Image: Rube Goldberg

While  IT departments struggle to reinvent themselves with the onset of cloud computing  by virtualizing their IT infrastructures, according to the Economist the specter of cloud computing is predicted to have a significant impact on next generation business models. You know this may just happen…

For this thought exercise put the foggy and messy issues of information security, government controls, identity management and user privacy aside. In this brave future, businesses will assemble not only the technology infrastructure but the business processes needed to complete specialized tasks from the cloud. This will have a significant impact on business models, post recovery. The emerging concept of the process network is an exciting one.

I can see that evolving in our environment. Currently TRU uses a technology to manage some processes called Integrify. At its most basic, Integrify is a workflow application that allows users to define and run approval processes across the enterprise. While workflow is really database driven email on steroids (I have this request, can you approve it? No/Yes Yes – Will my boss approve it – Yes/No etc…) Things start to get really interesting when you think about workflow tools that could assemble and interact with  processes (and applications) outside of TRU with other institutional partners, vendors, government ministries and other stakeholders.

A technology that moves in that direction that I think is really interesting is the concept of the “Enterprise Mashup.”The “web mashup” has been around for a while. For example, when you tie together your restaurant’s web page with google maps, for example – you’ve created a mashup. The key point, in my opinion, is that each web page in the mashup doesn’t know (or need to know) about its relationship with other sites in the mashup. This concept of application independence is key. Everyone just focuses on what they do best.

Back in the old days (um like now) you had to get out the welding torch in the form of Enterprise Application Integration technologies to connect applications together.  With the Enterprise Mashup – various internal and external applications can all be strung together through a common user view.

Let’s say you are customer service agent at a call centre that supports multiple vendors, each with their own inventory system. Customers call you and make inquiries about delivery times, returns etc. The Enterprise Mashup could tie together all the different vendor inventory systems into one common view. Heck, multiple products from multiple vendors could all be queried from that one view. May sound easy but without the mash-up glue, it’s a big headache. UK’s Corizon is an example of a mash-up glue provider.

To me this is where the concept of enterprise mash-ups get really interesting. Very little coding was required to put this together. You didn’t have to rip out all these legacy systems to web-ify them. Perhaps in the future, you won’t actually have to own the systems and processes to get things done.

I’m not saying that Service Oriented Architectures (which provide a standardized communications layer to disparate applications) are obsolete. It’s just that with there may be an easier way to string together different applications in different organizations in mashups. Stay tuned.

Wow, it was bound to happen. After all these years of me spouting off about the benefits of technology and the paperless office, the Economist now reports that paper use is falling.  No longer are printers spewing endless reams of paper to provide information. Well, not really, they are just spewing a bit less…

Take a look at your own paper use habits. I for one have gone paperless with my travel boarding passes, gas receipts, ATM receipts, bills, tax forms and the like. At work I rarely print out meeting materials, just lug the laptop.  Our new HR/Payroll System at TRU will eliminate more paper from the mix as pay stubs and tax receipts etc go electric.

At work, the single greatest  boon to my paper reduction is the fact that the office printer is located a long way away from my desk. It’s just too darn inconvenient to print stuff out. I rarely print out emails unless they go on and on, page after electronic page.

So I decree it’s the beginning of the end (of the beginning) for office paper. I can’t live without books, magazines and newspapers so until electronic  paper is a commercial reality I will continue to buy these by the metric tonne. This move to e-Paper could take a while, but, with those nimbostratus clouds hanging over it, our inveterate pulp and paper industry needs to rapidly adapt and change with the changing times.

Earlier I spoke of the benefits of plain old hard work and old fashioned subscription models as the way to make money on the web.

Well forget all that because, while I was sleeping, the web  moved to smart phones like the iPhone and the new gold rush are the riches to be made from creating clever iPhone apps. These are the single purpose applications that give you directions to the closest Tim Horton’s donut shop or cheapest gas station near you or the latest game for your hand held or… Because they are so cheap (say $1-5), geeks everywhere are buying them like, er,  donuts.

Apple is supposedly selling applications through its iTunes iStore (App Store) to the tune of $30 million per month.

Okay, now to make piles of cash all you need to do is  come up with an ingenious idea, download the SDK pay the $99 fee to Apple (sheesh) and learn to program in Objective-C. Done.

PS Actually the Timmy Me donut finding application is free.

Managing the email monster is lots of work for universities. It is seen as such a big job that some schools are getting google to handle their messaging services. Indeed, spam and viruses put a real strain on our IT infrastructure. For example, this September we handled 10,391,120 inbound messages destined to faculty and staff alone. (This number excludes our student email systems.)

Of that 10.4 million messages,  a staggering 91.9%  were thrown away and never delivered because they were spam. A paltry 6.8%  were not considered spam and delivered and 1.7%  were marked as potential spam but delivered anyway.

A further 2.2%  of all that email coming in last month contained a nasty virus that got stopped at the gateway. I refer to all this spam and virus protection as “nuisance management.” TRU’s email is a big disk hog too.  While the growth in legitimate email messages is fairly flat, disk space required to store messages doubles every year.

Given all this bad stuff, it may make sense to outsource the whole problem to someone, in exchange for giving them the opportunity to data-mine your messages. I’m not yet convinced that abdicating responsibility is the best approach for corporate and institutional email. While using google or yahoo for student mail has merit, my belief is that your enterprise email is more of a knowledge-base and should be treated as a valuable asset. It’s that catch-all for all the work you do and share with customers and colleagues. Every year I request that my disk quota is expanded so I can store more emails with more attachments. (I do use the archive utility to remove the really old stuff.)

I always have the knowledge repository available to search for what I did, what I committed to and so forth. This to me is the real value of groupware packages. No matter how much of a commodity email has become, managing it properly may be one of the most important jobs we do in IT.

(Thanks Wayne and Al for the stats, Abby for the hand-drawn monster!)