Summary: SaaS adoption is rife among fast-growing companies that want to adapt to change and stay up-to-date. That leaves conventional on-premise vendors competing for the laggards.

There’s a received wisdom that SaaS adoption is taking place among a subset of companies that face substantial change. SaaS makes sense if you need to move fast, grow quickly, adapt to rapidly changing markets or, in some cases, foreshorten the disruption of consolidation or downsizing.

In the ERP space, the latest expression of this trend is seen in the adoption of SaaS in subsidiaries of large companies that want to quickly accelerate their business in emerging markets or get better real-time information from regional operations running outdated legacy systems. Both SAP Business ByDesign and NetSuite OneWorld are targetting this opportunity. I’m at NetSuite’s annual conference this week (disclosure: travel and accommodation funded by NetSuite), where the company has been celebrating its penetration of Fortune 100 accounts with this strategy, including global brands such as Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, MetLife and others.

The corollary of this line of thinking is that the rest of the market will remain with the conventional software vendors — SAP, Oracle, Infor, even Microsoft who, bless their hearts, believe Dynamics AX is going to pick up business from their on-premise rivals. So here’s the rub. Exactly how many organisations are there today who don’t face substantial change? Exactly how large is the market for new software among companies that are happy to move and grow slowly, whose markets aren’t changing so much or who have plenty of time to consolidate and downsize? How many multinational subsidiaries are going to be upgrading their ERP because they’re in slow-growing markets and don’t mind waiting another year before they bring real-time information streams online?

The fact is, the nature of business today is such that no one has time any more to wait and plan for a conventional multi-month or multi-year on-premise implementation. The market for the old way of doing things is dying and SaaS is capturing more and more of all the businesses that will thrive in the future.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas/speed-of-business-propels-saas-expansion/1568

For many a social media guru and consultant, the first question they ask a potential client is: “What’s your social strategy?” And it’s a good question to ask, sort of, if you’re in social media consulting. Many companies admit they have no social strategy, providing an opportunistic wedge for consultants everywhere.

In fact, the Pragmatic Marketing Social Media Survey from November 2011 found that 33% of respondents don’t have or are unaware of that company’s policies. So “what’s your social strategy?” is likely the wrong place to start for many, and just might be overkill for nascent implementations.

The question it’s best to ask is: “What is your business trying to achieve?” In that context, social tactics can aid in achieving those goals, perhaps integrating with a more “traditional” digital campaign or maybe even a big brand spend. Starting with the tactics, however, is backward.

Start with the business. Depending on the business priorities, you may choose to focus on different activities. For example, improving service might require one set of social tools, tactics and resources; changing perceptions and creating awareness could require another. As social media and content strategist Jay Baer explains:

“The goal is not to be good at social media. The goal is to be good at business because of social media.”

That statement should be the spirit in which all social options are evaluated. Social media is anything but free, and is just part of the marketing mix. Marketers have to look at all the options for engagement before determining the approach.

It’s clear that participating in communities, engaging your market and improving overall processes presents great opportunities throughout the business (marketing, support, sales, education, fulfillment, etc.). And social projects continue to be a key priority for hitting these business goals in 2012 and beyond. But you are making a choice of how to invest your time, and choosing one approach over another likely means something else gets dropped. The anchor for all social efforts should be the business and its goals.

Examining Success Stories

There are a handful of case studies always cited as successes in social media by bloggers and tweeters alike.   The true successes didn’t start with a social strategy—they started with a business need. Let’s look at some case studies to uncover what these showcase social implementations were trying to achieve for their businesses.

Dell Outlet. One of the most visible success stories comes from Dell. The computer solutions provider set up its @delloutlet Twitter account to improve customer awareness about its outlet, which offers value-priced merchandise to consumers. The tweets aren’t conversational per se, although the company does respond to inquiries and service needs. Instead, the @delloutlet stream provides awareness of promotions and other efforts designed to achieve an overall goal: revenue! The company achieved big results—$6.5 million in 18 months (according to Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer)—via content development and Twitter. The stream now has more than 1.5 million followers, making it one heck of a broadcast channel.

This Is Seth’s Blog. Seth Godin provides another example of increasing awareness without interaction. I’ll submit that he is one of the best marketers ever, and estimate that many a product manager, product marketer and CMO strive to be 23% as creative and 36% as effective as he is. I mean this guy writes pithy little paragraph posts, which are retweeted all day long and consistently increase the visibility of his blog and brand.   He does this with no engagement with his 160,000+ followers, which validates use of social as a channel for broadcast.

Old Spice. This frequently cited social story started with a goal: Change the image of the brand. According to Old Spice brand manager, James Moorhead:

“The oldness of Old Spice was part of the problem. Every young man in America has a memory of his father or grandfather’s pungent aftershave—and young men don’t want to wear their father’s cologne.”

While the online tactics gained the most chatter, it is important to note that the strategy and plan to achieve this goal started with TV commercials. Over time, it prioritized social efforts from the brand team to achieve the business goals, but it was not a “social strategy.” Social became one of the most effective tactics in an execution plan for the brand that included traditional media and IRL (in real life) events.

Namecheap. Namecheap is a domain service that competes in a really crowded and highly commoditized segment by using social as a differentiator. If you look at the @namecheap Twitter page, it becomes evident that service is important to the company—not just service as it relates to support, but to buying too. But don’t take my word, take CEO Richard Kirkendall’s:

“Our company culture is entirely dedicated to you, our clients and how we can help you buy and manage your domains in the most efficient and hassle-free way possible.”

Namecheap has not made social its strategy, but has strategically chosen to view the customer as king and social as a channel for engaging the king. Effectively, social has been integrated into Namecheap’s DNA, including operational processes, products and the buying process. The use of Twitter has had significant benefits, including as much as a 20% increase in domain registrations based on Twitter contests and alike (according to O’Reilly Radar).

There are many more cases studies all over the web. For most, good content and good service are the key themes in successfully achieving business goals and increasing awareness of a product, company or promotion.

So where should you start?

Social isn’t necessarily a new thing; it’s a different way of doing things.

And let’s be clear, it is real and valuable for all businesses. There isn’t an option to not participate. But the questions should be around the level of investment and the focus of the effort: awareness, revenue, service, etc.

Social can be a great leveler for businesses and markets. With social, single home offices and small businesses can take their services global and start-ups can gain visibility and awareness not previously available without big budgets. But to create more effective programs, you have to understand your market’s preferences and identify how social can help—rather than wedge social into the market. It shouldn’t be a single channel for any given program or initiative, you need to focus on the consistent goals and messages (content) across the channels, including social. Some refer to this as your content strategy, but a more accurate term that is emerging is “content architecture.”

I think many marketers are looking at tools to provide a silver bullet. But without alignment to the goals of the business and the overall strategy, social efforts can become noise, rounding errors and minutia that consume resources and time and deliver minimal ROI. If you develop your content architecture right, you can build strong relationships within your market to drive action, regardless of where social fits in.

Engage or Broadcast?

Active engagement and real-time marketing, with teams involved in ongoing conversation and alike, is a valid approach to going social. But if this is your approach, you need to make sure your engagement is valid and not spam.

In a recent promotion for Jazz Fest, Acura randomly did some off-topic tweeting. This was quickly exposed on Twitter as being what it is: spam. The etiquette of respecting your clients’ and markets’ time and meeting their expectations is critical. Just like we don’t want to spam our opt-in list in email, we need to have the same courtesy with our social engagement or broadcasting. The content needs to be relevant and real. If you target your engagement with those of like interests and insist on putting out stale promotional messages (similar to old-school interruption marketing), those efforts (and any outbound marketing like that) won’t succeed.

Getting the Love, Not the Like

So to put a bow on this, let’s address a simple question: How do we get folks to love our products and brands? Customers and prospects alike are ultimately looking for service, content and information on their terms, not yours. Markets look for relevant information NOW, not when a salesperson can follow up. Your market wants service NOW, not once it goes into a queue and is assigned out of the CRM inbox. This is how we build relationships in a social world—by understanding expectations and delivering on them. And while social is increasingly the channel that some buyers use and some customers prefer for service and engagement, traditional methods still drive most of the revenue and value for businesses. (The most successful programs I’ve seen in social have taken an integrated approach, where programs and market initiatives combine traditional efforts with social.)

It also isn’t just marketing that social can make better. There should be a support, sales and product social strategy to drive toward the goals of the business. Any given department or program may or may not deploy social tactics, depending on the business goals.

Net-net: It’s not a given tweet, post or even an orchestrated set of social activities based on a social strategy that drives success, but overall alignment of the goals of your business with the needs in your market—using social when appropriate.

About the Author

Jon Gatrell brings more than a decade of experience in product management, marketing, sales, and corporate development to Pragmatic Marketing where he is an instructor. Prior to Pragmatic Marketing, Jon served in senior product management and marketing positions at a number of companies, most recently at Stonebranch and Inovis. He has successfully implemented the Pragmatic Marketing Framework at multiple companies, and integrated it into several acquisition plans. He has held leadership positions in numerous industry organizations. In addition to his role at Pragmatic Marketing, Jon writes the Spatially Relevant blog on product management and marketing best practices.He can be reached at jgatrell@pragmaticmarketing.com

http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/newsletter/you-need-a-business-strategy-not-a-social-media-strategy

I don’t think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it’s not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

It’s not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.

Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/05/hard-work-on-the-right-things.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

What is Facebook’s secret to keeping the world’s largest user base content? Sticking to well-proven software design principles, one study has concluded.

University of Washington graduate student, Parmit Chilana, worked as an intern at the social networking giant last year, and, during her time there, interviewed Facebook engineers and design specialists to learn about how they build and deploy new features for the service. Chilana discussed her report, which she co-authored with other researchers at the University of Washington and Facebook itself, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, being held this week in Austin, Texas.

Facebook has an audience that would make user bases of even the largest software products seem small in comparison, Chilana explained. As of latest count, the social networking service has over 845 million users. And it is an audience as diverse as it large: Facebook supports over 70 different languages. About 80 percent of its users live outside of the U.S. and Canada.

“Even if only 1 percent of the users were dissatisfied, that would still represent close to 10 million users,” Chilana said. “Most software companies don’t even have a user base of 10 million users. So you can imagine the impact of [Facebook's] design choices can be enormous.”

While its users may grumble about periodic privacy infractions or buggy new features, Facebook has largely been able to continue to increase its user base and keep them involved. About 50 percent of its users log on every day, and interact with more than 900 million objects that Facebook stores on their behalf.

Chilana sought to identify what perceptions those in charge of Facebook’s user interface held about what makes for a successful user interface. She interviewed 17 Facebook employees — software engineers, product designers and product managers. She queried them about the decisions they had to make when launching a new product or feature and asked how decision choices fit in with the company’s business priorities.

Chilana’s work “is one of the very first studies of Facebook’s [design] process,” said Wayne Lutters, a computer science associate professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, who moderated Chilana’s talk. Only recently has the company “slowly started opening its doors to outsiders,” wishing to learn more about its development process, he said.

As a baseline, Chilana used the generally agreed upon principles of good software user interface design, as espoused by John Gould and Clayton Lewis in a 1985 paper “Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think.” Gould and Lewis stressed iterative design, a focus on user testing and user-focused design in general.

While many product designers tend not to be aware of such principles, Facebook relies heavily on such ideas, Chilana found. “Over half the interview participants explicitly identified user experience as a key factor in driving design on Facebook,” Chilana said.

Facebook also values iteration. One engineer told Chilana that the company “will just try to get something out there, make sure it is reasonable and then iterate on the design based on how people are using it,” she said. “Design is hard,” another designer told her. “Just doing our best with very smart people, we screw up plenty.”

This approach is not always easy given the size and variety of Facebook’s user base. One engineer told Chilana that “once you get away from the core features, it is not necessarily obvious that there is a magic way that a feature could work in a way that everyone can find value in it,” she said. Engineers often have to design for the least common denominator, she said. Many proposed advance features don’t get implemented because the adoption rate would be too small to make the work worthwhile.

Engineers cannot simply rely on intuition. Early on in the company’s history, Facebook engineers added many features on the premise that if they thought the feature would be cool or useful, so too would the users. The company is slowly moving away from this mindset, Chilana said. New features, such as a photo upload button, must be equally intuitive to a 90-year-old Mongolian grandmother as to a 14-year-old Brazilian soccer player, one engineer told Chilana.

Even with user satisfaction in mind, Facebook designers are not afraid of implementing a cutting-edge feature that fulfills the company’s long-term vision of what a futuristic social-networking site should be like, even if it causes short-term dissatisfaction with users. When Facebook introduced the Timeline format last year, for instance, some users complained that it was clunky and difficult to use.

One engineer praised the company for not being afraid of making changes even if it causes some dissatisfaction. In some cases, such as the controversial Timeline, Facebook will give users the option to update to a new feature before rolling it out across the entire site. This works to minimize the disruption caused by the new feature, as well as giving the company engineers more time to tweak the design.

Despite its size, Facebook faces the “same frustrations” that other organizations do when trying to design good interfaces for their users, Lutters said. “It’s a very familiar tale, even if the stakes are much higher.”

“It’s a positive affirmation that they are doing the things everyone is else is doing to stay current, relevant and focused,” Lutters said. “If there is a secret sauce, she wasn’t able to uncover it.”

http://www.cio.com.au/article/424170/study_facebook_relies_good_design_retain_users/

Many IT decision makers feel they are more likely to have a close encounter with a flying saucer than see the completion of their company’s cloud migration in the next six months.

This was one of a number of alarming findings contained within Cisco’s 2012 Global Cloud Networking survey this week.

The company polled 1300 IT decision makers in 13 countries spanning five continents, and revealed a lack of universal confidence in the cloud among IT professionals unless a proper cloud migration strategy is adopted.

The survey included a series of irreverent comparisons designed to put “cloud deployments in perspective”, with 31% of the experts surveyed stating that they could train for a marathon or grow a mullet in less time than it would take to migrate their business fully to the cloud.

Nearly a quarter of those polled stated they would in the next six months be more likely to see a UFO, a unicorn or a ghost before they see the completion of their company’s cloud migration.

This however masks a more serious undertone that many IT professionals are either not comfortable with or are close to moving to a private cloud in the very near future.  The survey noted that it is “a clear sign that many IT organisations are still considering and planning cloud migrations.”

Currently only 5% of IT experts have managed to migrate half their company’s applications to the cloud, but this is expected to rise to 20% by the end of the year.

According to those surveyed, the applications which had been moved to a private or public cloud most were email and web (77%), followed by storage (74%) and web conferencing (72%).

Nearly two in five (39%) polled “dread” network challenges with private or public cloud deployments, as well as the same percentage claiming they would not trust their own business information with their current cloud product.

The survey also revealed that cloud service providers were the go-to body for information about the cloud. Service providers were the main source of information, followed by industry analysts, industry peers and information vendors.

Cisco predicted in their Global Cloud Index that by 2015 global cloud IP traffic will have expanded twelvefold and that by 2014 over 50% of computer workloads will be based in the cloud.

http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2012/may/11/unicorns-more-likely-cloud-migration-says-survey/

The web offers cheap and easy access for our clients (internal or external) to access services 24×7. As a result, our web stores and public facing sites have become “must be available” on the same basis. But how many of us actually follow through?

Catching up on bills on a recent weekend, I was doing internet banking, paying a parking ticket and checking a utility bill. Except for the annoyance of having to remember and type in passwords (being able to view my recent electricity usage requires more security than accessing my bank accounts), everything was fine. Fine, at least until I needed to check on a health insurance claim. As soon as the screen flashed up, I remembered, again. While this company prides itself on customer service, promising 24×7, I have yet to ever get access outside of standard office hours. In this case, I got a generic message, paraphrased as “we’re normally available 24×7, but we guess since you got this message that we must doing some sort of software maintenance. Here’s our hotline number, staffed Monday-Friday during office hours.”

Needless to say, this experience is not good customer service. Maybe I’m just incredibly unlucky that I have only tried the few times that maintenance was actually in progress, but I doubt it. This certainly wouldn’t happen in a web store environment, where no service is understood to be no business and lost future visits. More likely this stems from a corporate culture of the customer is captive, so they have to follow our rules, perhaps coupled with classic “lipstick on the elephant ” architecture; that is, a nice web portal to an ancient batch system that really hasn’t changed since the 70s. Talk about creating an opportunity for your competition!

Before you dismiss this as “well that’s them, I’m OK,” perhaps you should take a more careful look at all of your services as they are delivered, not against the standards of your industry, but to the standards of the web consumer, whether a paying customer or your own employees, where anytime, anywhere is the expectation. Using some old management clichés, this is shifting the thinking from “we’re no worse than anyone else” to “we’re here for you whenever and wherever you decide you need us.”

Going from 99.7 percent availability to 100 percent is non-trivial in both cost and staff resourcing. Determining what services need to be continuously available isn’t easy. Here’s where you, the CIO, can take a leadership role by changing the paradigm from a narrow focus of delivering what your business unit client asks for to one that is strategic: what is needed to deliver truly excellent customer service? For example, do you track how many times your “sorry and go away until Monday” pages are hit and offer a form to leave a message and promise follow-up? Or perhaps include a short survey when your site is up asking “how are we doing?” And you’re using social media; what is being said there?

It’s about using our roles as IT leaders and experience as customers to do our real job: improve our organisation’s ability to be successful. Our competition is Google, Facebook, and the other major utilities. We’re not in the same business, but they set the rules for presence on the Internet: continuous, robust full service. Imagine what a weekend blackout of Google would be. Can’t you see the governmental special commissions following days of apocalyptic media commentary and sharply devalued stock prices, probably triggering a U.S. Congressional investigation, and a call in Canada for a royal commission on how to lessen our dependence on foreign information services?

To your customers, being turned away when they need access sends the message that you don’t care about them. It leaves them wondering why you don’t care when they’re paying you for a service, while the “free” services are always there. More importantly, the answer to the question of whether one of your competitors can do better is only a few clicks of the mouse away.

George Gorsline has been an IT leader at Interac Assocation, Toronto East General Hospital and CIBC. He is now a consultant with IT Initiatives.

http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/opin/the-24×7-cio-are-you-really-open-for-business

It is often said that happy staff lead to happy customers.  So what are some good ways to improve staff happiness and ensure they enjoy coming to work?

At a recent discussion we asked a number of contact centre managers and directors for their ideas.

1. Free tea, coffee and chilled water

This has become the de facto standard for most American-owned companies but is still missing from many U–based contact centres.  It does not cost a lot to implement but is a simple way of showing that you care about your employees.

2. Free fruit or breakfast cereal

Some companies go a step further and provide free fruit or breakfast cereal.  It has been proven that people are less tired and concentrate better if they have had breakfast in the morning.

With so many contact centre employees skipping breakfast, you could find low energy levels late in the morning. Ask around your team to find out how many have had breakfast.  You may be surprised.

3. Hold an open forum for agents

“I hold an open forum every few weeks where agents can drop in and vent or comment,” said one contact centre manager.

“We make a bullet-point list of the main themes and have them viewable to all in the main office.  These are followed up directly and updates are posted on the call centre wallboards.  It makes everyone feel like they are listened to, and improves overall engagement a lot.”

4. Explain the reasons behind the rules

Many contact centres have rules.  These can often be seen as petty.  But if you can show agents the reasons behind the rules they are more likely to fit in with them and not resent them.

5. Engage agents in the change process

Companies have a great deal of change going on, much of which is simply imposed on the agents.  But if you talk to people about the changes and involve them in process change you are more likely to bring people on side.

6. Share great feedback with the rest of the team

Most contact centres get loads of great feedback.  Make sure that you share this with the rest of your team, and if possible put it up on the wallboards or notice boards.

7. Produce a monthly newsletter

A monthly newsletter written in house by agents themselves can be a great way to help with communication.

8. Staff surveys to measure happiness

Want to measure happiness?  A staff survey can be a great way to measure how happy the staff are, and also to find out if there are any underlying issues.

9. Employee of the month awards

A simple technique is to have an employee of the month award.

If you want to give your employee of the month awards a bit more visibility, then why not send a short write-up and a photo in to Call Centre Helper.  We run a monthly column on this.

10. Prize incentives around major events such as the World Cup

Major sporting events are a great way to create a bit of buzz.  From a prize incentive around an event like the World Cup to a simple sweepstake around the Grand National, these can all be good ways of making a good talking point.

11. Look at the work environment

“I think environment is very important – we give our agents freedom around the contact centre to sit on sofas, work off laptops – we’ve invested heavily in Macs so they don’t have slow systems,” said one customer service director.

12. Team spirit

Outside activities are a good way of helping to generate team spirit.  This can drive the social element and encourage better cohesion.

Social events such as 5-a-side football, shopping trips, Christmas parties can all help to pull the team together.  These can be done outside of work hours, but will all get a bit of a lift if you can subsidise them in some way – for example, laying on the transport.

13. An agent wellbeing team

“We have an agent wellbeing team that rotates every quarter, and they are charged with delivering 3-5 improvements every quarter for their peers,” said one customer service director.  “The improvements are things like getting to work – cycle schemes, shared pool cars.”

“It’s 4 agents at a time – they rotate every quarter, they are given a budget and they are accountable to their peers.  The agents see it as a great positive and it’s great for us to spread the customer service mission around the company – it removes silos.”

“It also promotes the art of responsibility across the entire customer service organisation – not just top down.”

14. Chill-out areas

Getting away from the desk is important and on many business parks there is nowhere to go for a walk.

Many contact centres have solved this with a break-out hub or chill-out area with an Xbox, drinks fridge, and comfy sofas.  This allows staff time away from their desks on lunches and breaks and the opportunity to recharge.

15. Staff can book their own time off

Booking time off is a major cause of discontent.  A simple way round this is to allow agents to book their own time off through the workforce management (WFM) system.

16. Work in another department

Every quarter give one agent the chance to go and work for a week in another office.  You can allow someone back to your department in return.  As well as providing some variety in the job it is also a good way of building bridges with the rest of the company.

http://www.callcentrehelper.com/sixteen-initiatives-to-ensure-your-staff-enjoy-coming-to-work-27793.htm

It will be much of the same in the ICT industry this year as it was in 2011, according to a global market trends report just published, which predicts continuing consumer tech disruptions will drive agendas even within the largest of enterprises, and that businesses face a tough time due to economic uncertainty, forcing them to ‘œpare IT budgets to the bone.’

In its IT trends report for 2012, CSC warns that unless something changes soon, economic growth will slow during the next several months, with businesses paring IT budgets to the bone, and every¬thing that can be pushed back or deferred will be.

The report, authored by CSC Australia and Asia chief technology and innovation officer, Bob Hayward, does, however, see some positives for the industry, with the momentum behind technology-enabled business growth and innovation remaining strong, and with IT investment not coming to a ‘complete stop as in-flight projects continue.’

Hayward also cites Gartner’s report for 2012 in which it projected US$2.7 trillion of global enterprise spending on information and communications technology.

And, Hayward says that this year it’s all about delivering ‘cheaper and better’ for the industry. ‘CSC’s Leading Edge Forum (LEF) has identified, as the service economy of the new world matures, that enterprise is changing its view of IT from a choice between lower costs and more value to a new view where cheaper and better is the new norm,’ Hayward says.

‘In this new world, enterprise IT functions must reduce their back-office focus so they can keep up with the explosion of technology at the front of the company. As a result, enterprises in Australia will be casting their eyes over several technology trends in 2012, trying to discern the right time and the best approach to take the best advantage.’

Hayward also outlines what he sees as the top 10 enterprise IT trends this year and, not surprisingly, he puts cloud technology at the top of the tree as the number one trend, seeing the cloud bandwagon rolling on from last year, and ‘transforming and redefining service availability in its path.’

According to Hayward, the five defining elements of a cloud service – elasticity, on-demand, metered consump¬tion, shared resources and Web access – start to become the ‘default means by which new IT services are rolled out and implemented,’ and he says that improved agility and removal of all the impediments for innovation become the most significant advantages gained by choosing cloud.

‘There are subtle changes underway as the overall adop¬tion of cloud increases. The growing need for transparency, trust and governance will gradually lead to the emergence of voluntary industry codes of conduct, trust marks and confor¬mance to emerging standards, like the CloudTrust Protocol,’ Hayward suggests.

Hayward also cautions that what he sees as currently, weak scrutiny by SMEs and consumers on the credentials of cloud providers, will adjust to reflect ‘growing concerns over treatment of data, privacy and security,’ adding that larger enterprises remain somewhat cautious about using global public clouds.

With cloud technology at number one in CSC’s top 10 trends list, Hayward look briefly at the other nine major trends and what developments he says can be expected in these areas over the remainder of this year and beyond:

2. The demise of legacy assets
The huge inventory of legacy systems and applications is a substantial part of many enterprise IT portfolios. And yet it is missing out on all the exciting innovation from consumer tech, cloud and mobility. Something has to be done. Enterprises in 2012 start to seriously consider retiring, replacing or decommissioning legacy assets. And many will look to transform legacy to more contemporary languages (Java, C#, Ruby) and environments (x86, cloud) using a growing number of automated and semi-automated tools now coming into the market

3. Big Data
The potential value of gaining insights from analysing large and increasingly unstructured data sets has hit mainstream. In 2012 many organisations will try to apply the new shared-nothing architecture and distributed processing frameworks to store, process and manage business information. By the end of 2012, IT strategy and architecture vocabulary will grow to include terms like MapReduce, Direct Record Access or Queries, NoSQL Databases, Parallel Relational Databases, Hadoop (MapReduce engines) and many more. Big data means big backups and big recovery. Enterprises that do not engage comprehensive disaster recovery plan¬ning are playing with fire

4. Convergence of IT and OT
Business will look to exploit the increasing convergence between traditional information technology (IT) used across enterprises and operational technology (OT) used to sup¬port production and control assets. IT/OT convergence promises to integrate machines with enterprise systems, driving value-based optimisation and bullet-proof reliability. While IT has matured in reliability, its convergence with OT will not rapidly expand the traditional patch of enterprise IT as some are promising.
Nevertheless, we expect that in 2012 enterprise IT will increasingly work in the operational space. But the focus for enterprise IT must address the age-old divide between OT managers (mainly engineers) and their IT counterparts

5. Strategic leaking ‘“ the power of information transparency
The 2011 disclosures of hundreds of thousands of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks led CEOs, CIOs and senior managers to ask, ‘How can I lock down my organisation’s information and make sure this doesn’t happen to me?’ It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that companies will have to become more transparent, whether they want to or not. In 2012 we expect that the more strategic firms will ask a completely different question: ‘What data and information that we’ve always considered confidential should we be making available online ‘” and how could we leverage the disclosure of that information?’

6. Post-PC mobility -  the consumerisation of IT
Smart, context-aware, mobile devices and enterprise applications that exploit the latest devices are making the traditional desktop/laptop computer seem old-fashioned, unintuitive and generally a drain on productivity.2012 will be the year that these truly mobile devices and applications become pervasive across the enterprise (in the new post-PC era). Enterprise IT must find ways to embrace this trend so it does not end up on the wrong side of history.
Enterprise IT must make significant changes in procurement, vendor management, employee support, security policies and legal compliance

7. The user is the universe, work anywhere ‘“ the enterprise no longer the centre
If we are indeed in a post-PC trend, then enterprise IT will require a greater level of understanding of our new perimeter at the edges. With increasing mobility, users are able to work anywhere, on any device and over any network (business, shared or third-party). Robust access like this raises notable security concerns. Traditional enterprise will grow beyond its accustomed perimeter, moving out to the edges. With stories of high-profile data breaches constantly in the news, security identity management will be in the spotlight. In 2012, forward-thinking organisations will understand the new perimeter and change current enterprise-centric approaches to a new user-centric federated identity management approach

8. Rapid knowledge capture ‘“ the drive to retain retiring baby boomers
There are thousands of baby boomers retiring now every year. Many are irreplaceable, and unfortunately there are simply not enough people to take their place. The result: a huge loss of critical knowledge and IP, most of which is tacit know-how built up over years of experiences that can’t be easily transferred. The mass exodus, or ‘great crew change’ as some industries have labelled it, will drive targeted spending on rapid knowledge capture, storing and transference. In 2012, expect to see the use of virtual environments to communicate key business processes. New human’“computer interfaces, like Microsoft Kinect and Augmented Reality, could allow some retirees to remotely stay on the job, shadowing and interacting with their younger peers

9. Taking it seriously ‘“ Green IT is in full bloom
IT sustainability has dropped off in importance due to global financial uncertainties. But the introduction of a carbon tax in Australia and rising energy costs will force enterprises to take sustainable IT seriously. In 2012 IT will lead the deployment of better tools required for detailed reports on energy use by business unit across the IT infrastructure, and to track continuous improvements in energy, ethical waste removal and water use. By the prudent and focused investment in intelligent IT systems in building management, supply chain, transport, logistics and energy production/distribution, the national goals of achieving carbon emission reductions in excess of 25% by 2020 can be achieved (without the need for a tax or trading scheme)

10. Collaborate without borders ‘“ the emphasis on offshoring knowledge & process
The global search for talent and insight at a competitive price will drive an increased emphasis on offshoring of knowledge work and the outsourcing of business processes in 2012. A readiness to go outside the organisation for skills and feedback will also raise the acceptance of crowd-sourcing and the use of social media to converse with the market, stay alive to new opportunities, generate ideas and create content. Technologies that enable or facilitate collaboration across the world in virtual teams will be major areas of investment

http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/54536-cloud-top-trend-in-it-this-year-but-it-budgets-under-pressure

In recent years, consultants Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton kept hearing the same lament from corporate clients: “It we can’t get our culture right, nothing works.”

The longtime partners and collaborators, who specialize in employee recognition, teamwork and culture, had long ago identified keys to building teams whose success could generate such strong momentum as to transform entire organizations. They wrote about those strategies in “The Orange Revolution,” a follow-up to their bestseller “The Carrot Principle,” which focused on how the best managers use recognition to keep employees motivated and dedicated. They backed their strategies with research involving hundreds of thousands of employees at a wide range of companies.

They have built an impressive file of corporate case studies that demonstrate the keys to workplace success. “Zappos is one we had written about before they were even cool,” Gostick said in an interview. “The teams know exactly how to make the culture work for their team. There are some nuances, but the teams are part of a big, structured organization, and the culture is clear. The problem is that most of us find ourselves in places that aren’t as clear. The team leaders think that the culture is defined, but it’s just not. So what we find are these oases of culture and teams in sometimes dysfunctional organizations.”

So, the two set out to pin down strategies for creating the sort of culture that demonstrably works the best. The result is their latest book, “All In: How the Best Managers Create a Culture of Belief and Drive Big Results.” Published recently by Free Press, the book has hit the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists. In it, Gostick and Elton offer a seven-step road map for creating a successful culture, as well as a quiz to determine if a work culture is dysfunctional and a list of 52 ways to get employees to be “all in.”

They worked with Towers Watson to analyze a 300,000-person study involving 25 high-performing companies, which helped them identify the traits of workplace cultures where employees believe in their leaders, but also understand and work for the company’s mission, values and goals. Employees at such companies exhibit what Gostick and Elton call “the three Es”: they are engaged, enabled and energized. Particularly notable is that the study was conducted during the height of the global recession and yet when financial data from a pool of 50 global companies was studied, those that displayed high levels of the three Es also had average annual operating margins of 27.4 percent.

The operating margin is the percentage of sales left after a company pays wages and for raw materials and other costs, and, as they note in their book, “operating margins above 27 percent are rare and worthy of exploration. They indicate efficiently run organizations, but also ones where customers are willing to pay a premium for their services.” The Towers Watson study further found that the 27.4 percent annual average was nearly three times higher than the 9.9 percent achieved by companies found to have low employee engagement, and that companies identified as having high employee engagement came in at 14.3 percent. Clearly, the other two Es of enabling employees, in part by empowering them to make their own decisions, and finding ways to keep them energized, make an enormous difference.

As is often the case with management sorts of issues, what seemed fairly straightforward was anything but that.

“We had all this data and as we went out to talk to clients, we would talk about the three Es,” Gostick said. “We had one manager raise his hand and say, ‘That makes sense, the three Es. Yeah, I get it. But how do I do it?’ It was kind of a slap in the face. We said, ‘We’re presenting all of this data, isn’t that enough?’ And he said, ‘No, I need to know how to get there.’”

The next step then was to identify leadership characteristics that are always part of a high-performing workplace culture — things such as a strong focus on customers and employee recognition. They identified six that they thought they could put in a sort of “catch-all bucket,” but their editor pushed back at them, saying the data showed, for instance, accountability characteristics that weren’t on their list. They kept at it, working with researchers to identify 50 or so characteristics of the best managers and cultures and then “putting them into the right buckets” to create different models for building effective corporate culture.

“We would bounce them off our editing team, we would bounce them off our clients, and there were parts that were sparking and parts that weren’t,” Gostick said. “When we got to our seven it was a real ‘ah-ha’ moment.”

Out of that work emerged a road map of seven steps that have what they call the “most powerful effect.” The seven points, which the book elaborates on in detail, are: clearly define the corporate mission; create customer focus; develop agility; share everything; treat employees like partners; cheer for each other, and establish accountability.

The book blends the research they analyzed and case studies from their consultancy, The Culture Works, into a practical how-to guide for creating a successful workplace culture. Along the way, they advocate for leaders to create workplaces that are fun, where camaraderie among coworkers is a given. Gostick pointed to the corporate cultures of Google, Southwest Airlines and Apple as examples of that. “A woman at one of our presentations said she works a 40-hour, full-time job and then a Saturday job at an Apple store. She said, ‘That Saturday there helps me keep my sanity the rest of the week. We have so much fun. They treat us so well there,’” Gostick recalled.

“The best cultures we studied do fun things,” he said. “Microsoft blasts music to get everyone up and moving. Everyone needs a little dose of levity.”

He and Elton have over the years heard the concern that fun for one person might not be fun for another person and what happens if someone is offended by office levity (they give examples of such situations in their book as well). “So what if somebody is offended,” Gostick said. Besides which, as the book suggests, people who take offense at having fun at work probably need to find themselves some other place to work.

Grumpy attitudes about having fun at work also tie directly into the need to get people to believe in the company’s mission and goals — the “all in” of the book’s title. People have to be persuaded to believe, Gostick and Elton write. Like many other business and management-focused books these days, they bring neuroscience into the mix, as research into how our brains are wired and how they work (or don’t work so well) increasingly is linked to all areas of life, including the office.

It can be woefully difficult to get people to give up their routines — even those that don’t work well — and their bad habits. Banishing ingrained skepticism and pessimism to achieve an “all-in” environment requires patience, perseverance and skill. But even in a place that falls short of the high-performing success stories that Gostick and Elton use as examples, individual departments can bring about positive cultural changes.

“The ideal way is top down, but if you find yourself a manager of 10 people in an IT department, don’t give up hope,” Gostick said. “You can still have a great team.”

That great team, he added, will influence other teams and that’s how the roots of a more successful corporate culture will begin to take hold.

http://www.cio.com.au/article/422999/guide_how_build_an_all_corporate_culture/

A new report by KPMG shows Australian businesses across many industries could reap substantial benefits through reduced capital and labour costs by adopting public cloud services.

Modelling the Economic Impact of Cloud Computing which was commissioned by the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and launched by Senator The Hon. Stephen Conroy , estimates that adoption of cloud services across 75% of ICT spending would result in an increase in long-run GDP after 10 years of $3.32 billion per annum*. At 50 percent adoption levels, the GDP gain is $2.16 billion per annum.

“There’s a critical need to continue to find ways to improve productivity in Australia”, said Nicki Hutley, Chief Economist at KPMG. “Successive governments over in the past have improved productivity by implementing a large number of reforms, but these have typically been the ‘low hanging fruit’ – such as industrial relations, tax and savings reforms. However, a number of factors have seen productivity slump over the last ten years. Widespread adoption of Cloud by businesses and government is the next key area of potential productivity improvement”.

“Cloud computing has a lot of potential but in Australia it is at the early stages of adoption when compared to uptake in the US and Europe. However, more businesses are now beginning to realise that the potential benefits of adopting cloud can be very large in either cost and/or time savings, as well as providing increased potential for innovation”.

Chief Executive Officer of AIIA, Suzanne Campbell, said there was no doubt that Cloud computing was the tool of the future, and one which would ensure businesses could grow and remain viable in an ever-increasingly competitive environment.

“Cloud computing has been shown to not only boost productivity, but it also adds greatly to the flexibility and agility of business which enables them to adapt quickly and cost-efficiently to meet and take advantage of changes in their business environment”, Ms Campbell said.

“There are huge opportunities for businesses in Australia to adopt Cloud computing and set a firm foundation for their future growth and development”.

Between August 2011 and March 2012, KPMG interviewed 29 organisations covering sectors accounting for 80 percent of GDP and ranging in size from 20 employees up to many thousands. Of those interviewed, KPMG found that the financial services, property and business services, education services, and media information and telecommunications sectors had the most robust results.

The report also found that it was not just big business that can benefit. “We found that small- to medium-sized enterprises could save significantly on operational costs. New companies trying to establish themselves are also more likely to succeed as their start-up costs would be lower as they could take advantage of the economies of scale offered by large public clouds”, said Ms Hutley.

While there is a strong economic case for the adoption of Cloud services, there are nevertheless several constraints and natural barriers which need to be overcome. These include the compatibility of an organisation’s internal processes with cloud offerings, connection speeds, location of data and related security issues, business continuity/disaster recovery and integration, and limited knowledge of product offerings including businesses’ lack of familiarity with opportunities.

“These challenges are gradually being overcome and we can look at early adopter countries like the US as government and businesses in Australia navigate their cloud adoption journey”.

The report also pointed out that cloud-based solutions do not always deliver identifiable, immediate or on-going cost savings. There could be intangible benefits such as access to to new products that allow business expansion and improved flexibility and timeliness of delivery to market. products that allow business expansion and improved flexibility and timeliness of delivery to market.

http://www.rustreport.com.au/issues/latestissue/cloud-computing-to-boost-economy-kpmg/