Disintermediation – Don Tapscott discussed many years ago how intermediation business can be lost as customers circumvent or replicate intermediary business and go direct. Cloud provides the simple tools to create this type of business.
2) Cost Collapse – Many businesses rely on cost inhibiting entry into marketplaces. Automation, Cloud and Data-abundance, and PAYG infrastructure can collapse the cost of entering some of these marketplaces. An example of this is Animation where small studies can now produce full feature-films using cloud rendering services.In the future digital technology are likely to do the same to many other areas of business which are today considered capital intensive.
3) Globally local – Prior to Uber most people working in taxi services could not imagine that the value of their business would shift to include services provided from north america. Yet such platforms, by their intensive focus on value creation for users, and their creation of brokerage services radically change the business model. Like Ebay, AirBnB, and Booking.com the creation of a dual-sided market… Read Eisenmann, T. R., G. Parker and M. W. V. Alstyne (2006). “Strategies for Two-Sided Markets.” Harvard Business Review(10). for more on this type of business model
4) Service Quality – Many existing companies struggle to respond to customers need. Using cloud services small businesses can emerge which provide much better ease of use and services by starting with a cloud-only strategy and uninhibited by the existing legacy IT.
This is just a rather random list – with time I will try to develop these ideas into something more coherent! I welcome readers contributions.
UK Cloud Awards 2015 finalists announced | Cloud Pro
UK Cloud Awards 2015 finalists announced | Cloud Pro.
I look forward to meeting some of the finalists at the awards ceremony!
UK Cloud Awards demonstrates health of cloud industry | Cloud Pro
Max Cooter gives a great assessment of the UK Cloud Awards that I was one of the judges for…
“The judges have been busy looking through the entries and Max Cooter is pleased with the volume and quality of nominations
What are the trends within cloud computing?
There are several answers to this: you can look at what the marketing gurus say are the hot topics – these are generally areas that are not even close to impacting on CIOs’ in-box though. They’re great for the Gartner Hype Cycle, but are often found hovering around the Peak of Inflated Expectations and have not even touched the Trough of Disillusionment.
This is the second year of the awards (the UK Cloud Awards, brought to you by Cloud Pro in association with CIF and sponsors HP, Ingram Micro and Microsoft) and the most gratifying aspect of the entries is how well defined cloud is now. Last year, there were a few entries that had only a minimal cloud content – the inference seemed to be that if there was some internet connectivity, then there had to be cloud. That’s not to say that all were like that – the shortlisted projects were excellent – but there seemed to be little understanding of the NIST definition of cloud computing – and those were the criteria we were using to make our assessments….”
via UK Cloud Awards demonstrates health of cloud industry | Cloud Pro.
Keynote for Athens Cloud Computing conference
I am proud to be the keynote speaker at the Athens Cloud Computing conference on the 10th of March.
I will be kicking off the event with a challenge to see cloud not as the transfer of computing from within the enterprise to an external party, but instead as a chance to reconsider the boundary of the enterprise, and try to create new business opportunity by partnership through cloud computing.
Binary Blurring 