Category: Uncategorized

Studying at the LSE – MISI

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I just realised that this blog includes Adverts – Sorry I am about to pay to have them removed… Anyway given the Open University is advertising on my site at the moment I thought I should respond with my own advert for our NEW MSc in Management, Information Systems and Innovation at the LSE.
See the video below for details.
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/management/programmes/msc/management-information-systems-and-innovation/film.aspx

MISI logo

The Masters in Management Information Systems and Innovation (MISI) studies organisational and IT innovations in business and government across the world. Information systems drive modern business and public services, the internet is changing drastically how we form and share information, and knowledge in the networked society crosses all boundaries and challenges all previous models of organising business and government.The programme is an intellectually rigorous, innovative, inter-disciplinary degree that creates capabilities for future management and IS practitioners, advisers and researchers, in the ever changing arenas of technology and organisations. It integrates established knowledge on management, strategy and major IS issues, such as applications development, projects, outsourcing with the critical study of emerging domains of innovation exploiting the internet, including cloud computing and social networking. View the programme structure

The practice of innovation requires understanding of the social and economic context within which technology and organisations are constructed and managed. Our learning approach places emphasis on the critical discussion of academic literature from across a range of scientific fields. We include theories and frameworks for understanding the processes of information systems and innovation and case studies for illustrating issues in particular instances of management and innovation practice. View faculty teaching on the programme

  • Management
    Our students will be managers who will need to understand all the demands made upon a modern manager
  • Information Systems
    Our students learn the in-demand skills and knowledge about how ICTs work in a modern organisational environment, corporate, public or third sector
  • Innovation
    We live in a time of constant and accelerating change where yesterdays answers no longer work and managers must innovate, introduce and control new solutions.

Hosting in the Cloud is fantastic – as long as Joe Lieberman doesn’t complain

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The Guardian is today reporting that WikiLeaks has had its site removed from Amazon servers after Joe Lieberman put political influence on Amazon.

WikiLeaks website pulled by Amazon after US homeland security pressure | Media | The Guardian.

Whatever the ins and outs of the story, this is an example of an outsourcer (Amazon) for WikiLeaks swaying to political pressure and reputation risk and in response effectively destroying its client’s business. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case it would have taken a court-order to enter a WikiLeak’s data-centre and physically turn off a server.

Catch me at the Cloud Business Summit tomorrow.

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Leslie Willcocks will be presenting some of our joint work (with Edgar Whitley and myself) on Cloud Computing and Outsourcing at the Cloud Business Summit tomorrow… I am attending if anyone wants to grab a coffee. Drop me an email.

http://www.businesscloud9.com/summit/2010

 

Cloud Computing Survey – with Leslie Willcocks and Horses for Sources

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As part of a research project on cloud computing I am working on with Prof. Leslie Willcocks and Dr Edgar Whitey we are undertaking a survey on Cloud Business Services in conjunction with Horses for Sources .

If you have a few minutes we would appreciate it if you could complete the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cloud-study-LSE-and-HfS

and you can read an article about the survey at http://www.horsesforsources.com/

Cloud computing Software architectures – ComputerworldUK

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Joe Tobolski of Accenture provides an overview of the software challenges of porting software to the cloud. In particular the need for data-access mechanisms reflecting the distributed nature of the cloud, the need for fault-tolerance “Fault-expectant” applications, and finally  applications aware of the elastic nature of the cloud – and able to call cloud services from within the code.

See  Cloud computing: The case for new architectures – Community – ComputerworldUK.

Lock-ins, SLAs and the Cloud

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One of the significant concerns in entering the cloud is the potential for lock-in with a cloud provider (though clearly you otherwise remain locked-in with your own IT department as the sole  provider).

The cost of moving from one provider to another is a significant obstacle to cloud penetration – if you could change provider easily and painlessly you might be more inclided to take the risk. Various services have emerged to try to attack this problem – CloudSwitch being one which created a considerable buzz at the Structure 2010 conference.   Their service aims to provide  a software means to transfer enterprise applications from a company’s data centre into the cloud (and between cloud providers). Whether it can live up to expectations we have yet to know, but CloudSwitch is attempting to provide a degree of portability much desired by clients – and probably much feared by Cloud Service providers whose business would reduce to utility suppliers if they are successful.

But this links into another interesting conversation I was having with a media executive last week. They mentioned that since cloud virtual machines were so cheap they often (effectively)  host services across a number of suppliers to provide their own redundancy and thus ignore the SLA. If one service goes down they can switch quickly (using load balancers etc) to another utility supplier. Clearly this only works for commodity IaaS and for relatively simple content distribution (rather than transaction processing) but it is a compelling model… why worry about choosing one cloud provider and being locked-in or risking poor SLA  – choose them all.

Structure 2010 – Mark Benioff – Cloud 2

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The key focus of SalesForce.com CEO Mark Benioff talk was on identifying the difference between “Cloud 2” and none-cloud marketing efforts leveraging the cloud to sell boxes. He highlighted his three tests for Cloud Compting

1)      Efficiency – that any cloud offering should offer 1/10th the cost of existing solutions and thus enable new entrants into marketplaces. For example he highlighted that only 1500 Dell servers are used to service the 77000 useres of SalesForce.

2)      Economic – that solutions should be economically efficient

3)      Democratic – That they should allow SME business to enter the market.

Nothing particularly exciting here.

Structure 2010: The Value of the Cloud — It’s Not Just About Cost

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Structure 2010: The Value of the Cloud — It’s Not Just About Cost.

This article reviews a panel at the Structure Event I am attending. The argument is that focusing on Cost, as an outsourcing of cost to a cheaper provider, misses the disruptive nature of Cloud Computing. Instead the focus should be on the strategic benefits of Cloud – and hence not a CTO issue but a board-level strategy issue.

The term Business Agility was mentioned within this, and was a theme in Werner Vogals picked up on later. In particular how afraid should companies be of small competitors using Cloud to leapfrog into the marketplace as competitors to old players – the SalesForce effect.

Structure 2010 – The Cloud Computing and Internet Infrastructure Conference – GigaOM Network Events

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I am going to be at the following conference this week (thanks to Accenture for the invitation).

Structure 2010 – The Cloud Computing and Internet Infrastructure Conference – GigaOM Network Events.

I will try to blog about the event during the week.