Last week I attended an event in Manchester, hosted by Harvey Nash, a specialist recruiter in the IT sector. The event, to unveil a deck of research into the CIO community (Chief Information Officer, a generic term to describe the people at the head of IT strategy within an organisation), their challenges and the ‘mood music’ of the sector.
What always interests me is when there is a ‘live voting system’ at the event, so you can measure sentiment there and then, outside of the confines and thinking space of someones familiar environment. It threw up some really interesting data about how the CIO community views itself. One of the most interesting insights from the live voting was this: - “30% of CIO’s in the room responded they have a ‘weak’ relationship with their board, 60% cite a ’weak’ relationship with marketing too.”
One of the insights from the survey was that, one in four, CIO’s have not come from an I.T. background, they’ve been more commercially focused indicating a step-change, a movement towards more soft management skill based leadership, than technology specific leadership. The days of business critical specialism it seems are eroding in many large enterprises in favour or more ‘aligned to the commercial plan’ type CIO’s, able to motivate, inspire and provide leadership in human ‘software’ (emotional skills) than ‘hardware (technical skills).’
Technology has been a driver behind that. Transactional costs are coming down as large scale computing commoditises, shadow I.T. means more people are self-helping from cloud based providers using their own devices (device indpendence) and third parties are propositioning fully out-sourced service packages, end to end for your infrastructure. So, the question is: – Is “efficient infrastructure management” the right skills to serve a CIO of the future or does it need to be more than that?
Time to Update?
For me, the statement about ‘weak relationships’ is down to where I.T. is seen in the delivery of strategic objectives within a business. If you look into the research* it shows that the to priorities of CIO’s in the UK are: -
Delivering stable I.T. performance
Increasing Operational Efficiency
Saving Costs
Enabling Business Change
Improving Business Processes
Interestingly, nowhere in the Top 5 does it say, “Improving revenue growth or increasing customer acquisition/retention,” which may be one of the reasons why only 34% of CIO’s report directly to the CEO in an organisation. I bet the Amazon CIO reports to the CEO, I.T. is a key driver in delivering sales growth. So, there is a strategic issue in where I.T. sits (keeping the lights on, rather than driving transformation – a perception gap?).
My sponsoring thought when I saw the statistic about board engagement was that it’s time for the CIO’s to get pro-active and really show their value. It’s important that I say right here, right now that I think CIO’s are a vital component of any organisation. We can so easily take for granted the invisible things that happen which keep our infrastructure alive and invoices going out the door. The CIO’s that seem to be getting it right are on the front foot, engaged with sales and marketing to understand where priority and resources are best put. Sales and Marketing have a huge influence on organisational direction, they are influential and feel the pressure of time and the need to make the numbers, they want speed and everything now. Nothing will influence a CEO more than if his numbers aren’t happening, if excellence can be replicated by scaling up a smart solution or market advantage.
Interestingly, one third of CIO’s are looking to move roles in the next year. Now that is either massive reason for concern or circumstance of the big picture commoditisation of I.T. If they are feeling undervalued, disconnected and disengaged, then CEO’s have to move to put them front and centre of strategy. In the new world a CIO needs to be an organisational mover and shaker, moving across, up and down an organisation to identify the best places for impact and offering clear insight into best practice and new ways of working or competitive advantage.
For many, that transition may be hard, in my view it is essential for more CIO’s to transition to the board. Interestingly when posed the question “How many CIO’s do you know who made it to a CEO” – I don’t think a single hand went up, I know for a fact that many more people from the “commercial’ side of the house will have made it there, so there’s the clue. The ‘Commercialisation of I.T.’ is where it’s at, making I.T. as exciting and value adding to an individual as the application they’ve just put on their iPhone, that takes a shift of personal style, priority and resource deployment. It’s all about how to hit ‘home runs’ which increase the numbers too.
I’ve met people already in the CIO community who are already there, perhaps they are that third already reporting to the board, for the remaining two-thirds, there is a whole stack of opportunity.
Yesterday saw the milestone anniversary of 20 years since the first text message was sent. On the 3rd of December 1992 a vodafone engineer sent the words “Merry Xmas” to a mobile phone and the rest is history. 2011 saw around 8 trillion text messages sent, 150bn of which were in the UK.
It’s almost unimaginable to think about lift without text messages in the current day. For many, text is still the number one platform for those on your “inner circle” of contacts, a text notification trumping updates/messages from other platforms. Yes, users are spreading out their messages to different platforms like BBM or Whatsapp, both born from the concept of short messaging. Chatting to a generation Y today, across all the various platforms, they sent around 100 messages per day on their mobile device across three differing services including SMS, but excluding social media updates on Twitter or Facebook – that’s a huge amount of messaging.
In business, you are always looking for things that may disrupt your business model. SMS was one of those things that had disruption designed into it, as it impacted on the amount of calls people made and the letters and faxes they may have previously sent suddenly went onto a mobile device. I can remember tapping out my first text on a Nokia phone, three presses for a ‘C’, two for an “F”, those old enough will remember. It’s a far cry from now.
Other examples of disruptive technology are cloud computing (demise of hosted software), tablet computers (demise of laptops), MP3 players (death of record shops), broadband (where do I start). It happens in services too, think of moneysupermarket (reducing need for financial advisors), Direct Line (going direct and cutting out the middle man), Crowdfunding (start-up funding from strangers reducing the need for banks), the list goes on and on.
The trick is to spot the difference between a fad and a trend. Texting was a trend, it’s lasted for 20 odd years. Fads simply come and go, they don’t last or provide long term disruption to an industry or behaviour. Personally I devote time to evaluating what the big trends are in the consumer space and business space, inside and outside of our industry as it helps to give you the general sense of direction and potential for future disruption. Will texting last another 20 years? Probably not. Like the fax machine and typewriter, it will have played a hugely important part in the development of communications, however new instant messaging platforms are likely to be the winners in the long term.
Whether these messaging platforms with their shortened catchphrases will add anything to our abilty to communicate as human beings in the long term is up for debate. Data suggests that the average Gen X has a daily vocabulary range of around 2,000 words, a Generation Y is around 800, so when we get to Generation Z, life is going to be truly interesting – LOL!
According to some research we’ve just conducted, 22% of new start businesses base themselves in a coffee shop and are driving a new trend we describe as “cappuccino commerce.”
Speaking on Radio 5 live this morning, I cited some of the drivers behind this trend, as always airtime is very limited, so I’m expanding some of the notes I’d prepared here for quick and easy comsumption.
The new postcode of SME’s is “no fixed abode.”
Technology is the key driver of this change, in particular the availability of free wi-fi and cloud computing. 71% of respondents cited smartphones, mobile printing devices and tablet computers as the key things that felt enabled them to work in this way.
67% of these businesses intend to stay “office free.”
AAA* is the new standard for business success “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere.”
It took Apple 24 years to sell 67M i-macs, it took them 3 years to sell as many i-phones and only 2 years to sell as many i-pads.
Apple derives 60% of it’s revenues now from products that didn’t exist 3 years ago.
Access is the oxygen to mobile businesses (access to wi-fi or a high speed mobile network).
New start businesses have high agility, this ability to work anywhere gives them competitive advantage, not disadvantage.
SoLoMo – Social, Local and Mobile businesses are the key trends fuelling further new starts and customer buying behaviour.
Fi-Wi is the new Wi-Fi. Users are demanding higher speed on the move.
Generation X, Y + Z are all participating in the shift.
Globalisation of business means people need to be on the move.
Access to power is also one of the key considerations as to where people work. No power = juice jitters and technology meltdown. Coffee shops, listen up!
Digital Ubiquity is the new watchword – you heard it here first.
If you want to know what’s going in a sector, go and hear one of the top management consultancies deliver a talk. I did this morning, when I attended a seminar by Deloitte on the future of retailing.
One of the guest speakers was New Channels programme manager at Marks and Spencer – Alice Rackley. Leading a forty strong team inside the business (which was only six strong six months ago), her job is to integrate the on-line with the off-line. I have to say I didn’t realise M&S were doing quite so much. They aim to be the number one multi-channel retailer in the world, that’s aiming high.
Typical examples of things they are doing include equipping assistants with i-pads selling extended ranges, installing screens in store which allows customers to see user generated content reviews of the products they sell, augmented reality mirrors in their new make-up concession. The really smart thing I thought they were doing was probably the simplest, putting wi-fi networks in all their stores so that people can browse their mobile shopping sites at good speeds on their own devices.
Deloitte had a couple of speakers up who threw some good stats and trends up. Here’s a few in no particular order: -
Amazon are expected to overtake John Lewis and M&S to become the largest variety retailer by 2014.
Apple are expected to have sold 80M i-Pads by the end of 2012.
48% of shoppers own a smartphone, 58% of those people use them for store related shopping (this works out to 27% of all smartphone owners if you do the math).
Marks and Spencer transacted 6% of all on-line sales on i-Pads in Jan 2012, by June it was 8%.
1 in 5 retail purchases will be via Smartphone by 2014.
Big theme is “digital ubiquity” – that is digital everywhere.
New innovation coming to market is “audio watermarking” whereby an embedded watermark is put into a TV ad which then triggers an experience on your i-Pad if your multi-screening.
It took Apple this long per device to sell 67M units – Macs -24 years, i-Pods – 5 years, i-Phones – 3 years, i-Pads – 2 years.
Speed of Response is becoming key. An example was given on retailer “New Look” who reacted to a new Kate Middleton outfit with an entire digital response within 24 hours of “get the look.”
Prediction of “death of the till” as store assistants use hand-held devices to optimise conversion.
Example given on a retailer who has equipped their staff with i-Pads to take photo’s of people outside dressing rooms, then recommend other clothes/complementary purchases.
Future for retailers will also be about analytics and making “fact-based” decisions amongst the big data that exists.
What struck me was just how much disruption there continues to be in the sector and it wrestles with it’s multi-channel strategy. Some are doing it well, others not. What’s clear is that the traditional landscape is changing at a supersonic speeed, expect more casualties from those that fail to react.
Last week I sat on a panel in Manchester, aimed at SME’s discussing technology. Representing the views not only of a hardware manufacturer, but also as a Director of a large business who uses technology to gain competitive advantage. Any conference examining tech needs to cover the advantages of cloud computing.
The main triggers for IT upgrades in SME’s tend to be the following: -
They are moving.
They are a new business.
They are growing.
They have an urgent need to repair something that is broken (what we call a “distressed purchase”).
In my view, businesses that are new or moving (1 or 2) are much more likely to adopt a higher level of cloud services into their business than those that are growing or repairing (3 or 4). Once a business is established, in a premises and focussed on growing, it becomes all about adding or growing to the existing IT set-up – evolution, rather than revolution.
One of the primary reasons that large enterprises, who have the resources to look at such things, are considering cloud computing is business agility and competitive advantage. It means less people plumbing technology, less software development, server maintenance and support – in fact there’s a lot to be said for it.
The number one consideration continues to be security, closely followed by available network speed for access. It’s a big job to move away from a network infrastructure, however many large enterprises are developing plans towards virtual private clouds.
A new start can doesn’t need a server, applications, e-mail server, CRM system or finance system, they can rent all these services in the cloud. They can benefit from the latest software developments, don’t have to worry about capital expenditure for hardware and can focus on what matters most for their new business – sales, marketing and growing like crazy.
They, potentially may benefit from competitive advantage over more established SME’s who may stick with what they’ve got, preferring to not change for reasons of business continuity. Those that continually refine what they use, how they use it and how they can review their working practices will continually benefit from these new services.
They may well come down to earth with a bump as the future is predicted to be smartphone/tablet based and the concept of “BYOD” (bring your own device) is already being investigated by major CIO’s as part of their future technology policies.
The lesson is this. It’s worth reviewing what you do and how you do it regularly. Some major advancements are right here and right now, you could be benefitting from them. Read up a bit, see what others are doing, go to a conference, invite a supplier, check out a few blogs – the possibilities are endless.
We’d all like to know what the next big thing will be. Something to invest the re-mortage in
I’ve been talking a lot more about augmented reality (AR) of late. It’s something that has been promising a lot for a while, but suddenly seems to be starting to take off.
So, what is it?
In simple terms, it’s the ability to merge the virtual world with the real world, real time. Like you’d see on some of the fancy sci-fi movies of years ago. Many things have happened technology wise over the past few years, which have created the tipping point to AR becoming more commonplace. Things such as: -
Smartphones.
Processor speeds.
Mobile broadbands speeds.
Geo-location.
Applications.
Why is it so important?
Two major applications for augmented reality will be: -
Turning 2d ads into 3d by holding your phone over a small QR barcode. A press ad becomes a 3d ad by holding your i-Phone over it. The ultimate product being brought to life moment.
Over-laying virtual or web information onto your current geo-location (directions, instructions or information).
I’ve already seen developers starting to do some clever stuff with this already. Here is a great article called 10 mindblowing augmented reality apps and videos, to see what I mean. This was published over a year ago, so imagine what a head-start those people that have been busy developing have over the market.
AR will bring a new age of interactivity, visualisation and opportunity. Start looking seriously at it.
I love to play with words. One of my most recent creations which I used at the How-Do Brand on Demand event on Wednesday was “ME-conomics”.
I used the word as a descriptor for the changing nature of mobile business, personalisation of goods, growth of personal branding and how marketeers need to pay attention to these trends in their marketing mix in order to monetise them (economics bit).
There was widespread agreement that the world is moving pretty quickly at the minute. Mobile applications are motoring along at a terrific pace. Innovation is rife. Here’s a great factoid – 60% of Apple’s 2010 sales came from products that did not exist three years ago. Scary!
Mobile-ME
Retailers in the states are now providing free wi-fi in store as a way of being able to geo-locate their customers, find out more about them and send hyper-local advertising to them, fire real-time coupons at their customers and track their physical paths through the store. Interesting stuff, totally driven by the technology. Mobile search gives local retailers a real chance for cut-through, as long as they get their proposition right.
Pay-Off
It’s evident that those businesses that get their plans shifted to accomodate the mobile revolution will be big winners in the game. Mobile enabled websites, mobile enabled e-commerce, mobile enabled search. I talked about the world shaking down to the big convenience platforms, Amazon, i-Tunes, Facebook, eBay – as they offer the ultimate in convenience to the attention poor individual on the move.
What’s clear, is that ME-conomics is a big trend. There are other elements to it, I’m saving those for a keynote I’m doing in a couple of months in Berlin. More to come.
So after Wednesday’s leaked memo to staff, Nokia CEO – Stephen Elop – today announced a new “broad strategic partnership” with Microsoft (no surprises given he’s an ex Microsoft man himself).
Elop is clearly a man on a mission and is determined to drive through the radical changes Nokia needs to stop it leaking market share like a bucket with a hole in it (facing the brutal facts). The memo set the scene for this announcement which has clearly been nutured in the background. It seems there will be big job losses as Nokia opt to use the Microsoft operating system, rather than their own – inevitable when you bring two teams of developers together. I think this is the right decision and Elop has called it right in terms of dumping their own native operating system and going with something developed by someone else to address the “ecosystem” issue.
BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones called it right when he said “two turkeys don’t make an eagle,” there is an inter-dependency in this new relationship and re-labelling old wine as new, won’t work. Both businesses are being battered by the progress both Apple and Google have been making in the operating system marketplace and some genuine innovation is needed if they are to catch up. Whether the horse has already bolted, we’ll see.
The next decade will be the decade we remember for it’s advance in mobile technology. Signalling the shift to location based shopping, services and convenience. Apps are coming out by their droves and one that caught my eye recently was this one from Red Laser which I think gives an indication of where it’s all heading. Using an i-Phone, you simply scan a products barcode, the app then identifies it and presents the current web pricing for that product from it’s database. Instant price checking and hugely convenient. Just one thing to do, scan the app.
From the user feedback so far, it seems the pricing isn’t perfect in their back end database, that can soon be corrected. It’s the process that interests me more. Another shift in the way people shop, instant comparison pricing and perhaps a decision to not “buy it now” but buy it when you get home, if the price is significantly different. Retailers watch out.
Mobile search is where it’s going to be at, presenting your website in a mobile friendly way. Manchester Search specialists theEword have already cottoned onto this and have a tool in development which will effectively convert your site into a mobile friendly version, which I consider to be an essential step for all businesses moving forward. Pay per click and search engine marketing also takes on a new persona, with specific activity needing to be done in parallel to your conventional SEM.
What’s evident is that the future is about mobile, the customer journey, convenience, location based marketing and immediacy. If you’re not working on “mobilising” your digital resources, you should be, it’s where it’s all heading.
Recognise this? It’s a laptop from 1990 – 20 years ago. How life has changed since.
Chatting to a 19 year old student at a recent social gathering about life through his lens as a Generation Y, it hit me how much change I had seen in my lifetime in the way our lives work. Things that today’s generation just take for granted.
Jumping on the tube back into central London, I let my wander for a bit and mentally tagged a few of the things that I’ve seen become commonplace since my working life started around 1988. So, in no particular order, here are 20 of them which have become commonplace in the last 20 years.
e-Mail (Corporate and Personal) – we talked more or wrote letters to people.
Internet/Google – we used encyclopedias or went to the library.
Mobile phones – we used phone boxes or land lines.
Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin – we met people in person.
e-Bay/Amazon/Marketplaces – we went to jumble sales, had garage sales or held on to it!
MP3 music/i-Pods – we bought vinyl or tape cassettes.
i-Pads/e-readers -we read paper books.
Youtube – we watched wrestling on World of Sport.
Wireless networks – we accessed computer networks at the office, not at home or out and about.
LCD displays/Plasma Televisions - we used huge clunky CRT’s and TV’s needed a full corner of a room.
DVD’s – we used video.
CD’s, CD players in cars – we listened to vinyl LP’s or the radio/cassette in cars. I didn’t get a CD player in my car until around 1996 from memory.
Sky TV - we only had BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and later Channel 5.
Dab Radio – we listened to conventional radio, often on Longwave.
PVR (Personal Video Recorders like Sky+) – we set times on video recorders.
SatNav – we used maps in atlases.
Skype – we used a normal phone.
Blogs – we kept secret diaries.
Digital Cameras - we used film and didn’t see the pictures until they were developed after a week or so.
Texting – seriously, we didn’t have text then. We talked.
There is great cause for celebration. The world has taken an almighty shift and here we are, Generation X, right in the middle of it. Witnessing the old and the new. What the future might still bring is really exciting, augmented reality, facetime calling over high speed wireless broadband, 3D laptops and retinal scanning lasers. Wow.
With technology change also comes societal change. And when I’d moved on from thinking about the tech, I went on to think about things that I did growing up, compared with now. Things like: -
Going to Corner Shops more than supermarkets. It fuelled the idea of us being a nation of shopkeepers, now the multiples rule.
Listening to the radio on a Sunday night to hear who was number 1 in the pop charts. Monday morning conversation (yes, you had to wait till you saw your mates at school) was all about who was number one.
Visiting record shops to buy music meant you had to go out to town, it meant the high streets were much busier places.
Major household items like washing machines or televisions were purchased weekly from people like Provident or Radio Rentals. Now they are seen as disposable items.
Having more adventure as kids. I had a local adventure playground where you could just ask for wood, nails and a hammer and off you would go. Today’s health and safety driven culture, just wouldn’t allow it.
Writing letters to people. This was a skill in itself which is regretably dying.
Faxing important business information. Retaining the formality of a written letter with more instananeousness and a proper signature!
Breaking bad news face to face or by phone call, rather than by written electronic means such as text or e-mail. It’s so easy to hide behind technology nowadays, whereas folk tend to just want it straight, face to face.
Taking more in. What I mean by that is that time wasn’t filled with constant interruption from mobile calls, texts, e-mails, status updates, there seemed to be more head time.
Computers didn’t rule our lives. We did!
And on that bombshell, I’ll wish all of my readers a fantastic 2011. It promises to be full of opportunity – if you look for it.
