My Digital Life

Generation Y.  It’s a term that keeps coming up.  Before that it was Digital Natives, and I’m sure different companies and areas have their own terms.  What makes these guys so special eh?

Well I guess the most basic answer is that these are the guys that our companies will be employing from this point on.  If you work in an internal IS group like me, that makes them our customers.

For anyone born after 1984 or so, social web applications like Facebook and messaging tools like MSN or Sykpe are part and parcel of life.  Of course there are plenty of other examples, and I’m sure that these things are just as important for some of us slightly older types.  But it’s Generation Y that really sum up this new wave of technology savvy people who use and rely on technology far more than ever before.  It’s this consumerisation of the workforce and the tools they demand that cause problems in enterprise IT.

For the past 10-15 years the primary drivers for many enterprise IT groups has been simple:  Reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and then hopefully earn the opportunity to use some of those savings to deliver extra value to the business. 

This lead to the usual standardising of services to reduce complexity and and consolidation of those services to further reduce management and support costs. 

In effect this means standardising and locking down what people can do to server the greater good.  It’s never really been a popular move with end users, but from a business standpoint it has made a lot sense. 

The times are a changin’ however.  The need to attract and retain Generation Y is starting to have a profound effect on these old strategies.  With technology now playing such an important part of peoples lives its becoming a factor in peoples decisions about where they work.  The traditional locked down computers, controlled applications and restricted Internet access just isn’t going to cut it with people used to communicating and collaborating live online.

What does this mean for IT?  Well for a start we’ll need to be a lot more open in our approaches.  The problem is that often the old drivers for low TCO etc still stand.  So in the short term at least there are some compromises to be made.

I was just catching up on my RSS feeds and ended up reading an old article about cloud computer by Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet.   It’s quite a good article, but one bit caught my eye:

Like so many aspects of Web 2.0, the industry is moving a lot faster than most businesses are currently able to keep up with.

Being a customer looking at cloud services, that was news to me - I’d argue that the opposite is true, at least for some enterprises.

Whilst there are some maturing cloud services out there, many of the big players that Enterprises will traditionally deal with just aren’t quite there yet.  Whilst they’ll talk a good game, when you dig into the details and try and actually buy this stuff you soon find out that the grass isn’t quite as green as you’ve been lead to believe. 

It soon becomes clear that whilst many of the big players aspire to providing cloudy ’service effect’ style solutions very few are able to deliver them at the moment.  And those that do have solutions are often both limited in scope and more expensive than doing it yourself.

I’ve found that billing models aren’t developed, when you look for the simplistic £-per-user, £-per-GB, £-per-CPU/hour models you’ll find them strangely absent. 

What’s worse is that one of cloud computing’s big selling points - reduced capital investment and cost of entry -  is also quite often AWOL.  Many of big players are still reluctant to take on the cost and risk of owning the hardware layer, preferring the more traditional hosting and support style agreements.

Unless you’re specifically looking at apps that you can move to solutions like EC2 or App Engine, there are very few options available right now for delivering applications and services from the cloud.

So in my experience the appetite of enterprises for cloud services currently exceeds the markets ability to deliver them.   Or at least deliver them against the promises it’s already made.

Seth Godin made a good point on his blog today about online ads being the new tip jar.

What he’s saying is that if you’re reading some content you like, why not click an ad on the site to say thanks (clicking on the ad will result in the site getting a little bit of cash).

It’s something I’ve tried to do for ages, not usually on the larger commercial sites, but on peoples blogs or on smaller sites where the author is more likely to benefit.  The way I see it, if some content entertains or helps me then I’d like like the author to get something for their troubles, it just seems like a decent thing to do.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/ads-are-the-new.html