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.

Spent some time today playing with the new Google chrome web browser. The minimalist look and tab controls are very elegant and I can clearly see this as an excellent browser for mobile devices. Google Engineers have gone for an “invisible look” to the browser that belies its real strength – as an operating system or platform for next-gen web applications. I also like how they have eliminated all those annoying tool-bars.

Back in the  day, I used to think we’d be moving more and more to a world without browsers; rich interfaces and ubiquitous connectivity – think Google Earth. Java would create this platform independence that would render browsers unnecessary. It seems once again that I am 100% wrong as the browser becomes the launch-pad for all applications. This will only lead to the second browser war with new browser platforms appearing. The reason for this is that you probably interact with most of your applications through a browser already.These interfaces will only improve with Rich Internet Application (RIA) interfaces like Flash getting better all the time and the Canvas html element taking told.

So I have seen the future and it may or may not be Google Chrome. (It’s sometimes hard to tell with Google what will be a hit and what will miss – think Google Talk.) Whether Google Chrome wins or not, watch the browser space for some exciting new software applications and a even more stressed out Microsoft.

PS But whats this – no Mac support?

Lots of discussion at present on the move to “cloud computing.” While I can count the Software as a Service applications (Saas) in use at TRU on one hand, Gartner predicts that, by 2012, a third of all corporate computing spend will be SaaS subscriptions. Okay so this is going to be big. The increased visibility on the CO2 emissions and costs to run local data centres will only accelerate this move of software applications to cloud.

But thinking ahead what happens when we’ve moved everything to the cloud and turned our data centre into offices? Like manufacturing and call-centres before it, the “cloud” will no doubt find its way to the cheapest place to provide the service. With the ease of virtualization, that corporate application that used to require servers and kilowatts and TLC in the basement can now run anywhere, even multiple places, at any time. I used to think that the Cloud Architecture would be simple and relatively benign, that these few, large”non-evil” companies knew what was best for you and your data. But Bill Thompson has other ideas and sees the rise of the cloud more like a miasma as corporations and governments have other plans for your info.

“In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection.Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.

If your data hosting company gets a National Security Letter then not only do they have to hand over the information, they are forbidden from telling you or anyone else – apart from their lawyer – about it.The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, more than 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list.”

More on the dark side later. Happy Canada Day!

Nicholas Carr, who a few years ago got us central IT bods all stressed out because of his HBR article ”IT Doesn’t Matter”  has a new book out that predicts the rapid end of central corporate computing departments and other predictions in “The Big Switch.”

Carr compares today’s central IT departments to the adoption of power grids in the 19th Century. At that time, factories had their own power plants with the related overcapacity and costs associated to keeping an infrastructure that wasn’t core to making cotton or beer, for example. Along came the power grid that allowed factories to focus on core activities and simply plug in for their power. Carr asserts that this is happening to corporate IT, those inefficient,  power plants that people like me run in schools and corporations. Businesses will simply plug into the Cloud and get their corporate applications from the grid. Life is good. While ordering his book online today, I had a few thoughts about my pending unemployment when the Big Switch happens. Now I don’t disagree that I’m doomed, I think the move will be a lot slower than Carr predicts.

1. Greed will make the move to ubiquitous computing incredibly slow. Those software and hardware giants in your RRSP portfolio make their money selling hardware, software and maintenance agreements. They will do what they can to keep complexity and obsolescence designed in for years to come. Further, big outsourcers prefer to run your complex, disparate applications as islands of information rather than move them all to one single source Application Service Provider (ASP.) While the Grid gang speak to the pervasiveness of Salesforce.com CRM and other applications, they haven’t proven to be big  moneymakers.
2. Organizational Inertia. Given the horrors of IT complexity, change implications and IT labour shortages, organizations have limited appetite to replace or renew their enterprise systems unless they are forced to through M&A activities. According to my earlier, wildly inaccurate predictions on the pervasiveness of enterprise applications like finance and HR run as ASPs by 2008, I’m not thinking this is just around the corner. I wish I saw complexity being reduced in our IT environments today, but this just isn’t proving to be the case.
3.  IT Security issues will slow the adoption of ubiquitous computing. While I wish it didn’t have to be this way, I believe that IT security is quickly becoming a differentiator and will be part of the brand of any successful information economy organization. Until executives and boards can trust that their constituents’ private data isn’t going to be exposed when hard-drives are carelessly disposed of, there won’t be a big appetite to move to central solutions.
4. Will you always need and rely on the grid? Look at the mess associated with today’s power grid and you can see how attractive locally produced power through cogeneration,  wind power or fuel cells will be versus  one aging, expensive unreliable grid. The upshot of this is that in the future I may want to rely on the processing power of my Nintendo Wii or the cpu in my refrigerator rather than the unreliable grid. That grid of networks provisioned by telcos is getting unreliable because of the lack of competition in the internet service provider (ISP) space over the last few years. We are currently seeing commodity internet costs flattening after falling for many years and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see costs actually climb in the next few years. The big switch requires a lot of new fibre to be installed in place of copper. This becomes a  risk if you must rely on that network for all your services.

Ok so I’m sour grapes and protectionist. While that may be the case, our IT Team will need to do more to help move the future along.

• IT must focus on the required solution versus that technocratic, not-invented-here approach to every problem that drives our constituents crazy. A secure, identity enabled, robust third party provider might actually be a better solution. At TRU, a good example of this is the leveraging of iCompass software as a service to handle some processes.
• We need to continue to enable server virtualization and open source models to increase data centre efficiencies.
• IT managers need to build “Trusted Clouds” with partner institutions and organizations. This will start small with disaster recovery initiatives between schools to shared applications and services, like BCCampus.