Workday Tech Summit - Progress Report

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

We had the opportunity to attend Workday's TechSummit, held at the beautiful Cavallo Point resort in Sausalito.

So take a peek at my takeaways:

I you cannot watch - read along: Always tough to pick the Top 3 takeaways - but here you go:

Insights Architecture - Workday gave us an update on their Insights Apps architecture - and no surprise it uses all the right ingredients for a next generation Application - Spark, Hadoop etc. - always good to learn more. Deployment options and locations was something we did not get to. I asked CEO Bhusri if Workday is slowing down on Insight Apps and his response was that customers are figuring out how to use them. Good problem to have.

Data Center Locations and Operations - For the first time we got an official update on data center locations (3 in the US, 2 in Europe) and how they are connected in (AWS similar) high availability zones. Workday has done a lot in the past to achieve higher resilience and continues to work along these lines, a key area for customers who are putting more and more, larger and larger and more critical (e.g. Finance) applications on the Workday infrastructure.
Presentation Services - The Workday extension story has initially been non existent, then was extended object by object (on my question where the vendor is - the answer was that customers do not prioritize this high anymore, as enough has been done) and now has an interesting new chapter with Presentation Services. The service allows customers to create their own screens and UIs, a major step forward. It is also the technology base for the partnership with ADP in regards of Payroll, where the service is being used to render, enter and validate the fields and information exposed by ADP via the REST interface chosen as integration technology between the two vendors. I expect more modern, next generation interfaces (and partnerships) to leverage this capability. Finally Presentation Services could also mark the first foray of Workday thinking of providing not a full fledge PaaS - but a 'paaS' (with a little 'P') - that allows the further customization / configuration, extension and creation of critical enterprise processes on the Workday platform. Departmental / End use programming knocks at all enterprise vendors doors these days...

Tidbits

iPad Product - We were handed iPads and had the chance to use the Workday HCM iPad app, a very good move that I can only encourage more vendors to follow. Of course I went off script and the iPad app was easy to use, very little 'not so intuitive' pieces and few loose ends (e.g. found 3 different date pickers). Overall a well done tablet client, that is easy to use and powerful enough for a business line manager to do what they need to with their HR application.
TCO Reduction - Vendors always need to work on reducing TCO - not only on the operations but also on the implementation and upgrade side. With O'Toole and Holincheck Workday has tasked two experienced professionals to reduce the cost of implementation and upgrades - always a good thing to see and stay tuned for 2016.
ADP Partnership - A key partnership for Workday, pushing the number of supported countries for payroll to 100 (read more here) - it leverages the above mentioned Presentation Services capability of the Workday framework.

MyPOV

Workday is continuously making progress on its platform in terms of extension for new use cases (e.g. Insights Apps), resilience (e.g. Availability Zones), core capabilities (e.g. Presentation Services) and overall TCO (e.g. Lifecyle Management plans). All good housekeeping a vendor should and needs to do, to stay on top of the game.

On the concern side Workday has chosen to operate on a proprietary architecture, that only Workday knows, understands and operates. This concern is alleviated by the capability of Workday to run its applications on common cloud architectures (e.g. development and test environments run on Amazon's AWS), the adoption of CIO accepted standards like OpenStack (though we heard little of this earlier in the week) and ultimately by Workday growing and creating a large enough ecosystem and scale to alleviate these concerns. Getting to over 5000 employees soon is such a milestone.

But technology for applications is built to run the application - and there is the Finance product which has not seen as much adoption as a successful product should. Workday is bullish to have it 'ready' now - 2016 will tell. Hindsight is always 20 / 20 - but as of today Finance is not a showcase for return of R&D Investment. With Workday eyeing further investment areas (SCM, Verticals were mentioned) it needs to make product development bets with a faster return of investment / better customer adoption. On the flipside for HCM, with the announced Learning product, Workday closes the wagons with a fully integrated suite of Core HR, Payroll (USA, Canada, UK and 2016 France more with ADP), Talent Management and some forays into Benefits and Workforce Management, that is very competitive in the market place. Not short changing HCM customers and product momentum will be a key area for Bhusri and team to manage in 2016.

Overall Workday is doing the right things on the technology side to become the long term partner for enterprises, who run key enterprise processes over multiple decades with the same vendor, through thick and thin. Every year of growth, adoption and investment brings Workday closer to that league / echelon. We will be watching.

The Battle For The Digital Corner Office, #CDO

Article written in partnership with Roger Beynon.

Whether they are spooked by the specter of "digital disruption" or just afraid that the bandwagon will leave before they can jump on, organizations are desperately looking for C-level talent with digital credentials.

"Digital credentials," however, can cover an array of competencies, and organizations have produced their own array of titles for the potential occupant of the newly allocated "digital corner office."

A quick search on LinkedIn illustrates the title diversity among the digital leader cohort.

So which title will win the battle for the digital corner office?

The answer, we suggest, is to be found not so much in the title as in the role.
Interviews conducted with 100 C-level executives over the last 12 months reveal that the "digital leader's" mission can differ widely from company to company. At retail clothing chain, for example, digital leadership means weaving technology seamlessly into the purchase process. At a hi-tech manufacturer, the job of the VP, Digital is to bring discipline and message coherence to the company's marketing and social strategy. At a century-old furniture manufacturer, digital leadership means process reengineering from the shop floor to the top floor.

Variations notwithstanding, the business imperatives behind any digital transformation strategy dictate a set of responsibilities that begin to define the role of a "generic" digital leader. Those same executive interviews point to a set of priorities common to the adoption of transformational digital leadership:

Developing the next generation P&L and driving, if necessary, corporate-wide self-cannibalization. (Digital transformation must manifest itself in the P&L or it's not worth the effort.)
Facilitating horizontal transformation and digital literacy within a company. (The effective digital leader should work him/ herself out of a job, once the organization is digitally positioned.)
Hacking the product/service requirements loop to understand what customers will need and what they will pay for. (Before these requirements become known to the competition.)

Given these priorities, how do the top-level digital titles and their accompanying responsibilities match up?

The Head of Digital Innovation/ Chief Innovation Officer focuses on exactly that - innovation. It is typically a job for an out-of-the-box thinker, but not necessarily someone with P&L experience.

The VP, Digital tends to occupy a marketing communications role. "Digital" is often synonymous with using technology to build ever higher levels of social engagement with an emotional attachment by the customer. That said, a VP is often someone who has General Management experience that qualifies him/ her for the P&L requirements that underpin the digital transformation imperative.

The Chief Data Officer owns Big Data in whatever form that takes for any given organization. Big data can certainly help shape digital transformation but the Chief Data Officer is unlikely be the driver of change.

The Chief Technology Officer tends to be an inward-focused role, essentially a facilitator and coordinator of the technology next generation infrastructure needed to meet the rapidly changing needs of the CTO's internal customers such as the CIO.

The Chief Information Officer may, in isolated cases, don the mantle of transformation agent, but the CIO role is rooted in maintaining service stability and continuity. Disruption is anathema to the CIO and asking them to embrace change as a way of life would, in most cases, would be asking for trouble.

The executive interviews point to the CDO as the title most aligned with the digital transformation mission. Here's why.

To point #1 (inventing a new P&L/cannibalizing the old):

The digital leader is often brought in with the single focus of preventing her/his organization from being the victim of digital disruption - to the point of going out of business. Richie refers to this as "preventing companies from having their Kodak moments" - more currently, their 'Zune Moments'". This can involve radical self-cannibalization in the way that you see right now with GE, which is divesting itself of financial companies and transforming its commercial and industrial portfolio into a model for the Internet of Things. GE has become a software company in the vanguard of the IoT.

Point #2 (working horizontally across the organization):

Any digital leader missioned with company-wide transformation must be able to bring a horizontal purview to the organization and operate across functional silos. To identify, develop, and roll out new digital products or services, the digital leader might need to work with (but have no direct authority over): customers, designers, product developers, finance, marketing, sales, legal, compliance, operations, and customer support. Consider the logistics that confront a 2,500-store grocer like Kroger when it wants to roll out a click-and-collect capability -- adding drive-thru lanes, creating a picking process from an inventory system organized in huge, wrapped pallets, integrating store return credits to customer accounts and inventory systems, etc. The digital leader must bring all the vertically-minded disciplines together and move them toward a digital paradigm. (Richie believes that a digital leader in this sort of role should not have a job in about three years, because they would have worked with the rest of the organization to pivot towards the digital opportunities and make their role obsolete.)

For point #3 (figuring out future opportunities in the marketplace):

The digital leader is tasked with identifying market opportunities that can be best exploited through digital execution. To be able to see opportunity before it becomes visible to others, the digital leader must be able to work with and win the trust of customers. The digital soothsayer must divine how customers are internalizing technology-driven paradigm shifts, since those shifts will generate future requirements. IMS Health's customers include the major Pharma companies small, large, regional and global. Richie works with Pharma companies to figure out their own paths toward transformation and in doing so is able to capture their aspirations for the future. He then interprets those aspirations and delivers them to the IMS Health's digital product team to be able to build the company's next gen P&L.

The digital leader must therefore operate (and be welcome) on the customer side as well as the product side. This, as describe by Richie, differs significantly from product development practices of the past, in which "our product guys build whatever the hell they think the future is going to be and it's left to the marketing team to describe it in a way that makes sense to customers who don't really want the product but need to be convinced they do."

What are the characteristics/competencies to look for in a Chief Digital Officer?

Companies can hire and allocate digital responsibilities to any and all the titles listed above, but if the transformation imperative covers the entire company and is seen as essential to survival and success, then they will more than likely want to hire a Chief Digital Officer. For what, therefore, should they be looking?

The research identified these primary attributes:

1. A technologist who is fluent in business:
The CDO will typically have computer science or engineering as a first degree, often bolstered with an advanced degree in business and a macro-economic world view. At core, they are technologists, but fluent in language and lore of C-suite business because they will have accumulated P&L responsibility along the way. This is important because the P&L perspective guides prioritization. Digital expertise along the whole of the value-creation chain, moreover, allows the CDO to distinguish digital value from "digital noise" and to be able to evaluate opportunities consistently spawned by technology change.

2. An Internet veteran:
This is not a mandatory qualification, but the experience accumulated while riding the Internet wave cannot be overstated. Many CDO's have been involved in the Internet world for 20+ years. The majority of these have climbed the corporate ladder on the back of their technological prowess and then used that prowess to jump from IT to e-commerce to digital innovation and now to digital transformation. Having lived through the most explosive years of digital's relatively short history, they better understand its evolution and have the best chance of anticipating its direction.

3. A skilled, agile communicator:
The CDO must be articulate and persuasive. It helps if they exhibit what one CEO called "contagious confidence." The CDO's motto could be: "It's not hubris if you can back it up." They tend to be acutely conscious of their own brand, and they know its value to their corporate employer. They make digital "cool" for everyone within the organization, not just the geeks and the marketers. The CDO makes digital a corporate an idiom as well as an emblem. As a result, both the brand and the culture carry a different vibe.

4. A digital anthropologist:
The CDO is an observer and analyzer of customer behavior. Their job is to interpret that behavior for the digitally impaired by "parsing" customer needs and aspirations into digital (or digitally supported) products and services. CDO's who have multi-industry backgrounds bring added value to this capability. The more a CDO understands the nuances of parsing customer needs for B2B as well as B2C, or international and domestic, or CPG and electronics, for example, the greater the anthropological asset s/he brings to the hiring company.

5. A risk-taker:
Even though the dominant career path has been along the corporate Internet highway, CDO's often exhibit strong entrepreneurial characteristics and it is not uncommon for them to have started (and sold) their own companies. This background gives the CDO a high tolerance for ambiguity. Change is their constant. They are hyper-inquisitive -- seekers and synthesizers of ideas, preferably in an "alpha state." That said, every effective CDO carries scars. The learning that took place in the earning of those scars dictates that, having embraced and accepted risk, the CDO will constantly look to reduce risk levels within their digital initiatives. Consistent, disciplined, risk minimization is not antithetical to hubris.

6. A thought-leader:
New ideas fuel the CDO's intellectual and professional engines. CDO's seek out the type of high-fliers who speak at TED events because they identify with them. They follow and respect people like Ray Wang (at Constellation Research) and Scott Galloway (at L2inc). They network naturally and copiously with their peers and they are plugged into the start-up and investor communities. Many are mentors to incubators or innovation labs because digital is driven by disruption and the CDO's radar must continuously scan 360. Richie describes this as: "There's a lot of value to be found on the fringes, out where it can get a bit weird."

7. A time-jumper:
CDO's create the future out of the past. They must be able to move readily and rapidly between the past (constraints of culture and legacy systems) and the future (the limitless world of digital possibility). To succeed, a CDO must be under no illusions about the legacy constraints under which the company operates. The most common constraints are out-dated platforms, but might also be ossified practices, processes, or people. Legacy constraints restrict the boldness of the vision the CDO can present. Pizza Hut, for example, had 9 POS systems at one point in time, so creating an app needing to link to all nine rendered the cost of digital innovation moot. Legacy burdens also impact the CDO's budget and thereby restrict the speed with which the CDO can move. And speed is critical. CDO's seek permission to fail, so long as they do it quickly. They operate on the belief that rapid failure leads to quicker success. Richie describes this as "de-legacy" activity, suggesting that it is more important to "stop or reverse un-innovation anchored on the wrong side of history" than to only look forward.

8. A trust-builder:
The most effective CDO works hard to be seen as an asset to his/her peers. Because a CDO's appointment often indicates that a company feels threatened by digital forces outside its control, a CDO's digital initiatives carry an implicit threat. The CDO must demonstrate by actions and results, as well as by words, that they can be trusted to make their colleagues as well as their customers successful. To that end they must be skilled in the creation of emotional capital, and even more adept at its allocation and cultivation.

The digital corner office: most CDOs we spoke with, do not have a physical office, the digital corner office is completely virtual, or constantly hoteling! Marketing Transformation Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer

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Microsoft Power Apps Turns Everyday People into Developers

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

Introducing Microsoft PowerApps – for the non-developer! We work on our phones, tablets and laptops and often on the go. That could mean being on manufacturing floors, in airplanes or at customer meetings or on the highway. With nearly limitless computer and data in the cloud and the mobile revolution, the work professional experience has been transformed. And that’s important, because how people works affects the type of customer experience brands can create!

Until now the apps most employees use to do business have been slow to keep pace with employee demand for ease of use and not having total dependence on IT. While companies are increasingly turning to SaaS solutions for specific scenarios like CRM, travel and HR, using services like Microsoft Dynamics, Concur or Workday, most business app scenarios still remain locked on premises, dependent on corporate connected PCs. Too often, they’re not optimized for mobile, not easily integrated with other services, and not accessible when and where people need them most – on the device they want to use in that moment. The business app category continues to lag behind consumer app scenarios in terms of richness and ubiquity.

What is the cause of this business app “innovation gap”? Working closely with our customers, Microsoft has identified three key problems:

1) Not enough skilled mobile developers. There simply aren’t enough skilled developers to keep up with demand for business app scenarios.

2) Business data proliferation. Business data has proliferated spanning on premises systems and beyond the firewall to SaaS clouds. With data stored in many systems, it is difficult to connect to and consume related data from within an app.

3) IT agility and app sharing. Mobile app distribution typically happens through app stores, or through mobile device management, governed by IT. This creates inherent friction in getting apps onto employee phones.

The introduction of Microsoft PowerApps is a unique solution to these problems. PowerApps is an enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps with your team on any device in minutes. And PowerApps helps anyone in your organization unlock new business agility.

For employees,

Quickly create apps that work on any device using a Microsoft Office-like experience, templates to get started quickly and a visual designer to automate workflows.
Use built-in connections, or ones built by your company, to connect PowerApps to cloud services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox and OneDrive and on-premises systems including SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases, SAP and more.
Share PowerApps like documents. It’s as simple as typing an email address and your coworkers can take advantage of an app you created.

For developers and IT professionals,

PowerApps includes Azure App Service for employee-facing apps, so native web and mobile apps get into employee hands faster than ever.
Build additional data connections and APIs to any existing business systems, thus empowering any users in your organization to create the apps they need.
Data security and privacy controls are respected by PowerApps, so you can manage data access and maintain corporate policies.

Microsoft Power Apps has been partnering closely with a number of customers and partners such as Toro, Bose, Metro Bank and eBecs to ensure our vision for PowerApps addresses their needs for business agility. Customers have built solutions ranging from a recruiting app for an internal team to a mobile app for banking employees that connects to their CRM data. And customers are realizing the impact of PowerApps on their business. Stéphane Cavallo, CIO of Division Habitat at Groupe Beneteau, shared, “PowerApps is simple to use, and doesn’t require deep technical knowledge or programming skills. I can create fully-functioning apps very rapidly and easily. In fact, we’ve brought app development in-house, which has really saved us a lot of money.”

PowerApps will dramatically accelerate how business apps are built, reducing time to solution from weeks or months to minutes and empowering a new category of app creators. It balances power between IT and business users, arming those closest to business needs with tools and services to not just envision but also implement the solution. It moves what has been for decades a set of scenarios that typically only run on-premises with PCs to being centered in the cloud and delivered mobile-first.

To learn more about Microsoft PowerApps and to put your name on the list to get access, go to www.PowerApps.com. And, if you are professional developer, learn more about development related scenarios with PowerApps on Channel 9.

The more we make the way we work better, the sooner and better the customer experience will be!

@drNatalie, Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Customer-Facing Applications

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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What is a Smart City? It is defined by the Smart Services used by Smart Citizens! IoT Business disruption and Service level improvement through Decentralization

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Andy Mulholland is Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on cloud business models. Formerly the Global Chief Technology Officer for the Capgemini Group from 2001 to 2011, Mulholland successfully led the organization through a period of mass disruption. Mulholland brings this experience to Constellation’s clients seeking to understand how Digital Business models will be built and deployed in conjunction with existing IT systems. Coverage Areas Consumerization of IT & The New C-Suite: BYOD, Internet of Things, IoT, technology and business use Previous experience: Mulholland co authored four major books that chronicled the change and its impact on Enterprises starting in 2006 with the well-recognised book ‘Mashup Corporations’ with Chris Thomas of Intel. This was followed in…...

Improving ‘Service’ in the broadest definition of the term has historically been taken to mean optimization through centralization. The Business Disruption introduced by the Internet of Things, IoT, introduces new types of Smart Services and responsiveness achieved by decentralized autonomous interactions providing individually optimize responses. This may be counter-intuitive to some views of a Smart City as achieving new levels of centralization to optimize management.

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Examining how Smart Services and users create a Smart City is an instructive example for Enterprises in how they must consider a similar adoption path. Starting with the Technology definition of IoT as an Inter Connected Interactive world of Intelligent Devices operating Autonomously, to understand how Business Value is created through Smart Service incorporating these new technology capabilities.

An easy example of how Autonomous actions create localized benefits for Users can by found in traffic speed monitoring by GPS units in cars. A traffic jam on the selected route promotes individual responses as each driver decides on their own reaction. Some choose not to react and wait in the traffic jam; other drivers will embark on a detour; some using their personal local knowledge, a further group will follow the option suggested by their GPS. The result will usually result in the most obvious detour routes, in turn, become blocked, and a larger and larger area gridlocking as time passes.

The limitation of the current Service for Traffic Service is that it is a passive service, not capable of the continuous intelligent interaction and management that differentiates an IoT Smart Service Traffic Service. Each car is individually maintaining a two-way quasi real time dialogue with all other cars within the localized Traffic Smart Service cell to optimize the use of available road space and routes. The sheer amount of data traffic involved between the Traffic Smart Service Event Engine and the cars, with the response times required to maintain real time traffic flows, require this to be a decentralized service. However, the Smart City would contain many such localized Traffic Smart Service cells, or in IOT terminology Fog Computing zones.

A IoT based Smart Service Traffic Management, as with many other forms of Smart Services, gains much of its ‘smart’ responsiveness and value to citizens through their real time participation in localized situations. The challenge is to design and deploy Smart Services that encourage citizen participation around very direct localized responsiveness.

The full value of a Smart City, or an Enterprise lies in the extent to which different, but aligned, Smart Services interacting to provide a further level of unique insights and values. Connecting the Smart Service Traffic Management similar Smart Services covering Traffic Lights, Routing Smart Signage, Public Transport, etc. has an almost logarithmic capability to multiple the insights and values created. In IOT based Smart Services scale is achieved, as with the Internet itself and the Web, by the decentralized architecture, but it is the careful aggregation of interactive Smart Services that makes the City become ‘Smart’.

In addition to the challenge of deciding what Smart Services will be well received to maximize participation with perceived value to the City and Citizens there are some very real concerns for the City Management in the costs of operating Smart Services. IT budgets remain stretched, the cost of operating a further layer of Technology is difficult to justify with out strong benefits.

At the heart of Smart Service business models is the shift from CapEx, Capital Expenditure with an identified payback, to OpEx, Operating Expenditure where the over the last five years Marketing operations have shown a very different approach. Budgets should flex to follow success and cut off poor results…quickly. More of what works meets the criteria of ‘More (Value) for Less (Cost) common in the public sector.

The Private sector has led in making the shift to OpEx through its experiences in adopting and monitoring Social Marketing Campaigns where results are immediate and quantifiable. Social Marketing and IoT Smart Services have much in common, increasingly IoT events are being tied to Social Marketing reactions, therefore it is instructive to consider Social Marketing OpEx experience.

Five years ago Marketing was seen to be a necessary fixed annual investment budget item but with the understanding that the value was difficult to quantify, (truism at the time; ‘half of all marketing is wasted, but which half?). Today micro marketing using decentralization/localization provides immediate quantification of value; the result is that more of the Budget has become flexibly allocated to increase expenditure in successful areas and decrease elsewhere.

Using the same model defined by citizen satisfaction in traffic flow management requires more of the annual fixed CapEx Traffic budget moving to a more responsive OpEx model where increasing knowledge of successful Smart Service outcomes dictates where the money should be spent. Increasing expenditure against high value returns and decreasing expenditure on less successful initiates is the goal for any Smart Service deployment business model.

Underlying any Smart City, or Enterprise, contemplating exactly what Smart Services to deploy are increasingly selective Citizens or Users who after a generation of Smart Phone Apps are now vocal in their expectations. Good Apps, or Smart Services such as Uber quickly go viral, and just as quickly poorly thought through Apps, or Smart Services, are panned.

Competition between Smart Services, whether Public or Private Sector, will more closely resemble a Financial Trading market where event data feeds, evaluation and time to respond, are the difference between success and failure. The battle between City centralized licensing management of Taxi Services and Uber as an example is a fore taste of what is to come! Smart Cities will find difficulty in continued control of centralized services in the rapidly emerging world of IoT; a future of highly responsive, high value , locally optimized, Services that rely on User support for much of their value generation capability.

Grasping the difference between IoT based Smart Services, and classic Services that have been moved to Web based access, is a critical point in the journey of making a City, or an Enterprise ‘Smart’. The frequently applied term ‘Business Disruption’, or books such as ‘Digital to the Core’ do not refer to the use of current online Web eCommerce, accepting that as both an expectation and a fact of life in 2015. Instead these terms, books, reports, and of course social discussions, are all drawing attention to the impact of a fully connected, interactive, intelligent world of IOT Devices offering a new generation of localized autonomous Smart Services.

The current, and predicted, numbers of connected intelligent devices capable of participation in Smart Services vastly outstrip the resources the City has to deploy its own IoT devices. A successful Smart City is created by its vision as to how its City Smart Services will work with its Smart Citizens and Smart Enterprises to create a wholly new generation of value… for the City, its Businesses and its Citizens.

Though there is a dependency on decentralization for across the City success this does not preclude National or Local Government leading, and encouraging, Smart Services in their own Cities. Quick wins on current programs to reduce cost and improve efficiency are readily available in areas such as Building and Energy management, or any other Asset Management covering equipment from Gritting Equipment to Rubbish collection. There is much to be gained commercially as well as in experience from these deployments in more familiar commercial areas that will assist in providing leadership in a wider range of City activities.

The big challenge is to ensure the introduction of Smart Services of a decentralized open nature to encourage other providers and users to participate. Travel and Transport or other infrastructural based areas are natural starting points for any City Management, but imagination is needed to gain the attention, innovation and participation from Citizens and Businesses to create the connected, interactive, intelligent city wide economy that justifies the title Smart City.

An Example of some innovative ideas for Smart City Services

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/manchester-wins-10m-prize-to-become-world-leader-in-smart-city-technology

Resource

Download now: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

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Consumers Can Research a Company and Schedule Appointments Faster and Easier

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Often times, as a customer, you want to know a little bit more about what a company offers and when you find that information you want to be able to act on it. With the partnership between Verint and TimeTrade, customers will have more seamless omnichannel experiences for consumers.

How Will This Partnership Work? The TimeTrade platform will integrate with the Verint Branch Workforce Optimization^™ solution, enabling customers to research financial products and services, and schedule an appointment to meet with a branch professional on a desired date and time in their preferred branch location.

Can Customers Find Remote Specialists if They are Not At the Branch? In addition to scheduling appointments with branch employees that have the right skills for a given topic, the combined offering can schedule remote financial specialists to meet with customers and branch employees by video conference for even greater omnichannel customer engagement. This enables the broader sharing of resources across the bank enterprise, whether they are in a contact center or another location. For example, for mortgage appointments, customers can schedule an appointment in their preferred branch but be connected with a mortgage representative in another location via video conference.

How Will Brands Measure Success? Following these interactions, key metrics can be automatically added into the bank’s performance management scorecards, enabling them to track customer satisfaction, gauge customer wait times and other efficiencies, determine interaction success rates, and identify areas for training and development.

What Do The Executives Have to Say? Chris Zaske, global vice president, strategic operations, Verint Enterprise Intelligence Solutions,^™explains, “A top priority of the retail banking organizations we serve is to provide superior experiences to their customers—both on- and off-line—with the goal of also growing revenue. Partnering with TimeTrade and integrating with its platform supports this goal by helping our financial institution customers optimize branch personnel by scheduling their time to meet with customers and better utilize their capacity. By making it easy for customers to schedule appointments in advance, banks are connecting digital interactions with skilled branch associates that can improve close rates, as well as provide follow-up on future cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.”

Gary Ambrosino, CEO of TimeTrade goes on to say, “In-branch service has been suffering, and banks are losing customers as a result. We recently did a study and found that 60 percent of consumers lack a personal connection to their banks. In the same study, we found that a significant majority (83 percent) are willing to come into a branch during a week day if offered a guaranteed time to meet a representative. We believe the responsibility is on the associates and bank managers to re-build these relationships. Our goal in bringing a TimeTrade and Verint solution together is to provide the tools banks need to make this vision a reality, so they no longer risk losing out to the competition.”

MY POV: This is a very interesting partnership in that it does extend the branch beyond the solid walls of a financial office and allows the customer to more easily access the right person, maybe even in their jammies. With the increase in work-at-home employees, this may be a very smart move!

@DrNatalie Petouhoff

VP and Principal Analyst, Customer Facing Applications of Marketing, Sales and Customer Care, Service and Experience, Constellation Research

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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Qlik Unveils QlikView 12, Qlik Sense Cloud Roadmap

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

Qlik is not retiring its venerable QlikView product, but the company’s future lies with Qlik Sense and cloud services. Here’s what stands out.

Qlik has long been known for QlikView, a product that helped move the business intelligence market toward self-service over the last decade. Qlik’s new lead product is Qlik Sense, an even more business-user friendly, visual self-service app introduced last year, but that won’t mean the end of QlikView.

QlikView 12, introduced on December 8, is the first of many annual upgrades to come, and there is no plan to retire the product, insisted Qlik executives at last week’s Qlik Analyst UnSummit in Austin, Texas. With release 12, QlikView shares the same in-memory, associative Qlik Data Indexing (QIX) data-analysis engine with Qlik Sense and all other products on the Qlik Analytics Platform (QAP). That will make it easier to migrate apps to the appropriate product.

Other upgrades in QlikView 12 include improved clustering for scalability, mobile touch improvements for better use of native functionality on iOS and Android devices, and RESTful API connectors for linking to Web services such as those used by social sites and Web content management systems.

In comparision with QlikView, Qlik Sense makes it easier for business users to analyze data and develop reports and dashboards. That much was confirmed by six prominent customers at last week’s UnSummit. Pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, for example, is rolling out Qlik Sense dashboards to several thousand internal users as well as to customers.

Qlik Analytics Platform

Demand for Qlik Sense helped Qlik increase license revenues 20% (in constant currencies) in 2015, said CEO Lars Bjork, up from 13% in 2014. The company is expecting even faster growth as it moves into subscription-based services with Qlik Sense Cloud. Launched this year as a freemium service, Qlik Sense Cloud is approaching 30,000 registered users, and the company will soon introduce a paid, Qlik Sense Cloud Plus edition offering more storage, wider sharing and larger app sizes than supported on the free service.

By mid 2016 Qlik plans to introduce a workgroup service tier on Qlik Sense Cloud that will add collaboration and data-governance features. And by some time in 2017, Qlik will introduce an enterprise-class service capable of supporting hybrid and purely cloud analytics deployments at scale.

MyPOV: Competing in a Crowded Market

The vendor stresses that Qlik Sense supports more than just data visualization. That’s a jab at Qlik’s younger and faster-growing rival, Tableau Software, which is best known for data visualization. Qlik’s differentiated is its associative QIX data-analysis engine, which keeps the entire data set and rich detail available even as you explore and focus in on selected dimensions of data. If you select customers who are buying X product, for example, and you’ll also see which customers are not buying that product. In my view, associative exploration gives QIX advantages over data visualization alone or conventional drill-down analysis where you filter out information as you explore.

Qlik’s in-memory, associative QIX data-analysis engine keeps all data and detail
in view, even as you explore selected dimensions of data.

Qlik’s biggest challenge in the coming year will be raising its brand profile in an increasingly cloud-centric BI and analytics market. Competitors will include not just Tableau, Birst and GoodData, but also Microsoft with Power BI, IBM with Watson Analytics, SAP with Cloud For Analytics, and Amazon with its recently announced QuickSight service.

Qlik is making an effort to improve its marketing so it can better compete with all these rivals. It’s starting with the simple step of ensuring consistent branding. QlikView is the company’s best known brand, and in the past this product name has been used synonymously with company names QlikTech and Qlik. Now the company is consistently using Qlik across Web sites, collateral materials and even buildings, and the Qlik Analytics Platform is the underpinning for all products, including Qlik Sense, Qlik Sense Cloud, QlikView, QlikView NPrinting, and the growing Qlik DataMarket for third-party enrichment data.

Among large vendors, Microsoft with Power BI poses the biggest potential threat to cloud upstarts like Qlik and Tableau. To stand apart, Qlik needs to just needs to forefront the combination of the associative QIX engine and the Qlik Sense interface. To my mind that will require more partnerships and word-of-mouth marketing tactics rather than branding wars against much bigger players. Qlik has more than 37,000 customers and millions of users, so it has an excellent springboard to grow Qlik Sense and Qlik Sense Cloud.

Data to Decisions Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

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The Economist's take on blockchain

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

An unpublished letter to the editor of The Economist.

November 1, 2015

Just as generalists mesmerized by quantum physics are prone to misapply it to broader but unrelated problems, some are making exorbitant claims for the potential of blockchain to change the world ("The trust machine", The Economist, October 31st). Yes, blockchain is extraordinarily clever but it was designed specifically to stop electronic cash from being double spent, without needing central oversight. As a general ledger, blockchain is unwieldy and expensive.

Trust online is all about provenance. How can I be sure a stranger's claimed attributes, credentials and possessions are genuine? Proving a credit card number, employment status, or ownership of a block of land in a 'democratic' peer-to-peer mesh strikes some as utopian, but really it's oxymoronic. The blockchain is an indelible record of claims, which still need to be vouched for before they are carved forever into mathematical stone.

Steve Wilson
Principal Analyst - Identity & Privacy, Constellation Research.

Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Chief Information Officer

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Informatica Takes Comprehensive Approach To Big Data Management

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Informatica addresses big-data integration, governance and security through a subscription-based portfolio. But will big data remain a separate world?

One irrefutable trend in 2015 has been growing enterprise adoption of big data platforms including Hadoop and NoSQL databases. Yet as companies move beyond big data pilot projects and try to do more with their deployments, many struggle to achieve repeatability and productivity. Short on experienced talent, companies look for any way possible to avoid one-off-coding and development work.

Enter Informatica, which last month introduced Informatica Big Data Management, a three-part offering aimed at big data integration, governance and security challenges. Big Data Management replaces Informatica’s PowerCenter Big Data Edition with a separate, subscription-based product line aimed exclusively at big data environments.

Informatica addresses traditional use cases (lower-left) with PowerCenter and “next-gen”
use cases with subscription-based Big Data Management.

The first component is Big Data Integration, which runs on Hadoop and promises to save companies time, trouble and, therefore, money over hand-coded data-integration, data-transformation and development work. This has been Informatica’s value proposition in the data warehousing arena for decades. Big Data Integration extends the promise to complex big data environments with intense volumes and varieties of batch and streaming data.

The second two components of Big Data Management are Informatica Big Data Quality and Governance, and Informatica Big Data Security. These may be of less immediate interest to companies that are just starting out with big data experiments. But Informatica argues these components will become increasingly important as the number and diversity of big data sources and projects grows.

The one question I have is whether and how long enterprises will view and treat traditional data warehouse environments and big data projects as separate worlds?

Big Data Integration

Data-integration products are all about connecting to data, so vendors in this space invariably tout their portfolios of pre-built connectors. In Informatica’s case, Big Data Integration offers more than 200 connectors that speed and simplify access to data (as compared with the hand-coding) and ingestion to Hadoop and NoSQL databases. The portfolio includes two-way integrations to modern big-data platforms, real-time sources and cloud-based apps and databases. Big Data Integration also offers 100-plus data-transformation and parsing routines, including options to handle variable and semi-structured data and big-data world formats such as JSON, Avro and Parquet.

Flexibility is another draw for Big Data Integration. Running on Hadoop, it supports not just MapReduce for batch processing and Apache Spark for fast, in-memory batch or streaming-data processing, but also Tez and Informatica’s own high-performance Blaze engine, which offers familiarity to veteran PowerCenter users while taking advantage of distributed processing power and Hadoop’s YARN management layer. With all these options at its disposal, Big Data Integration can intelligently and automatically execute each workload on the best-suited engine, according to Informatica. Here, too, the idea is to speed execution while taking manual work steps out of big data projects.

Adding Data Governance and Security

Where some big-data management offerings begin and end with ETL, Informatica Big Data Management also addresses data governance and security. Governance and data quality are always important, but their importance increases as the uses of big data multiply. That’s when Informatica Big Data Quality and Governance collaborative stewardship capabilities help ensure that all appropriate data stakeholders are involved in setting data definitions and standards. The various constituents get role-specific interfaces, and policy-based workflows, approvals and auditing features ensure compliance.

BigData Governance and Quality is also about helping to find the value in big data. For example, a Live Data Map powered by Spark provides a universal metadata catalog and knowledge graph for enterprise data. This supports searching, matching and linking among transactional data, machine data and social data to illuminate behaviors and better understand customers, prospects and influencers.

Informatica started stepping up its security capabilities earlier this year when it released Secure@Source, which analyzes the metadata in Informatica PowerCenter repositories and spots sensitive data, such as payment card and personally identifiable and personal health information, as well as systems, groups and departments at risk.

Informatica Big Data Security brings Secure@Source capabilities to big data, uncovering sensitive data and spotting the business units and individuals that have access to that data. The software gives data and security professionals insight into how such data is used and whether it’s adequately protected. Visualizations pinpoint sensitive data by geography and function while risk analytics highlight vulnerabilities that demand immediate remediation. One alerts are raised, policy-based protections and dynamic data masking can be used to secure or de-identify sensitive data.

MyPOV on Informatica Big Data Management

Informatica previously offered PowerCenter Big Data Edition, its traditional data-integration suite with added big data management capabilities and a selective ability to run on Hadoop. But that’s being replaced by Big Data Management, which is a separate, subscription-based product that’s a better fit with the times, according to Informatica.

Big data projects are graduating from exploratory experiments to separately budgeted initiatives with executive sponsorship and increasingly mission-critical expectations, according to Informatica. Thus, the time is right for a separate product, Informatica execs reason. The subscription-based approach (with software deployed on-premises but paid for annually) is in keeping with the way Hadoop subscriptions are typically handled. This keeps initial costs down and helps businesses scale up as data volumes grow.

It’s good to see that Informatica has not taken and all-or-nothing approach with Big Data Management, offering an Enterprise edition that skips some of the data-quality, data-profiling and data-masking features included in the Premium Edition. What’s more, the Big Data Security offerings are entirely optional, which is a good thing as security professionals with budget and technology oversight many not yet be familiar with Informatica.

My one concern about Informatica’s separation of its traditional and big data product lines is that we will eventually see the pendulum swing the other way. As big data sources, integration needs and data-quality and data-governance concerns become more commonplace, they will become the prevailing data challenges in the enterprise. Indeed, Informatica depicts a “crossing the chasm” movement from traditional data-warehouse use cases to “next-gen” data big data use cases (see diagram above).

When the transition is complete, big data will just be data. And when data-management professionals stop looking at big data as a separate world, they may well want and expect a single portfolio to address all data management needs, whether large or small. I suspect that day may come sooner than many expect.

Data to Decisions Chief Information Officer

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Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Workday has its European Rising event happening in Dublin this week and one of the major product news has been an improved level of partnership with ADP.

Let's take a peek:

If you can't watch - let’s take apart the press release in our customary style – it can be found here:

PLEASANTON, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 2, 2015) - Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced plans to expand its partnership with ADP to provide multinational organizations with a seamless and unified global payroll experience. The partnership plans to leverage the next level in integration technology to unite Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and ADP Global Payroll in a single user experience within Workday, enabling multinational organizations to more effectively manage their global workforce, efficiently process payroll, and maximize business growth.

MyPOV – Good description of problem and solution. ADP provides global payroll capabilities through its GlobalView product and Workday has global customers, so this is a ‘symbiotic’ partnership.

"With this expanded partnership, our customers will be able to manage their workforce globally and process payroll in over 100 countries," said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO, Workday. "This is the new standard for integration -- bringing together two leaders for best-in-class HCM and payroll in one seamless global solution."
"ADP's increased collaboration with Workday tightly aligns market leaders to deliver a seamless global payroll experience," said Carlos Rodriguez, president and CEO, ADP. "Through the partnership, we will help our joint multinational customers effectively address the complexity of global payroll so that they can focus on driving their business forward."

MyPOV –Good to see this is a partnership supported all the way from the top – with quotes from both CEOs, Bhusri and Rodriquez. The perspectives are worth noting – Bhusri sees global payroll capabilities, Rodriguez sees peace of mind from payroll complexity for customers as the main drivers.

Through the partnership, Workday customers will benefit from:
· One Seamless Customer Experience to Manage a Global Workforce:
o Multinational organizations can leverage ADP Global Payroll functionality from within Workday's user interface in one process for managing their global workforce.
o Customers can enter comprehensive local data directly into Workday where it is automatically validated and utilized by ADP to create a more streamlined global payroll experience.

MyPOV – This is the key innovation part of the integration. In order to run payroll in one single UI – something most enterprises prefer – payroll relevant information needs to be in the same user interface as the rest of ‘HCM’. As payroll is subject to many legal changes, it previously required the HCM vendor and any payroll partner vendor(s) to both that does not have payroll to provide all fields and validation necessary to run payroll correctly. Obviously a duplicate effort for vendors – and both ADP and Workday went for a more elegant solution.

· Next-level Integration Technology to Create a Unified User Experience:
o Workday combines the latest advances in integration technology with ADP's REST APIs to enable dynamic page creation, rendering the fields for local payroll information from ADP so multinational organizations can better manage payroll requirements around the world.
o Legislative updates from ADP can be made on a timely basis via the Workday user interface, ensuring that customers are up to date with country-specific and local regulatory changes for a smoother payroll process.

MyPOV – And here we are to the ‘magic’ – REST as an API standard allows ADP to expose fields and validation directly into Workday – creating one common user interface for workers – and making duplicate coding and testing superfluous.

· A Best-in-Class Approach to Global Payroll Management:
o Multinational organizations looking to invest in Workday and ADP's best-in-class HR and global payroll solutions can take advantage of a seamless experience for global payroll management.
o Workday HCM enables multinational organizations to make faster decisions, gain operational visibility, prepare for future talent shifts, and build effective teams.
o As the proven leader in payroll, customers benefit from ADP's extensive global payroll coverage and unparalleled expertise in payroll processing.

MyPOV – Good to point out the benefits – Workday provides a more seamless global payroll experience and will be able to spend more time on additional product innovation for its customers and ADP gets more utilization of its payroll capabilities. But the biggest winners are the users at clients: On an operational level they will be able to do all HCM related tasks in one common API, and on a management level they have the peace of mind of working with a proven Payroll leader with ADP.

Availability Workday plans to make solutions resulting from the expanded partnership with ADP available in Workday 27, which will be offered to customers in the second half of calendar year 2016.

MyPOV – There are few things not to like about this partnership, except for this very late and 12 months or so out delivery date. But good things take time…

Overall MyPOV

A good partnership with a modern integration technique between ADP and Workday – who both benefit as vendors. As the world goes – it is a co-opetition – as ADP will keep providing HCM solutions that compete with Workday.

But the winner is the joint customer, and a large part of Workday customers use ADP as their payroll partner. So good news for these customers, as they don’t have two vendors tracking legislative payroll compliance and spending precious development time and dollars duplicating and integrating fields, but just with one. On the global side it gives Workday customers and prospects access to over 100 countries for processing payroll – given that Workday as of today only supports the USA, Canada, and UK (and France in 2016) - a major leap going forward. Certainly a key strategy move to expand in Europe, where the announcement was made. Whether it will alleviate the pressure on Workday to provide native payroll capabilities for other large markets (with large customers, Germany and Japan come to mind) remains to be seen.

And we expect more of these partnership in the marketplace – based on REST APIs, something that to our knowledge Learning vendor Skillsoft first introduced into the marketplace almost a decade ago (but to be fair - with a more one directional nature of the interface).

For now a very good partnership, which also shows that market adversaries can be partners for the benefit of the customer. As heard often before – ‘at the end the customer has to won’ – and that’s what is the clear end result of this partnership is – so congrats for all are in order.

An Executive Summary of Internet of Things Technology Overview - Assembling the Technologies from previous blogs into Business Solutions

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is currently moving towards the top of the hype curve driven by a series of amazing predictions. However if asked to explain what IoT brings to business capabilities, or what technology components comprise an IoT solution, remarkably few people would be able to answer comprehensively. Those who did answer would tend to be able to identify just a single aspect of IoT; and what that was would be dependent on whether they worked in Operational Technology, Information Technology, or even Social Marketing. It’s fair to say that there is a lot of confusion about IoT, not helped by apparently conflicting views.

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

At the same point in the hype curve for Web technology equally few people would have been able describe the role that the ‘Internet of the Web’ would play in globalizing Content, creating mass participation of consumers, and laying the foundations for online ecommerce. Yet there are strong similarities in terms of the development curve and global impact with IoT.

The ‘Internet of Things’, IoT, makes use of Internet connectivity to add a new layer of capability around the ubiquitous Global scaling of ‘Interactions and Events’ between Intelligent Devices. This is a different layer with distinctly different functionality and technology to the ‘Internet of the Web’ with its focus what and how ‘Content’ can be used.

It should be noticeable that the above IoT definition that doesn’t refer to, or restrict itself, to the use of ‘sensors’ with simple event triggers, instead it embraces the reality of the numbers of devices and their characteristics that are, and will be, connected to the Internet. As an obvious example your Smart Phone working as your personal IoT device handing complex relationships between you, your location, your smart home, and IoT based services such as Uber Taxis.

It is best to define IoT by recognizing four important characteristics that between them are redefining capabilities, both for technology and the resulting business beneficial solutions.

Intelligent; An addition to Moore’s law written today would probably dwell on how the cost of the same amount of processor power halves every eighteen months, with the result that many basic devices such as Coffee machines, or Hair curlers, now use processors to control their operation cycle. Size, Power, Cost and programming complexity are no longer barriers to adding intelligence to anything, the results are already clear to see.
Connected; self-evident perhaps, but the physical formats by which connectivity is achieved have benefitted from the development of Mobility in all its forms. Today options range from low cost low data rate wireless connections that require no direct power through to high through put dedicated wired bus topologies. Taken with ubiquitous network types such as 4G wireless, or wired Ethernet, anything can now be connected at the right cost for the Service supported.
Interactive; Intelligent connected devices no longer are limited to reporting simple sensed conditions, increasingly they participate with other devices, gateways, or cloud based Services, in a series of iterative interactions that will refine the details and context of an event into an insightful actionable outcome.
Autonomous; As the sheer scale in the numbers of intelligent, connected, interactive devices grows so does the need for localized autonomous groups. As with the Web itself IoT is a decentralized environment, supporting scale through its decentralized loose-coupled architecture. For IoT centralization of all interactions and data is undesirable due several reasons including bandwidth availability, timeliness of response being impacted by latency. The required Autonomous groups may be pre-defined, or dynamically created; for IoT clusters where interactions and actionable outcomes have to be seen as ‘real time’. However it is likely that there will be an upstream outcome report made to other less time sensitive Services.

Time is a very key factor in creating architected IoT Smart Service business solutions based on these four functional, but the concept of Time is not directly comparable with the definition associated with data integration in Enterprise Architecture. Time to respond with an insight or an action is what defines the use of decentralized Fog Computing, or more centralized Cloud Based Services, and of course how any integration with legacy IT Enterprise Applications will be achieved.

As the numbers of connected devices continues to grow exponentially future competitive business success seems certain to depend of an Enterprise’s capability to outplay their competitors through using the four capabilities of IoT to optimize their dynamic tailored ‘Service’ led market responses. Smarter, faster, better connected and autonomously optimizing are all the wining traits in IoT based Smart Services.

Adding online Web based channels to increase sales within the current Business model is a survival necessity, but doesn’t provide a defense against first movers who use IoT based Smart Services to produce a disruptive competitive market impact.

For many Enterprises their first experiences with IoT will follow a similar path to their adoption of the Web starting with one, or probably more, initiatives on the internal Enterprise network. As with the Web adoption it is more likely that the earliest of these will be carried out by small internal groups of enthusiasts, and not necessarily known to senior management. The Web spread within the Enterprise as these initiatives became of increasing value for sharing previously isolated and inaccessible content. (It is as well to remember how quickly many Enterprises found themselves with an uncontrolled, accelerating number of individual Web sites, and decide to establish better managed adoption of IoT).

Connecting, and using data, from a variety of smart devices is already an established reality in factory and other process centric Industry sectors such as Oil & Gas under the heading of Process Automation and/or Operational Technology. Under the guise of improving interaction with actual, or potential, customers there has been a similar adoption in Social Marketing Interactions. Social Marketing use of IoT goes largely un-noticed until it is realized that much of the data being created and used is comes via the Smart Phone providing the four principles of an IoT Devices to ‘sense’ events and circumstances of the owner/user.

There is a substantive gap between those parts of an Enterprise that thrive on real time interactions and resulting data, versus IT operations driven by transactional applications and analysis of historic collected data. This is not surprising at this stage in the adoption curve as Business value is recognized from the edge of the Enterprise in its engagement with the market. Later with scale, and the recognition that it is now Business critical, the management of new technologies has in the past changed to the IT department.

The importance of time as a critical factor in the design of IoT Business solutions has already been raised. Time is also one of the major factors as to why different people in different technology and business areas don’t recognize a common IoT model. There are three separate definable and different time zone based requirements that can be present in IoT Enterprise level architecture. Although it is not necessary for all three to be present in every business valuable solution it is increasingly common with scale and in defining Business valuable Smart Services to find a chain reaction across all three Time zones.

When describing each zone it helps to illustrate their use with an appropriate example.

Quasi Real Time; IoT clusters, (fog computing environments) where alarm conditions require to as near as possible real time responses across a directly connected, often hard wired, group of Devices. This is common in factory machine management where an event starts with a sensor signaling a catastrophic failure needing immediate action. The event reaction may require adjustment to align with the exact state determined across the group of IoT devices (interconnected machines).

Quasi Real Time, and associated Fog Computing IoT clusters, are also prevalent in consumer IoT home based systems such as NEST, or HIVE, where the detection of an attempted home break-in immediately activates the home alarm siren, or a furnace leak turns off the water supply. Less noticeable, but even more highly developed are those used in new cars where the car itself is a Fog Computing IoT cluster able to sense and provide appropriate actions to a wide variety of Events. Due to connection constraints as well as the need for ‘immediate’ actions in some conditions, e.g., a tire blow out at high speed, a car is a perfect example of an Autonomous IoT environment.

An Enterprise should strategically seek to position as the ‘owner’ of Fog Computing environments that are align to its Business to ensure that the Processing of all Events initiates actionable Event responses related to their Business model. This is particularly relevant for any Manufacturing Business. It is not necessary to own all the IoT Devices indeed providing a Smart Service as connecting other IoT Devices increases the capability to provide unique value.

Notes; Quasi Real Time, (so called as exact Real Time cannot be achieved), is usually associated with Fog Computing; the creation of small edge based clouds, where the risk of network failure and the latency introduced by a remote cloud based Event Engine is unacceptable. A Fog Computing network is usually dedicated to the support of a single functional activity, using a specialized data protocol. Much of the so called ‘House Keeping’ data activity can be contained with in the Fog Computing IoT network to reduce the need to pass large amounts of data across low bandwidth edge of network connections. In scaled up Enterprise IoT Architecture Quasi Real Time consolidated key Event triggers would normally pass upstream to one, or more, Near Time IoT Service Clouds where it might be stored, or used to trigger a further level of responses.

Near Time; the upstream reporting point for Quasi Real Time IoT Events and the provider of Complex Event Processes for sophisticated multi Event Smart Services. A better name might be IoT Smart Services Clouds with the function to provide compute power and data storage at higher levels than in a Fog Computing cluster but with increased latency in response times. Smart Services Clouds would normally be distributed between multiple data centers to provide localized decentralized responses as timeliness and reliability remains key.

The most obvious, and widely appreciated, example of a Near Real time IoT Smart Services Cloud is Uber. Uber is not immediately recognizable as an IoT Smart Service, a point in common with many new Apps. In common with similar Apps it uses the four characteristics of IoT; intelligent end points; everything relevant is connected and autonomous; interactive optimization to achieve insightful actionable outcomes; and it happens in Near Time, (i.e. user perceived timeliness rather than time critical). It is an important principle of Near Time IoT Services, such as Uber, that failure is not critical, the event can be retried, together with relatively low amounts of data moving across the network as end points are on low bandwidth connections.

Notes; Near Time IoT usually requires a higher amount of Complex Event Processing from the Event Engine, associated with increased stored data from the Event Hub. In the case of Uber the action of asking for a Taxi is the creating event; the smart phone provides the intelligence as to location and personal details; the Near Time Service Cloud Event Engine compares this with the flow of data on Taxis types, locations, availability and makes an optimal match. The Uber Service Cloud contains other necessary connections such as data on traffic conditions and weather, some from Near Time Service Clouds, other data from Transaction Time, the third time zone. In the later category comes the integration for the Credit Card transaction as an example.

Near Time IoT Service Clouds will be the principle element in the development of high value Smart Services for the majority of Enterprises. The greater the number of Events and correlation with other inputs the greater the Business Value that can be created. Taken to the ultimate level Smart Services allow an Enterprise to disrupt an existing market by recombining the traditional elements into Smart Services that relate directly to the customers true requirement. E.g. Power by the Hour, Shared use of a Car schemes, etc.

Transaction Time; incorporates business outcomes that require some form of process action from Enterprise Applications such as Book to Bill financial recording in response to the use of a IoT Service. ERP, CRM and Data Analysis are all vital parts of Enterprise Back Office operations and their value is not diminished by the new business focuses brought by IoT. Similarly the output of existing analytical tools that can provide either a source of data to be included in an IoT Service Event Engine/Event Hub, or can be used to determine rules for Complex Event Processing.

As an example Uber uses weather data to dynamically adjust pricing in response to bad weather increasing demand for Taxis, an excellent example of dynamic pricing in response to real time conditions. Weather forecasting employs huge models with exceptional computational power, which run at set intervals. IoT Transaction Time relates to the updating of this type of data into the Near Time Service Cloud Event Hub data store. The triggering Event of calling for a cab results in the Event Engine adding this data to its Event Processing. Transaction Time IoT describes interactions with traditional IT systems for data outputs and/or inputs to existing systems and processes.

Selling the use of Smart Services requires the same Enterprises IT processes to be used as any other form of commercial transaction, and provides the same valuable input to Business Intelligence reporting. Conversely valuable contextual inputs can flow from Transactional IT to adjust the Event processing rules for the two other IoT time zones,

Representation of the Three Time Zones supporting IoT Smart Services

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The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

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The Battle For The Digital Corner Office, #CDO

The Battle For The Digital Corner Office, #CDO

So which title will win the battle for the digital corner office?

Given these priorities, how do the top-level digital titles and their accompanying responsibilities match up?

The executive interviews point to the CDO as the title most aligned with the digital transformation mission. Here's why.

What are the characteristics/competencies to look for in a Chief Digital Officer?

Microsoft Power Apps Turns Everyday People into Developers

Microsoft Power Apps Turns Everyday People into Developers

What is a Smart City? It is defined by the Smart Services used by Smart Citizens! IoT Business disruption and Service level improvement through Decentralization

What is a Smart City? It is defined by the Smart Services used by Smart Citizens! IoT Business disruption and Service level improvement through Decentralization

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

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Download now: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Consumers Can Research a Company and Schedule Appointments Faster and Easier

Consumers Can Research a Company and Schedule Appointments Faster and Easier

Qlik Unveils QlikView 12, Qlik Sense Cloud Roadmap

Qlik Unveils QlikView 12, Qlik Sense Cloud Roadmap

The Economist's take on blockchain

The Economist's take on blockchain

Informatica Takes Comprehensive Approach To Big Data Management

Informatica Takes Comprehensive Approach To Big Data Management

Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

Overall MyPOV

An Executive Summary of Internet of Things Technology Overview - Assembling the Technologies from previous blogs into Business Solutions

An Executive Summary of Internet of Things Technology Overview - Assembling the Technologies from previous blogs into Business Solutions

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

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The Battle For The Digital Corner Office, #CDO

So which title will win the battle for the digital corner office?

Given these priorities, how do the top-level digital titles and their accompanying responsibilities match up?

The executive interviews point to the CDO as the title most aligned with the digital transformation mission. Here's why.

What are the characteristics/competencies to look for in a Chief Digital Officer?

Microsoft Power Apps Turns Everyday People into Developers

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Qlik Unveils QlikView 12, Qlik Sense Cloud Roadmap

The Economist's take on blockchain

Informatica Takes Comprehensive Approach To Big Data Management

Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

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An Executive Summary of Internet of Things Technology Overview - Assembling the Technologies from previous blogs into Business Solutions

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