The Cloud Circle Issue1 2011 by Optic Juice

The Cloud Circle

1st Industry Trends Report

Sponsored by:

contents 05

The Survey: Using cloud computing to drive business transformation The Cloud Circle presents the findings and analysis of our 1st Industry Trends Survey, with input from industry experts

The Interview: The latest IT innovation, hot off the press

The Feature: We’re becoming a world full of socialites – and it’s big business

Ian McDonald has already moved most of the Symbian Foundation’s computing over to the cloud. Now he’s looking to do likewise at News International

Mark Young explores the benefits of social computing to the enterprise, both customer facing and behind the scenes, and looks at what the effects could be on the way we work

CA S E S T U D I E S:

The logistics company: Dee Set

The global charity: World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)

Upcoming events

Having built a £50m turnover in eight years, York-based Dee Set found it could save up to £70,000 per year and improve its customer service by switching to Google Apps for Business

Famous conservationist charity WWF needed a more interactive and collaborative intranet platform for its 5,000+ employees. It turned to Google Apps

All of the events below are being held in central London. For more information on any of these events, please contact The Cloud Circle team on 0207 960 6551.

15 September & 24 November The 7th and 8th Cloud Circle Forums: ‘Transform your business with cloud computing, for competitive advantage; agile response to business threats and opportunities through innovation, collaboration and empowerment’ 11 October & 3 November Desktop Cloud Masterclasses: ‘Desktop cloud computing as an enabler for business transformation’

2 November The 3rd Executive Breakfast Club: ‘Fast-track your cloud projects’ (exclusively for our members with project sign off in the next nine months)

7 October & 2 December Security in the Cloud Conferences: ‘Practical due diligence to identify, evaluate and manage the security risks of cloud computing’

24 November The 7th Obis Omni Forum: ‘The world is changing: Doing better and doing more with business intelligence and performance management’

www.thecloudcircle.com

Over 4 million businesses have gone Google.

“Going Google” means using Google Apps for Business: web-based email, calendar and documents designed to help teams work better together. Learn more at www.google.co.uk/gonegoogle.

© 2011 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

SURVEY BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

The 1 Cloud Circle Industry Trends Survey st

Using cloud computing to drive business transformation

Key findings: Survey finds that large organisations are now just as engaged with cloud computing as SMEs Cloud computing spend expected to rocket over 2011/2012 and take a bigger share of overall IT budgets Security is still seen as the biggest barrier to cloud computing but business personnel register fewer concerns than IT colleagues

mall and medium sized organisations are thought to have led the adoption of cloud products and services so far. Ostensibly, SMEs have the most to gain – externally managed, pay-as-you-go utility style IT services allow the small enterprise to concentrate on the day job and compete with the big boys, or that’s the theory at least. But, as illustrated by The 1st Cloud Circle Industry Trends Survey, conducted among senior decision makers from both IT and business departments within a broad cross sector of Britain’s public and private enterprises, things have changed. The survey found that larger organisations are now just as engaged as their smaller counterparts in some areas of the cloud, more so in others. Currently, 36% of organisations across all sizes and industry types are using cloud technologies. A further 9% are at the testing stage and 32% are actively researching. Just 5% have no plans to implement any cloud technologies

he survey was completed by 251 senior managers from a broad range of industry types, including financial services, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, construction, the public sector, education and charities. They represented companies of all sizes – from single site operations with a few members of staff to global, industry leading blue chip organisations. Of the individuals canvassed, 71% hold the main responsibility for driving cloud within their businesses. By job function, 59% primarily represent IT departments while 41% are more involved in the business function.

at all. See fig 1. These numbers are fairly consistent across large and small enterprises, though there is some differentiation in the types of services that they are taking up. Organisations with less than 500 employees are focusing more on emails, databases, storage and standard office applications, while organisations with over 5,000 employees are leading the uptake of the Software, Platform, and Infrastructure as-a-Service offerings. A total of 64% of respondents, across all sizes and sectors, expect their cloud computing spend to increase over this year and next. This is four times as many as the 15% that think it will remain the same, together with the 1% which expect a cut. The finding is even more impressive in the context of respondents’ predictions for their overall IT spend over the same period. A majority of 54% of respondents expect this either to stagnate (30%) or decline (24%), against the 34% that expect it to increase. The remainder are unsure. See fig 2. Yet, here, organisations with more than 5,000 employees appear to be ready to commit even more of their budgets to the cloud than those with less Fig than 500 on the

What stage of cloud readiness is your organisation currently at?

We are already using cloud computing technologies – 36% We are actively researching cloud computing – 32% We are currently testing cloud systems – 9% We plan to begin cloud projects within one year – 6% We plan to begin cloud projects within one to three years – 7% We plan to begin cloud projects within three to five years – 2% We have no plans to implement cloud technologies at this time – 5% Not sure – 3%

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Fig

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payroll. A massive 75% of the bigger organisations expect a rise, compared with a still very respectable 58% of the smaller ones. Ian Takats, head of IT at the government backed Visit Britain and Visit England agencies, says larger organisations may now be ready to spend more on the cloud because this is the first opportunity they have had to do so, on a large scale, since the cloud came to widespread prominence. “One of the things that may influence whether you will adopt the cloud is if you have a significant infrastructure contract coming up for renewal or whether or not you are looking to buy a new data centre or something similar,” he says. “That might mean you’d look at the cloud more seriously than before. And the cloud, of course, offers the opportunity to move costs from capital expenditure to operational expenditure, which is very appealing in the current economic climate.”

W H AT C LO U D B R I N G S TO T H E TA B L E Large and small organisations – this time categorised as those with annual turnovers of over £250m and under £10m respectively – registered similar priorities in what they want to achieve from the cloud, with ‘reduced hardware and infrastructure costs’, ‘scalability’ and ‘agility’ the top three priorities for both. However, significantly more larger organisation respondents selected all three options than those from smaller enterprises. This, at the very least, shows that larger organisations are taking proactive considerations of the issues involved with the cloud. Although cost related drivers were cited most widely, ‘agility’ and ‘mobility’ were both in the top five priorities. This is an indication, according to Thomas Davies, head of Google Apps in the UK, that organisations are looking to use the cloud to add value to their service offerings, rather than just reduce their overheads. These two elements will help organisations to achieve business

THE 1

How do you envisage your cloud computing spend changing in 2011/2012? Increase – 64% Decrease – 1% Remain the same – 15% Not sure – 20%

How do you envisage your overall IT spend changing in 2011/2012? Increase – 34% Decrease – 24% Remain the same – 30% Not sure – 12%

transformation, even though this itself was down in eighth on the list, cited by only around a quarter of enterprises. Interestingly, aside from the business cases, one in five respondents said environmental benefits are a big part of their considerations when moving to the cloud. See fig 3. Davies says mobility will be especially important in how the cloud develops. “It will be interesting,” he says, “to find out how organisations see their device strategy going forward, especially in larger organisations, as this will determine a lot of the cloud services they engage with. The demand for smartphone connectivity inside enterprises that I’ve worked with is huge. That will lead, by the back door, to a lot of company data being synchronised by cloud. The device strategy Fig and the cloud strategy are inherently What does your organisation view linked.”

Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

as the most important benefits of cloud computing?

Over £250m turnover Up to £10m turnover

Fig

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How do business and IT workers see the benefits of cloud computing differently?

Business department IT department

B U SINESS VERSUS IT When respondents were split by their job function, more of those with IT-based roles picked out the benefits of ‘on demand payment structures’, ‘agility’, ‘mobility’ and ‘scalability’ than their business focused colleagues. The reverse was true for ‘business transformation’ and ‘access to skills/ capabilities that aren’t in-house’. See fig 4. And there was a notable split between business and IT regarding the perceived barriers to cloud adoption. More IT personnel registered concerns in every area than their business colleagues, with some notable discrepancies. Most prominently, there was a 27% differential between the two for ‘lack of management understanding’, which was rated as an issue for only 8% of business focused respondents but 35% of IT respondents. Furthermore, there was an 18% difference between the two functions in ‘governance’ (45% IT to 27% business) and an 18% difference in ‘integration with existing systems’ (51% IT to 33% business). See fig 5. The ‘lack of management understanding’ concerns that IT departments reported may stem from

business users making decisions in areas that are not their primary concern. For the ‘governance’ issue, Dr Richard Sykes, a former CIO of international chemical company ICI plc, says IT professionals have been through it all before. “When offshoring first came to prominence in the mid 1990s,” he says, “the thing that liberated it for the City was the Financial Services Authority at the time going to India, doing a lot of groundwork and then issuing a set of guidelines. They gave their blessing for offshoring to take place so long as these rules are adhered to. That opened the door to what, up until then, had been seen as too much of a risk.” He suggests something similar could now be of benefit for the cloud. By quite some distance, though, the biggest concern for both IT and business was ‘security’, which overall was cited by 62% of respondents. Following this was ‘data protection’ (45%), ‘integration with existing systems’ (44%), ‘governance’ (38%), ‘lack of management understanding’ and ‘compliance’ (both 32%). See fig 6. ‘Security’ is, in fact, the leading concern across all industries, except manufacturing, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods, where the biggest concern was ‘integration with existing systems’. Ian Takats said the anomalous result for manufacturing et al reflects the mature reporting processes and the heavy use of tools like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems and supply chain management programmes within these sectors. See fig 7. Thomas Davies says there is a residing anxiety surrounding security but, to vendors, this is perplexing. “While we appreciate the concerns, we really think there are robust solutions in place today that allow cloud security to be at least as good as, if not better than, on-premise systems,” he maintains. Fig

How do business and IT workers see the barriers to cloud computing differently?

Business IT

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Fig

“All of our customers ask us the same questions when we discuss their move to the cloud. But every cloud is different and you have to do proper analysis of your business needs to ascertain what’s best for you.” As an end user working for a government organisation, Ian Takats said his experience is that vendors are certainly attempting to face the issue head on – because there’s no other option. He says: “When we are looking at cloud services of any description, security is one of the things that the vendors discuss very clearly. They are addressing it because they know that if they get it wrong they will be out of business. As soon as there is a breach of their security, no one will ever trust their services again. “When pitching their services they tend to go through all of the steps that they’ve taken and, from my perspective, I read a lot in their statements that they are much more secure than anything the average company could put in place.” The residing concerns, he says, can be attributed to the fact that control is taken away from the owner and because of high profile data breaches like Sony’s. “However,” says Takats, “you could easily argue that this is not the same thing.”

Selected industries, top five barriers: Financial services:

Manufacturing, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods:

Security

76%

Data protection

60% 57%

Lack of management understanding

53%

Compliance Lack of management understanding

49%

Governance

40%

Performance

33%

Integration with existing systems

49%

Security

33%

Return on investment

27%

Public sector: Security

73%

Media and telecommunications:

Governance

55%

Security

68%

Data protection

45%

Data protection

59%

Integration with existing systems

40%

Integration

32%

Compliance

38%

Compliance

32%

ROI

27%

Retail: Security

72%

Lack of management understanding

57%

Integration with existing systems

Professional services: Security

55%

Data protection

42%

50%

Integration with existing systems

39%

Data protection

42%

Cloud provider lock in

35%

Compliance

35%

Performance

35%

FEEL THE FE AR… Google’s regional enterprise marketing manager, Itay Haber, points out that even though security has been widely registered as a concern, “the fact that cloud spending is on the rise and three quarters of respondents are either currently using, testing or actively researching

Fig

What are the biggest barriers to cloud computing?

T H E 1 S T Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

cloud technologies,” as established earlier in the survey, “suggests that these barriers are not seen as insurmountable.” In fact, less than 1% of the respondents to the question ‘How do you view the potential of cloud computing generally?’ said ‘The cloud is just a passing fad’. Only another 7% chose ‘The cloud is just another way of completing day-to-day tasks’. The biggest share of 32% answered ‘Cloud computing is an evolving concept which will eventually be an important tool in business transformation’; while 23% responded ‘Cloud computing offers some opportunities for cost and/or process efficiencies’; 20% answered ‘Cloud computing will become an essential mechanism that the world will come to rely on’; and 16% said ‘Cloud computing will enable a new wave of global innovation’. See fig 8. Dr Sykes points out that a positive by-product of security sitting at the top of the agenda is that it spurs people to analyse the safety of their existing internal systems. “What I’ve found is that there is an assumption that the in-house stuff is secure,” he says. “This

SURVEY BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Fig

is very often not the case. I’ve heard stories of in-house security teams looking at cloud proposals and saying ‘oh, very risky’ but then vendors such as Amazon What percentage of challenge this, perform tests and prove that their your computing is internally hosted, system is more secure. The most important co-located or in the cloud? thing is that whatever the decision is, it is Respondents were asked to rate each of the three options 0%, 25%, 50%, made on knowledge, not perceptions. It’s 75% or 100% and were instructed that their combined answer should about control.” total no more or less that 100 per cent.

THE FUTURE’S C LO U DY

1 = 0% and 5 = 100%

Hosting mix now: Yet the takeover of the cloud Internally hosted – 3.6 might not be as quick or as all Co-located – 1.8 encompassing as has been touted. In the cloud – 1.5 Respondents were asked to estimate what percentage of their computing is Expected hosting mix in five years: currently internally hosted, co-located, Internally hosted – 2.5 and located in the cloud and then what Co-located – 1.8 they expect the mix to be in five years’ In the cloud – 2.7 time. The options given were 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. With the answers expressed on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is 0% and 5 is 100%, the average location mix now is 3.6 internally hosted, 1.8 co-located and 1.5 in the cloud. In five years’ time, the hosting mix is expected to be 2.5 internally hosted, 1.8 co-located and 2.7 in the cloud. This shows that although enterprises accept that there will be a shift from internally hosted services to external, they expect that this will only have reached an even

Fig

How do you see the potential of the cloud generally?

Cloud computing will become an essential mechanism that the world will come to rely on – 20% Cloud computing will enable a new wave of global innovation – 16% Cloud computing is an evolving concept which will eventually be an important tool in business transformation – 32% Cloud computing offers some opportunities for cost and/or process efficiencies – 23% The cloud is just another way of completing day-to-day tasks – 7% Other – 1% The cloud is just a passing fad – <1%

split between the two by mid-decade. See fig 9. When looking at what the impact of cloud computing on IT professionals will be over the next five years, 61% said they will become more strategic, 28% said there was likely to be a reduction in headcount, just 2% anticipate an increase in headcount, and a further 2% said there would be no effect at all. Of the 7% that selected ‘other’, some of the answers that were given included: ‘Secure more supplier/service agreements’, ‘Deskill’, ‘Better strategic alignment for business services’, ‘Flexibility – home working etc.’, ‘Concentration on integration’, and ‘More emphasis on business focus’. See fig 10. Respondents were then asked how they see their own role changing as the cloud develops. The top answer was ‘More strategic’, with 34% of the response, followed by ‘More time spent on innovation’ – 28%; ‘No change’ – 15%; ‘Will

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become more research based’ – 11%; and ‘Will become more Fig people orientated’ – 9%. Comments from those selecting ‘other’ included: ‘More time on service management/ vendors’; ‘More time spent directly supporting sales’; What will be the impact of cloud ‘More time spent on core business apps’; and ‘Enabling computing on IT professionals IT teams to become more strategic and business over the next five years? focused’. See fig 11. Dr Richard Sykes said IT departments are Become more strategic – 61% adapting their outlook and accepting that they Reduction in headcount – 28% “are no longer gatekeepers” – the very nature Increase in headcount – 2% of the cloud is that it is accessible to end users. None – 2% Therefore, they will act with or without the aid of Other – 7% IT. “If the IT team are seen as ‘Mr No’ then they tend to be ignored,” he says. “However, if they act as enablers then issues stand a better chance of being properly addressed in a safe and secure way. That message is starting to filter through.” Summarising the results of the survey, Emma Taylor, founder and managing director of The Cloud Circle, said: “I think our research shows that while there are still some concerns, British enterprises have by and large come around to the idea of the cloud and they are now seeking out the best ways to implement it within their organisations. There has been a significant shift since we launched the community in December 09 – people now understand what the cloud is and they are trying to formulate strategies around it. “It is very encouraging to see such heavy projected rises in cloud it is reassuring to see that while some computing budgets, Fig expect there to be job losses as a even though overall result of the cloud, most see it as an IT spend could opportunity to become more strategic fall. Likewise, and focus on innovation. Respondents were asked “Overall there are some very how they see their own roles interesting findings in this survey which changing as the cloud develops call for further research. The security issue is fascinating in that many end users still state that it is the biggest barrier to cloud adoption, yet many of the vendors I have spoken to maintain Will become more people that it is no longer a big problem – or, orientated – 9% at any rate, most of the issues have Will become more research been ironed out. I am looking forward based – 11% to debating this topic in more detail More time spent on at our security conferences in October innovation – 28% and December.” More strategic – 34% No change – 15% Other – 3% ur thanks go to Dr Richard Sykes, a former CIO of multinational chemicals company ICI plc; Ian Takats, head of IT at public sector organisations Visit Britain and Visit England; and Thomas Davies, head of Google Apps in the UK for helping us to analyse our data.

T H E 1 S T Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

server uptime, all the time. Access your files from anywhere on any device with a web browser. It’s time to go Google.

“Going Google” means using Google Apps for Business: web-based email, calendar and documents designed to help teams work better together. Learn more at www.google.co.uk/gonegoogle.

© 2011 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. The 99.9% uptime SLA for Google Apps is offered to organisations using Google Apps for Business, as described in the Google Apps for Business Terms of Service.

INTERVIEW IAN MCDONALD

The latest IT

innovation, hot off the press The Cloud Circle talks to Ian McDonald, head of infrastructure and cloud at News International, to find out about his organisation’s push towards the cloud and to get his advice for those now embarking on similar journeys

an McDonald started working for News International in January of this year, with the newspaper industry in the middle of its biggest operational transition since the invention of the printing press – the switch to digital newspaper content consumption. Previously, he had handled business critical IT support and project implementation in senior management roles for a number of leading companies, including DHL and Datacom, in his native New Zealand. He moved to the UK in 2009 to become head of IT at the Symbian Foundation, where he moved nearly all services into the cloud, including file shares, email, finance, and HR, and

If the staff are not running around worrying about the Exchange server, they can put their talents towards innovation instead

migrated all of the websites to Amazon EC2. Now at the UK arm of media group News Corp, working across a portfolio of Britain’s best selling and longest running newspapers, including The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times, McDonald’s job is to ensure that the company uses the very latest in IT to ensure it is as innovative and efficient as possible, while staying ahead in the fight for digital dominance. As his job title suggests, News International sees the cloud as one of the best weapons at its disposal on both of these battlefronts. Within McDonald’s remit is an ambitious target to reduce the organisation’s physical servers by 50 per cent by the end of 2012. “This is entirely achievable,” he says. “The main message is that we are fully committed to the idea that the future is based on the cloud. With any new application that comes up at the moment, the first thing we ask is ‘why shouldn’t this go on the cloud?’ And we’re also looking at old ones to see if we can either move them over to the cloud or replace them altogether with cloud-based services.” The cloud has already been a revelation to some operations within News International. Whether it’s in the newsroom or in the IT department, McDonald says the collaborative and communicative functionality of things like Gmail and Salesforce Chatter are proving invaluable. “It means that people can work much quicker, more efficiently and be more creative as they share ideas better,” he says.

T H E 1 S T Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

INTERVIEW IAN MCDONALD

Ian McDonald CV:

Born: New Zealand Work history: January 2011 – Present: Head of infrastructure and cloud, News International Responsible for all Infrastructure including: SAN/storage Linux/Solaris Network VMWare Fixed and mobile telephony Datacentres Guidance and support for cloud: Citrix Amazon Databases Google Oracle/MySQL/SQL Server Salesforce Microsoft services including SaaS AD, Sharepoint, Group Private/hybrid cloud initiatives Policy, SCCM

The cloud has allowed the newspapers’ websites to host a much larger quantity of data intensive videos, which are ever-increasing in popularity with audiences, and also takes away a long standing issue of the increased traffic through big audience competitions. “Without scalable cloud facilities, these would simply kill our servers,” says McDonald. Although News International will have benefited from some cost savings from going into the cloud – mostly through savings in capital expenditure that would have been splashed out on the new physical servers and other infrastructure refresh – McDonald says this really is not the ambition. He also says there are no plans to make any reductions in headcount as a result of the cloud. He adds: “If the staff are not running around worrying about the Exchange server, they can put their talents towards innovation instead. Essentially, you stop running servers and start running services.”

Some advice

McDonald’s advice to businesses that are embarking on cloud implementations is to “stay committed and see it through.” He says solutions should be ‘truly cloud’ in their versatility, pricing, and whether or not you can get in and out easily. “Don’t go for big up front fees or long,

2009 – 2011: Head of IT, Symbian Foundation 2007 – 2009: General manager, Waikato/BOP, Datacom 2001 – 2005: IT manager (equivalent to head of IT/director), SITEL 1999 – 2001: National software support manager & software manager, ECONZ Jan 1998 – Dec 1998: IT manager (equivalent to IT Director) New Zealand and Pacific Islands, DHL 1995 – 1997: MIS manager, Ecolab 1991 – 1995: Process computer engineer, BHP NZ Steel Other interests: Motorsport, dining out, currently studying for a PhD in Computer Science in his spare time.

locked-in contracts,” he says, “as these go against what the cloud is supposed to offer. And make sure that you know what the process will be for getting your data out.” When considering Google services, he advises working with one of the company’s official partners, rather than dealing with it directly, as some offer excellent support service. By the same token, he suggests that when working with Amazon, it is worth taking out one of the company’s tiered support packages. He advises caution if you use outsourcing companies for your IT needs as “they might think they will lose revenues via the cloud. They will have to adapt or die,” he says. “It really is a false dichotomy to fight the cloud.” Where personal careers are concerned, for those aspiring to an executive position within IT, “it’s really about being someone who can move things forward rather than being a blocker,” he says. “That’s the way the cloud will move things. If you don’t go and provide it for your users they will go and provide it for themselves.” He says the biggest obstacle is people being scared. “But there’s no need to be. Just test it and see how it goes – that’s the beauty of the cloud.” An extended version of this interview is available on www.thecloudcircle.com, where you’ll find a range of other interviews with senior IT executives, thought leadership features, case studies, videos, blogs and news.

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FEATURE SOCIAL COMPUTING

We’re becoming a world full of

socialites – and it’s big business Not come around to the idea of exploiting social computing for your business yet? You could be missing a big bag of tricks. Mark Young explores the benefits of consumer-led social media to the enterprise, both customer facing and behind the scenes, and looks at what the effects could be on the way we work

T H E 1 S T Cloud Circle I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S R E P O R T

t’s a sure bet that not a day goes by when you don’t come across social media several times over – even if you’re part of a diminishing group and don’t have accounts yourself. You encounter it on television, on the radio, in magazines, through other people’s conversations, and you see the logos of the major networks on just about every website and product advertisement you come across. They petition you to ‘follow us’ – we’re in a world full of Pied Pipers, it seems, and we’re easily serenaded. However, the influx has been the work of a relatively small number of pioneers, on the business front. Our survey found that only 12% of organisations are actually using social computing at the present time. Those that haven’t embraced it yet will still be saying: ‘Great, but how do we make any money from it?’ Some believe you’ll soon struggle to make any without it.

W H AT YO U LO S E ON SWINGS… The technological revolution of recent years, spearheaded by online developments, has changed the way people consume media. This, in turn, has altered their perceptions of interruptions and how they interact with other people and marketing messages. It has opened up new forms of communication while closing off others. Through on demand

FEATURE SOCIAL COMPUTING

television, people can circumvent the adverts. Through real-time delivery of specific news streams, either through applications like Google Groups, user groups on Facebook, LinkedIn and the like, or RSS feeds, they don’t have to engage with the subjects they’re not interested in. According to John Dodgson, a social computing evangelist who works as a consultant and strategist for business transformation specialists Pera, and an associate lecturer at York University, this has led to a fundamental change in the way people consent to communication. “If you try to contact somebody within a large multinational company through the traditional route of calling the switchboard, identifying the correct department and then trying to locate the individual person that you need, it’s near impossible. People are no longer prepared to accept unsolicited interruptions.” However, social computing has created a new route in. “Things like LinkedIn are generally regarded as much less invasive and people will generally respond to it,” says Dodgson. “And this way you can find out who they are and contact them directly, relatively painlessly. In the future, when you’re looking for new business and you’re not using social computing, you’ll struggle. Others who have got on board will have better access, better relationships and more information to make the right decisions.”

THE DIVISION BE TWEEN HOME AN D WO RK B LU RS Thus, social computing has created something of a dichotomy – as opposed to their attitudes to unsolicited communication through traditional means, people have accepted they are contactable whenever and wherever they are through new media. And this has significantly streamlined the efficiency of communication within organisations. Using things like Google Chat and MSN Messenger, people can quickly and easily see whether a colleague is working and available.

They can then fire off a quick question with about three clicks of a mouse and the question will pop up on a work computer, home computer, internet café computer, mobile or tablet device – whatever’s in use at the time. The formalities of the email system – itself a weakened version of traditional pen and paper letter writing, though still fraught with social convention – are taken away. And if the mobile has long been sounding the death knell for the desk phone, social computing means the desk itself will at least be looking over its shoulder. As Justin Pirie, cloud strategist at Mimecast, pointed out at the 5th Cloud Circle Forum in May 2011, “work is becoming less of a destination and more of an activity”. Now, you can put your staff closer to markets and clients and have them travel to wherever you can derive benefit, working while they get there, organising everybody through collaborative, multi-user group conversation and shared documents which synchronise in any number of locations and platforms simultaneously. You can have fully functioning members of staff, as they would be in your office, working ‘on location’ or gaining all of the peace and quiet In the future, when and comfort of working you’re looking for new in their business and you’re not own homes, using social computing, using their own you’ll struggle electricity and coffee to boot. What is the total John Dodgson, consultant, PERA cost of ownership of your business premises per person? What would it mean if you could reduce it by pushing your staff out into the big wide world? Far from meaning the business loses the ability to keep tabs on its employees, social networking arguably allows you to see even more detail on your workers’ current status, whether they are in the office or not. On the contrary, a more pertinent danger of the blurring between the workplace and the office is that, ironically, social networking tools could deprive employees of their social lives. Pushing too much work upon employees, who have the capacity to work at home, may make them feel obliged to do so in their own time.

T H E T W O WAY S T R E E T W I D E N S For advertisers, too, social computing has taken away with one hand while giving with the other. People might be increasingly less responsive to TV and radio adverts but, for the most progressive marketers, personalised and two-way interactive platforms are now among the most powerful tools in their stable. Users create their own digital environments in which they are most comfortable to engage from and they relay this to the advertisers through their digital footprint. In short, they do all of the hard work for them. The consumer is now given a direct route back to interact and buy products alongside the marketing messages, allowing them to instantly act upon their impulses, and the advertisers can utilise a number of different social computing platforms, including networks and mobile applications, to keep the audience engaged.

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FEATURE SOCIAL COMPUTING

N O LO N G E R JUST FOR TECH HEADS

used to be the realm of geeks and nerds alone – it was John by no means a layman’s activity. But one of the biggest Dodgson by-products of interactive web services has been the says Pizza demystification of computing, on an interface level. Hut is a model As the hidden, back-end technology has become more complex, the end proponent of this. user experience has become simpler to operate. And therein lies another “They launched an all singing, key value to the enterprise. You no longer need specialist skills to utilise IT to all dancing new pizza which they produce an effect. Just as a child learns to talk because it naturally comes marketed through Facebook, into contact with language, social computing skills are now gained seemingly offering discounts to build up a innately. The digital natives – the first generation of whom are now in their base line of ‘followers’. Alongside early 20s and are entering the world of work – don’t know anything else. They it, they released apps for the are ready to use that rudimentary grounding to utilise IT for innovation in the iPhone where you shake the workplace. Furthermore, those born before the mid device to pour sauce over your 1980s are putting the ground work in at home chicken and ‘pick up’ toppings in the evenings and weekends as personal to spread over your pizza when pursuits to reach the same level. People now you order. Then there’s a game know how computer applications generally where you drive around delivering function and can adapt their knowledge of pizzas until yours arrives. In short, home applications to use business ones. It is they covered all bases to keep the far easier now, for instance, for somebody attention of the consumer in an to learn CAD modelling software because attempt to provide no motivation they are experienced in the operation of for them to seek out a competitor. computer interfaces. Speaking about th They’ve definitely seen a return on this development at the 5 Cloud Circle their investment.” Forum in May, Microsoft’s Dave Coplin Dodgson says once you begin said: “Five years ago we’d have killed to interact with audiences on for that level of technical engagement. social networks you have to keep We now have to make sure we utilise it up. Otherwise, the decrease it.” The last thing you’d want to do in your communications will be is to suppress that enthusiasm for taken as synonymous with your something you can profit from with no business overall. investment needed. If you have built a decent “You have to be bold online following you can also use enough to make the leap and it to tout new ideas and get a empower individuals to use quick response from the market whatever technology they without having to facilitate focus choose to do the job,” says Coplin. groups and trials. And the risk of “If you don’t, they’ll use it anyway, potentially sullying your name by doing so is insecurely, and you’ll marginalise your IT personnel.” dramatically reduced. If you are Whether it’s through closer links with your audience considering rebranding a product, to advertise your wares, easier purchasing all you have to do is start a techniques for your customers, better ways rumour on the internet to tout new ideas, reduced barriers to IT among about the change staff, allowing your employees to communicate and then monitor better, or allowing them to work from more the response. efficient locations; it’s almost certain that you If it’s positive, can benefit from social computing in some go ahead. If it way. This applies to the national pub chain, as gets slated, it does the back street mechanics, the smallissue a denial town family run accountancy firm and almost that the any other type of business. change had “Nothing has changed purchasing and he number of businesses ever been marketing as much over the last 30 currently using social mooted and years,” says John Dodgson, “and it will computing strategically get back to the continue to develop at a rapid pace. drawing board. What I say here could be out of date by the time it goes to print.”

12%

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CASE STUDY DEE SET

Gavin Jones of fastgrowing logistics and fulfilment company Dee Set explains how the company was able to cut IT costs and improve client services with Google Apps for Business

n just eight years, York headquartered logistics company Dee Set built a £50m turnover and an employee headcount of 1,300 by helping customers, including Asda, Claire’s and Morrisons, reduce their inventory levels and lead times. The nature of Dee Set’s business and its high rate of growth meant its IT system had become costly and inefficient. Collaboration on projects among its 700 widely dispersed, field-based workers often amounted to a “logistical nightmare,” according to IT manager Gavin Jones. Likewise, its reporting to clients needed improvement, and the company’s email system was no longer delivering value for money, with its increase in users and traffic. After a thorough evaluation of several traditional and cloudbased productivity solutions, Jones found that Google Apps for Business, Google’s enterprise-ready email and collaboration application suite could solve all of the company’s IT frustrations. As well as the increased collaboration and more efficient communication, the scalability and adaptability

Getting approval from the board was no problem when I mentioned the cost savings, which were projected to be up to £70,000 per year once the system was implemented Gavin Jones, IT manager

Dee Set

it provided stood to save the business between £60,000 and £70,000 per year, if it made the switch. The management decided to move everything and everyone over to the new system at once. “We followed the big bang approach,” recalls Jones, “and we switched off Microsoft Exchange completely after three weeks. Although we had assistance ready on-site if anyone needed help, Gmail proved so easy to use that most of our staff figured it out pretty much on their own.” Dee Set quickly began to see a number of productivity and cost benefits emerging from its transition to Google Apps. For example, one of the regular tasks for the field-based employees sees them go into retail organisations to undertake remerchandising and product recalls. This involves visiting stores to put together reports on the number of a specific product on a shelf; where the product is located; whether it is on sale; or whether a promotion was attached to it. All of the information has to be reported back to the customer – a task which Jones says has become easier with Google Apps. “Google Docs and Google Sites have transformed the way we manage fieldwork, making the process of remotely managing reporting across multiple teams while on client sites straightforward,” he says. “We can save time and money on phone calls thanks to integrated chat within Gmail. Audit trails are preserved with Google Chat logs and administration can be dealt with instantaneously.” Version control is also no longer a headache for Jones and his colleagues. “We’ve always had problems having everyone use the right templates,” he says. “Now we simply have one version of the truth, hosted safely in the cloud and available to our staff by simply accessing a browser. Our teams can collaborate with each other on the same doc at the same time.” The Dee Set employees have also reported back favourably on the search, labelling and archiving functions. And the ability to personalise the Gmail interface has also proved highly popular. Jones concludes: “What I love about Google Apps is that it is business-ready software in a cloud offering. We in internal IT departments have limited time and resources to innovate ourselves. It’s great that Google does it for us.”

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CASE STUDY WWF

World Wide Fund for Nature

This case study information has been extracted with permission from a full Best Practice Insight report published by MWD Advisors, providers of practical, independent industry insights that show how leaders create tangible business improvements from IT investments. The full report is available at www.mwdadvisors.com.

The famous conservationist charity WWF needed a more interactive and collaborative intranet platform for its 5,000+ staff and partners around the world. It turned to Google Apps

s the world’s largest charity foundation in its field, WWF works with local communities, corporations and government aid agencies all over the world to drive and support conservation and sustainability projects. While its international headquarters are located in Switzerland, the organisation has 90 offices in 40 countries, employing 5,400 staff. With projects spanning the globe, there has been a long-standing need within WWF to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration among its employees and partners. From an IT perspective, while each individual office is responsible for its own administrative applications (such as HR and finance), WWF has a central secretariat which has responsibility for enabling communication and collaboration. In 2000, the secretariat implemented a global intranet which was designed to provide a central place for storing and sharing information. However, by early 2009 the system had come to be described internally as “ordered chaos”, with information hard to find, response times slow, and content sharing processes inefficient and unmanaged. The system became increasingly shunned by employees, who turned to emails as an alternative. This meant that WWF’s on-premise email system was becoming increasingly overloaded and there were further knock-on effects relating to poor document management and lack of version control. The secretariat decided that it needed a new solution which would better support content sharing among virtual teams and cross-border and crossorganisational project management needs.

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Challenge:

WWF needed to modernise its intranet and provide a more interactive, social and collaborative environment to support project teams spanning the globe.

Solution:

The organisation began rolling out Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar to deliver a platform for creating project workspaces and best practice file stores, as well as to provide a new framework for the intranet. The organisation is now also part way through implementing Gmail as a replacement for its on-premise email solution.

Outcome:

Eighteen months on, WWF has achieved significant adoption of the new collaborative platform, resulting in improved content management processes, greater efficiencies, and less reliance on email for collaboration purposes.

CASE STUDY WWF

Implementation characteristics and status

When the process of selecting a technology began in early 2009, the key focus was on balancing the organisation’s requirements with a very limited central budget. High-end project management tools like Microsoft Project were ruled out quickly on a cost and complexity basis. And while the project team considered on-premise wiki tools like Atlassian Confluence, ongoing maintenance costs, as well as issues with providing connectivity to remote locations, meant that these too were quickly ruled out. The team decided that a hosted, SaaSbased solution was their best route, providing instant scalability and outsourced support. Several members of the project team already had private Gmail email accounts and some were already using the free version of Google Docs within WWF. Thus, the team decided to consider Google Apps as a whole solution. Apart from its functional capabilities in respect of the organisation’s primary requirements, the decision was made to use Google Apps for two key reasons:

Competitive pricing – as a charity

organisation, WWF was able to make major cost savings by licensing the Google Apps Education Edition for 3,000 of its users.

Email cost savings –

while the original requirement was not to replace email, the inclusion of Gmail in Google Apps provided an opportunity to save more money by migrating the organisation’s 2,500 Program Office staff from its onpremise Novell Groupwise email system. After successfully piloting the service for twelve months, in May 2010 WWF upgraded its licence to the full Google Apps Pro edition to enable it to support the organisation’s remaining 2,000 users. All WWF employees now have access to Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Sites. Today, the WWF intranet consists of a central front-end news portal providing access to local office intranets and collaborative workspaces (underpinned by Google Apps) which support more

interactive, project-based activity and best practice file stores. Google Docs is used for sharing content, collaborative authoring, forms-based data collection, and project planning and tracking; Google Calendar is used for managing and sharing personal and team event calendars; and Google Groups is used for organisation-wide discussions. The project team recently also activated Google Video, and intends to promote this as a solution for enhanced internal communications.

The approach

WWF took a relatively low key approach to rolling out the service, selecting a few specific groups of employees, particularly those in high-visibility global teams, and showing them what they could do with the new tools. To start with, the focus was on the project-based collaboration tools within the suite – in particular Google Docs and Google Sites – and on encouraging a viral adoption process as individuals saw for themselves how the tools could be of benefit. The project team then created templates for global initiatives, team workspaces and office intranets to enable them to push out Google Sites to various teams in the network.

Adoption

When it came to the strategy for getting people to use the Google Apps tools within WWF, the education process was carried out on a team by team basis. The project team helped each group to identify their problems, and then suggested ways in which the new tools could support them, rather than simply teaching them how to use the technology. A key message which was reiterated throughout the training process (and via ongoing education) is that email should be used as a communication tool, and not a document storage tool. Training was carried out either remotely via web conferences or in-person, depending on the location of the team.

Overcoming security concerns

In order to overcome internal security concerns about who is able to access WWF content hosted in the cloud, the project team implemented the Google Apps services behind its pre-existing single sign-on (SSO) service. This allowed them to roll out the new services without users needing another username and password, and to avoid hosting login credentials on Google’s servers.

Technology and infrastructure

A key requirement for WWF’s implementation was that it was integrated with the organisation’s LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) hosted server. Other integration requirements included enabling employees to work with Google Docs and Microsoft Office together, and for this WWF uses Offisync that enables individuals to save to Google Apps directly from Word, Excel or PowerPoint. While some offices have opted to use the browser interface within Gmail, others access their email via Microsoft Outlook.

Saving time and costs

Two years on, WWF has achieved significant adoption of the new collaborative platform, resulting in improved content management processes, greater efficiencies, and less reliance on email for collaboration purposes. Content and project owners feel a much greater sense of ownership of their intranet and project workspace pages, reducing the management overhead on the central IT team and making the intranet a more valuable and relevant resource. Once the migration to Gmail is complete, the organisation will also be able to point to tangible cost savings relating to systems management and technical support, again freeing up internal IT resources for other activities.

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“Going Google” means using Google Apps for Business: web-based email, calendar and documents designed to help teams work better together. Learn more at www.google.co.uk/gonegoogle.