IT management as a service: the disruptive offering from uGovernIT

In part 1 of this report, we looked at the startup world, and uGovernIT's role as an exception to the consumer-focused world of Silicon Valley


Startup uGovernIT makes an “ERP for the CIO” product of four interrelated modules for the management of IT. It is aimed at the SMB enterprise CIO, and specifically midmarket firms--not the Global 2000/Fortune 500 market world of SAP and Oracle. Described below, the modules interrelate strategy, resource planning and execution, the management of projects and service delivery.

 


There are several reasons for Infrics.com coverage of this company. In many ways the uGovernIT business model, sales, and service delivery approach mirrors trends you’ve seen in Infrics reports since 2011.

• Stateless
  There is no local app installation of uGovernIT. It is all delivered through a web browser. That means that out of the box, it’s enabled for virtually any enterprise laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile device. The heart of the stateless computing idea is that the processing power lives in the cloud, while the result is consumed by a device that provides connectivity, display, and user interface, nothing more. This can be incredibly attractive for the enterprise CIO: quick, low cost deployment with predictable lifetime TCO.
• Simplicity as a design choice
  One of the main characteristics of enterprise software that inhibits innovation is complexity. While each of uGovernIT’s functionality modules can be customized, the workflows, forms, charts, and interfaces are streamlined versions of their very expensive big enterprise counterparts, and can be used by a small or midsize company to begin adding value from day one. By design, one of the disruptive ideas this company puts forth is “good to go” without months of IT division customization and planning.
  
  This graphic illustrates the range of prebuilt services in uGovernIT:

• Consumer software-modeled cost structure
  Founder Subbu Murthy believes uGovernIT is disruptive. With a cloud delivery model and per-seat pricing, it’s IT as an expense item, not a capitalized cost. And as Murthy points out, the pricing model is “like Quickbooks.”

The company sells a service, not a product. On the one hand, they defy the expectation that a tech startup is staffed by fresh-out-of-college high achievers with designs on the consumer space. On the other, they challenge the legacy of the big software and hardware companies that rely on pre-digital (and fading) models of the enterprise IT department.

Now that’s disruptive.

 

Amazon Web Services: $1B in stateless computing revenue, "less than 10% of its eventual size" -- NYT

Active in Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing - NYTimes.com:

When an AWS customer speculated on the price of a server--which he never has to buy thanks to Amazon's servers in the cloud--he said, "for me, that would be like knowing what the price of a sword is."

This is an excellent article from the New York Times.  The success of Amazon's effort highlights three important Big Ideas:

• Abstract complexity
  If you can't eliminate the complex, manage it so the part that is consumed appears simple.  AWS abstracts the entire data center so well, end users neither know nor care how it happened.  Don't Know, Don't Care (DKDC) is one of the biggest enablers of:
  
• the Service Oriented Enterprise
  Up to now, buying, configuring and managing servers and the place they live was like a piece of a very elaborate jigsaw puzzle.  It had many edges and only fit together in one way with other similarly elaborate pieces.  AWS is like Lego blocks: standard and predictable. It can be assembled in millions of ways. When the elements of business processes are decomposed into reusable component parts, it's the difference between a Lego store and the impossibly jumbled Room of Requirement in the Harry Potter stories.
  
• Decouple data, applications, and machines
  Remember, cloud computing, for all its (mostly justified) hype, is only one part of the stateless future.  AWS represents the impact of stateless processing power at the top level; imagine the same impact propagated across personal and mobile computing, user data, and the applications in your enterprise, and you begin to see the true promise of the stateless future. 

From ReadWriteWeb: CIOs see consumerism as threat

Read this on the ReadWrite Enterprise site and see if it doesn't sound familar:


CIO survey: consumerism threatens the enterprise cloud



One quote in particular is comment-worthy:  "Consumers just have unrealistic expectations for the levels of services that IT departments are capable of delivering, say 74% of CIOs surveyed worldwide and 81% of U.S.-based CIOs. As a result, IT departments are having to be tasked with delivering functionality levels and multiple device support that they're not even ready for."

This is exactly what we've been discussing in the "era of you" series, and is a natural corollary to the conversation I reported with Podio's Ryan Nichols.  The IT organizations as they exist in most enterprises, and by association the businesses they serve, are threatened by the expectations of their users, and by the services those users can deploy themselves without an IT department at all.

The quote from CIOs has a hidden prefix: "As we operate today, if we don't change, we can't meet consumer expectations."  The logical extension of that quote is this: "we have to do things differently in order to meet those expectations."

Three things to start changing today: the big ideas

1. Get your services house in order.  Structure data, infrastructure, ERP, and other elements that are mission-critical but unrelated to competitive advantage so they can be delivered as reliable, repeatable, recomposable services.  Manage complexity here to enable the flexibility you need at the user level.  This is hard work, but it's crucial to your success. 
2. Get out of the business of managing devices.  Virtualize users' desktops, adopt stateless devices, sunset old client-server technology wherever possible, require new applications to be web-enabled.  Secure your data and quit thinking that securing the device is your responsibility.  Once you are stateless, every app and all the data lives in the cloud, and the device has virtually no security risk anyway.
3. Organize for less command-and-control, more responsibility moved to individuals and teams. No organization can compete well in an era of empowered users when everything is subject to committee, cover-your-ass stagegates and approvals, and "I can't budge until I'm 100% certain I won't be blamed for doing the wrong thing" thinking.  

The fears about consumer demands are very real.  Moreover, in an improving economy, those consumers inside your company and without will vote with their feet, and take their skills and their business to those who implement the action points above.  

How much longer do you think you can get away with inaction? 

C-suite talk: can you make complexity disappear?

Building blocks, not jigsaw pieces.
Image from countingblocks.com

In the last of the C-suite articles, I talked about managing complexity, either by relentlessly simplifying processes and applications, or by abstracting a complex service in such a way that it appears simple to those who consume it.  This time, let’s take a closer look at the latter: how to use complexity abstraction and why it’s an underappreciated business tool.

A service oriented enterprise is composed of 4 service tiers (for more on service tiers, see “How Technology Disappears”):

1. Lines of business, end users
2. Service Orchestration
3. Service Management
4. Infrastructure

There are exceptions, but in general, the tiers build on one another: service management uses the products of the infrastructure service to enable service orchestration to serve end users. One of the simplest measurements of success at each level is the degree to which service providers can offer consumers freedom from concern over where the service came from and how it was provisioned. It just works.

This is not revolutionary, but it’s very actionable. By simplifying and standardizing component parts of complex things, the care taken by providers at each service tier abstracts the complex into a simple, consumable product.  How can you do this?

• Standardize: practice strong, almost rigid exception management when customization is requested at lower service tiers.  This is an area, especially in IT, where businesses have traditionally operated backwards.  Your business and your employees are locked down to enable success of highly customized infrastructure and applications, when it should be exactly the other way: very high levels of standardization at lower levels in support of ease of deployment and customization at the user side.  If you are abstracting complex services by standardizing their component parts, you almost automatically guarantee your business is right-side-up here.
• Reliability engineering: Attack the weakest link in a complex process, and do the heavy lifting required to get its reliability up. Think of your car engine: the ignition system and fuel delivery systems were once high-maintenance items that demanded a fairly high level of driver involvement. Today, both are handled by computers. The Bosch computer in my old car has now managed ignition and fuel injection without attention for 22 years. Reliability is a great complexity abstraction if you make it a component of service delivery.
  
• Building blocks, not jigsaw puzzle pieces: each can be assembled into something useful, but jigsaws can only be assembled one way.  Building blocks are the ultimate abstraction, and can create many outcomes from standard shapes. That structure is the metaphor for your abstracted complexity.  If it only has one purpose, it it worth it?
  
• Externalize: instead of creating abstraction inside your own four walls, pay someone else to do it for you, and purchase a consumable service, which appears simple to you as the consumer. This is the province of services like cloud computing, third party payroll managers, and distribution services like UPS.  Their success lies in managing away the complex so you don’t have to.  It’s their core business strength.  Is it really worth it to make it part of yours?  The greater core simplicity you can structure into your business--the areas that don’t justify customization or added complexity--the more opportunities this solution presents.  The explosive growth in enterprise-ready external services and their abilities is also moving favorably in your direction.

The idea is to create a virtuous circle: structuring for managed services enables simplification and abstraction of complexity, which enables greater agility and higher business efficiencies. It sets you up for “one question to rule them all,” namely, “do I have to care about where that service came from, or can I just put it to work?”

"Beauty and the Beast" teaches us the future of social commerce

If you want to understand where technology is taking us, look no further than Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.  Although Belle longs to escape her provincial life, in her small village everyone knows everyone else, and daily life is a series of highly personal interactions among village folk.

Once we grew beyond a single small village, we’ve used technology ranging from iron keys to letters of credit to chip-encoded passports to confirm our identity and our rights. Something you possessed took the place of village recognition as proof that “it’s me!”

As things got more complex there were fewer interactions between people who actually knew each other. Technology enabled more and more distance between people, and more layers of separation between those who consume and those who provide.  “Good morning, Belle!” has been replaced by “please listen carefully, as menu options have recently changed.”

That’s the background for the revolution technology is now making possible: the re-emergence of the village metaphor. We’ve already seen our village become the “wall” on Facebook or its equivalent, and in constant touch with different circles of friends and interests.  Google picked up on that very idea with the “circles” in Google Plus.  

Replacing the fact that everyone in the village knows you and will vouch for you hasn’t caught up yet.  Nothing has quite given us a new version of “hi, how are you, would you like your favorite table?” “Hi, neighbor, try the apple pie today, it’s delicious!” “Shall I just put that on your tab?” Proving who you are by the fact that you’re just plain recognized and known is long gone.  Yelp and Foursquare and other early versions of recommendation engines are trying to apply technology to the “try the pie” equation, but they are still very primitive, require that you actively work to find things out, and are disconnected and ad hoc.

You’ve probably heard “social” attached to way too many things by now: the social network buzzwords and all the associated catchphrases: social selling, social enterprise, social graph.  It’s communities of interest, not communities of place.  But at its heart, the online social world, our “circles,” represents Belle’s village, with internet nodes replacing cobblestone streets.

The “era of you” concept is based in the idea that technology can re-personalize a lot of everyday life and business transactions, and that the village metaphor has much to teach us as it does.

• You are the hub of a network of information, all coming into view as consumable services that can be combined into a “you” layer.  As I’ve pointed out in discussions about the forthcoming digital personal assistant, it can access your roles, your rights, your preferences, and your behaviors to facilitate work, shopping, travel, entertainment, learning, and social interaction.  Technology can recognize things and people to provide context in real time.  
• Technology can enable a new security model based on circles of community: circles of trust.  Using the “degrees of separation” model, shared contacts across contact circles attest that you are authentic; a “likelihood of mutuality” algorithm can generate authentication that is not two-or-three-part, but thousand-part, almost impossible to game or falsify. It duplicates at scale the village dialog, “I don’t know you, but my best friend does, and if he says you’re OK, that’s enough for me.”
• Objects and people can also now recognize you, in ways that can re-introduce the village “I know you, come on in” proof of identity.  Adding to mutuality-based authentication, facial recognition programs can now recognize you with very high accuracy.  Add a layer of “you” service to attest that you’re in a role, location, and activity that meets the standards of authentication.  At that point, we’ve really done completely away with the need for such familiar objects as keys, licenses, passports, credit cards, and tickets--and the bane of modern technology, the password.  If you belong on that plane, in that theater, charging that meal, driving that car, the world-as-village knows and allows it without further action.  The digital wallet concept, is suddenly very old news.  Tap-to-pay, near field communications?  SO yesterday.  “I know it’s you, here’s your receipt.”

The possibility takes the standard CRM “one single view of the customer” a big step forward: “one single view of YOU.”  There’s no reason Starbucks shouldn’t know your favorite drink and your name as you approach the counter.  There’s no reason your airline can’t recognize your travel patterns, offer to bill your ticket to your corporate account because it has figured out your itinerary is a business trip, and pre-populate your expense reports.  Will we see this reality of the entire world treating you like royalty? Not likely to happen.  But will we see someone who sees the value in providing the integrative “you” layer, and someone else who grows their business dramatically with tech-assisted personalization?  Will demand for personalized services grow? Count on it.  The digital personal assistant could be the user iterface to this richness of personalization.  

This “re-villagization” of security and commerce show us another side of the social promise of technology.   Authentication and personalization represent great opportunities to deconstruct old ideas into services that can be used in many ways, and to use technology to re-introduce highly personalized services that feel like village life in its most idealized form.   Who will dream big enough to bring it to us?  As Belle said, “there must be more than this provincial life.”

Thank you, Belle.

C-Suite talk: agility starts with 2 questions

C-Suite Talk: an Infrics.com series about ideas that matter to executives

Individuals--consumers of technology--move through rapid change like dancers. New ideas, new products, short implementation times and perpetual beta? Not only do they make it look easy, as former Texas governor Ann Richards joked about Ginger Rogers, they do it “backwards and in high heels.”

Corporations--enterprises--move like hikers with a 90-pound packpack. Burdened by legacy technology, the sheer size of their businesses, and business practices laden with feature creep, the best answer they can give to technology is often “not now,” and sometimes, it’s just plain “no.”

Without seeking to make light of the very real challenges of running a business, don’t you sometimes sit alone in your office contemplating your own business, and wish you were more of a dancer and less of a plodder?  If there is one single element that stands between you and agility as far as business is concerned, it’s complexity.  

Complexity sneaks in like a thief, but because it’s stealthy, it works its way through your processes and technologies until it begins to seem more like the norm than an unwelcome intruder.  Reducing complexity is strategic, but it takes a solid tactical mindset to achieve. As you tackle complexity in your organization, try looking at it by asking these 2 questions:  
Is there a simpler way to do this?

If not, how can we manage the complexity so that it appears simple to those who use it?

Images from wikipedia.org

These are hardly revolutionary ideas. But the thought of seeing complexity through two different lenses is a powerful one that can be used in a lot of situations.  One can build on the other.  Can you simplify underlying processes as a means of abstracting a more complex one?  Can an abstracted complex process enable a simpler approach in another area? 

When you either reduce or abstract the complex, you service-enable it; the components of your technology and your business become building blocks. It is not realistic to think you can eliminate the complex, but it is a critical business success factor that you manage it.  

Complexity management is the business equivalent of laying aside the backpack, and walking on level ground instead of uphill all the time.  It is a core concept of the service oriented enterprise, and is a core tool for the C-Suite to manage enterprises well.