Frank Kenney

Microsoft and Google now have competing products that allow users to store their documents online and provide access to those documents to anyone. Microsoft’s Skydrive allows users to drag and drop documents, photos, media files and just about any other ‘thing’ on a browser window and then silently uploads them to the user’s SkyDrive folders. Google Docs now allows users to upload documents into customize folders and allows those documents to be shared easily.

Let me just take a moment and remind everyone that collaboration is an activity and that activity is generally associated with humans sharing information with humans. So when I talk about collaboration I talk about e-mail, USB sticks, burnt DVDs and Federal Express all being used to facilitate interactions between a set of humans. (It should be noted that humans do have to collaborate with systems and systems integrate with each other.) But I digress…

Both products point to a continuing phenomenon within the government integration and collaboration market (GI&C) space. (Previously we called this space the MFT suite market) Hosted and on premises solutions from vendors such has the vendors evaluated in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrants for Managed File Transfer 2009  are currently available to provide the same type of functionality but tend to do so with a higher level of governance within what is provided via Microsoft and Google. The ability to report & audit against uploaded and shared artifacts is essential to enforcing policies around privacy and authentication. Additionally, value added services that you may find in more global class solutions will enable you to simply “snap in” third-party functionality such as data loss prevention capability, advanced encryption, transformation, automation, business intelligence, community management and provisioning and others.

The impact of the “prosumer” in the government integration and collaboration market has been felt and leveraged by vendors such as Box.net, Dropbox,  Globalscape, LeapFile, Stonebranch Scribbos, and YouSendit. These vendors of all have been able to attract enterprise attention to their products by providing compelling solutions to “prosumers”. These solutions also give you the capability to provide visibility and control to all of your file collaborations.

 So here’s a bit a cheap advice: Microsoft and Google are now providing new ways of enabling your knowledge workers and assisting them with their collaboration needs. We expect that both Microsoft and Google will eventually allow systems to programmatically envoke the service interface is that are powering these systems; allowing companies to take advantage of this functionality. Companies need to take steps to ensure that corporate policies and mandates are enforced within the context of low cost “prosumer” solutions. When available companies should consider leveraging the governance technologies and capabilities from technology providers to protect corporate intellectual property and consumer data.

Aight… Let’s table the technology discussion for a minute…

Every CIO must ask Chief Counsel and all of the workers reporting to Legal (including internal and external attorneys, paralegals and administrative executives) how the information that flows in and out their department is governed and controlled.

Here is a short survey that CIO should send to their legal department:

1. How are you exchanging information (legal or otherwise (remember that e-mails asking about your last vacation counts too)) with internal, corporate and external parties?
2. How are you maintaining chain of custody processes and procedures?
3. How are you showing compliance to judicial, regional and national, industry and internal regulations around the handling and privacy of corporate information?
4. What can you show a judge when asked, “Who has access to information?”
5. What are your current FedEx, UPS, DHL and courier/messenger policies around privacy and what are the costs of using such services?
6. Are you using e-mail to exchange information and if so what processes are in place for governance?

While these should not be difficult to answer, they can be uncomfortable; especially from the perspective of Chief Counsel.

Governing Collaboration

Managed File Transfer (MFT) technologies, include mechanisms for enabling legal departments to consistently and securely exchange information in a way that is centrally managed, monitored and audited, are available from a myriad of vendors. (Gartner provides an annual magic quadrant for these vendors)

These technologies and services can be deployed in a manner that is transparent to the workers that will use them. For example they can be deployed behind an e-mail server (so workers can simply attach files the way they normally do), deployed as an add-on to existing legal software (so workers can simply press a button to send information) or deployed has a lightweight client on the desktop (so workers can double-click an icon or drag and drop a file.).

Regardless of where and how the technology is deployed, as a traditional packaged application, hardware appliance or cloud service, the technologies can be used by the enterprise to ensure that all regulations and mandates are being met and that proof of compliance can be easily generated.

Let’s face it; companies don’t really want to use existing e-mail systems to enforce policies around the chain of custody. E-mail administrators are burdened enough as it is. IT departments do not want to train workers on the use of FTP servers and the risk analysts and security analysts do not want the legal department leveraging free e-mail and collaboration services. But the reality is today most companies do one if not all of the above.

Action Item:
CIOs and their IT departments MUST supply their legal departments with mechanisms to exchange documents in a well governed way (visible, monitored and controlled), that is and shows compliance with all judicial and corporate regulations and mandates.

Are you ready to have that conversation with your legal team?

If you ain’t read research from Deb Logan on e-discovery… you missin’ out

As many of you know I make music. Considering that I am an industry analyst for the largest and most influential analyst firm in the world, I guess I’m not that good at making music. That being said I love to make music.

Arguably the platinum standard in recording audio music today is Digidesign’s ProTools. You can walk into any professional studio in the world and 9 out of 10, they will be using ProTools. The beauty of this software is that it supports open standards around third-party plug-ins. Plug-ins created by third parties By are useful if I want a specific type of sound effect like a reverb or a delay. Using a drop down menu the plug-in executes and integrates with the client, in this case Pro tools.. Other Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) such as Sonar and Cubase also support open standards, some better than others, that allow me to plug-in third-party sound effects and virtual instruments. Needless to say plug-ins have been extremely valuable in the world of composition and music creation.

So when the creator of one of my favorite composition tools, Reason, decided to develop and sell a new environment for professional and semiprofessional audio recording I was ecstatic at the proposition but perplexed by Propellerhead’s decision not to support open standards around third-party plug-ins and virtual instruments. I felt that they would be doomed from the start because me, like other semiprofessional and professional musicians, like to leverage heterogeneous third-party plug-ins.

I was wrong.

For the last three weeks I’ve been beta testing Propellerhead’s Record, their new digital recording environment, and it works. It works so well and so simply that I don’t see it working and I just create. I don’t fight with conflicts in the operating system or in between clients and plug-ins, I just create. There is a very good reason why it works so darn well for me and that reason is I have been spared most of the common conflicts, error messages, blue screen of death, sad Mac, dead Mac and loss of cursor, one tends to get when using a mixture of technologies based on open standards (remember open don’t mean interoperable- an interoperable don’t mean reliable)

Much like my iPhone things hardly ever go wrong which allows me to make my phone calls and use my applications. (With all do respect to Apple when things do go wrong old boy do they go wrong!!!) This got me thinking about the information technology we use their IT environments every day. If I were to ask you, the reader, if you preferred opened or closed systems, I’d bet most of your money that you would tell me open systems and standards.

Open is good. But in reality do you really want everything open?

I mean, at some point dealing with all of the integration and interoperability issues takes you away from what you have bought the systems to do. Please understand on tap isn’t a disparaging post on ProTools, Sonar or Cubase. Their technologies do what they do very well-when I’m allowed and able to do it. But the reality is I have dealt with systems crashes, client crashes due to unreliable third-party plug-ins and plug-in crashes due to inexplicable conflicts.. Again this doesn’t take away from the strength and the robustness of these fine DAWs but the reality is analogous to any business process, such as order to cash, nothing exist in isolation. I don’t and can’t blame ProTools itself but if some plug-in is causing ProTools to crash, the end result is that I am not making music- which is my goal. If some third-party application on my open Google Android phone is it working and causes the phone to crash ,I am not getting phone calls- and that ain’t good.

So when I ask do you want a closed proprietary system or an open one or I ask, “Do you want to leverage open standards or proprietary ones?” The real answer is, “It depends on what I’m doing. Because on That I want open standards for the Internet and yes I want open standards on electricity. But I’ve want a closed system for recording and I am willing to trust the vendor, Propellerhead in this case, to deliver the innovation that I need to continue to make better music.

Kudos to Propellerhead for bucking the system and giving us what we need even though we don’t know we need it. They didn’t convince me to become a Record user because the product was so good it has so many features, no they convinced me to be a Record user because it just worked. And work consistently and let me concentrate on making music..

For more on Propellerhead Record click here
For more on Digital Audio Workstations click here
For more on my album (if you laugh I will come hunt you down) click here

Till next time
Frank

This week I did something unimaginable. I opened a bottle of Merlot, poured a glass and reduced my Facebook list of friends down to 50. I started at 253 which means 203 people have been cut out of my virtual life. Actually they haven’t been cut out of my virtual life, they have been relegated to my LinkedIn page. I do not mean to say that LinkedIn is any less important to me than Facebook… well considering that I check Facebook about five times a day and I check LinkedIn about once a week, on my iPhone where the functionality is rather limited ( hint hint), I guess LinkedIn is less important to me. By the way that would change dramatically if I was unemployed and looking for a new job.

I started with my family. Unfortunately even the second cousins that I never speak to I have to keep on my list, because of my mom. Okay next 10. Next up- my college buddies. I whittled through people that I thought would be cool to talk to but I realized afterwards I hadn’t talked to in over 15 years… slice- that left three. Some old friends from the neighborhood added up to another 10 but in all honesty nine of them will probably be gone by the end of next week. (If you are from where I’m from then you would understand.) Now we come to the difficult part. Facebook is really good at recommending collates who work at Gartner and should be on my friends list. The problem is they aren’t really my friends. By the way I’m one of the lucky people in the world that could say my boss and my boss’s boss actually give a crap about my personal life and I give a crap about theirs. Add to that people like Whit Andrews, Craig Plummer (yes I call him Craig) and a few other people who I actually care about. However everyone else should be a part of my professional page on LinkedIn. Why? Because it seems every other day I am ranking and raving about something that is politically incorrect or I am quoting my favorite lines from some hard-core rap album or artist – stuff that I don’t necessarily want the people I work with work to see.

So what is the bottom line in all of this? Out of 203 people that I have cut out of my personal page only three have requested that I re-friend them. I did just that for two of them. So here’s a challenge for you:

Goto your Facebook page and whittle your friend list down to 15% — 20% of what it is today. Make hard decisions about whose status updates you really care about. For example the first love of my life used to be on my friend list and as much as I would love to say that I am now a mature adult, I secretly could care less that she has two beautiful daughters. (Actually do care but it hurts when I see them and since I am the all American macho “I can never cry” sort of man I rather say I don’t care instead of it hurts). Anyway, after you make a few passes at reducing your list monitor your requests for the next few days and you’ll be surprised at what you don’t see- that is the 80% of your now defunct friends e-mailing you as to why you have so mercilessly cut them from your virtual life.

Here is a form letter you can send to all of those business associates that insist on being a part of your personal virtual life:

Dear XXXX
Thanks for your request to be a part of my personal virtual world. I take my personal space pretty seriously but I do want to stay connected virtually and I have set up a professional page over at LinkedIn, which I would love to have you a part of. Please don’t take this personally; the reality is I’m sure you could care less as to what exceedingly normal activities my 3 ½-year-old is doing. In addition on my professional page you don’t have to update your status or feel inclined to read my nonexistent updates.

Truly your virtual professional associate,
XXXXX

Now how’s that for efficiency. Talk to you soon
-Frank

Has many of you who know me, you know that I’m always on the run. For instance I landed at 7pm and I’m back out at 6am in the morning.

<Sigh>

Sometimes there isn’t just enough time. So instead of screaming that all of you need to understand the benefits of Managed File Transfer, I will let superstar

who is signed to Bad Boy Records (That’s Diddy/ Puffy/ Sean Combs record label) explain why you need an MFT solution and why all the free services aren’t the best things to use all the time.  More info on Cassie can be found here.
Without further ado, here’s Cassie.

Cassie Explains Why She Needs MFT

Regardless of your beliefs about the origin of man and the evolutionary theories that accompany it such as the evolution of amoeba to chimp to man, you must agree that at some point there was a global phenomenon that caused us to stand upright and pull our iPhones on the jet way of a Delta flight to Tampa from Atlanta Hartsfield international. (Hey dude in seat 23A, see you in the fifth circle of hell with the guy that decided to bring Popeye’s chicken onto a flight that served no food.)  But I digress, in the interest of not starting another international incident, much like my advocacy of the adult industry being a key indicator of IT success; I will not attempt to identify what that evolutionary phenomenon was. But I can say that this phenomenon happened and those half man- half chimpanzees that fail to recognize it are today a mere blip on the evolutionary chain.

This, my slightly captivated audience, should serve as enough of a warning to all of you; especially if you are information technologists who believe that the phenomenon of the Cloud and Cloud Computing are just evolutionary steps from message oriented middleware, integration brokers, application platform suites, enterprise service Buses, SOA Suites, Etc.. If you believe that simply putting an enterprise service bus on an external server hosted by your local Internet service provider, will give you the capability to offer the same functionalities (including elasticity, flexibility and agility) as true Cloud platforms, then you are mistaken.  And you have made a mortal error if you fail to see the evolutionary trail of enterprise infrastructure and middleware has dwindled.

I fully expect to see that the chasm, which may be more like a deep bottomless pit, between enterprise stuff and true infrastructure for Cloud services, filled with the bodies and careers of men, women and analyst (sometimes we can be above sexuality) who failed to detect and comprehend the radical shift in existence necessary to consume and provide the proper mechanisms and methodologies necessary for survival in this new era of Cloud services and Cloud Computing.

In turn this means the fight for leadership in Cloud platform and Cloud service infrastructure markets is far from over and there are no incumbent leaders or even visionaries.  So if you provide application integration technology today by all means adapt your technology for Cloud service infrastructure but be forewarned; your competitors will come from the world of integrated service environments, multi-enterprise collaborative gateways, manage file transfer technologies, Web 2.0 platforms, productivity suites, business process management suites and even entire operating systems. Take nothing for granted.  Unlike SOA and to a lesser extent BPM, the Consumerisation of the IT will not let enterprise infrastructure and middleware providers and vendors dilute and shift the Cloud’s core value proposition, strengths and legacy has a defining shift in information technology.

I like many other analysts love talking in multi-letter acronyms (MLA) and do so when there is:

• An IT guy in the room
• When I’m getting a new cell phone (to prove I’m smarter than the sales guy)
• At the hotel bar (preferably after the conference)
• In seat 2B when seat 2A is occupied by someone much better looking than I

But here’s a suggestion. Let’s concentrate on solving our problems and achieving the desired outcome and not focus all of our attention on HOW the problem is solved. Doing so will get us thinking about all the options for getting the desired result. Maybe its SaaS, maybe its an appliance, maybe it’s a custom app or ff you happen to work in a city where it costs you 10 bucks a week for knowledge worker, maybe your application integration is a shared desk with a set of in and outboxes. Maybe your database is a very tall and thick file cabinet. All you really do is keep your workers performing at a high level (meeting SLAs), have a group of other workers validating the result (Validation) and you lock the front door and if sometimes you lock the file cabinets. (Privacy) Oh and by the way you still have a successful, growing business and your R&D budget is twice your IT spend.

It’s all about the result. For example my colleague David Mitchell Smith (Cloud guru) prefers red wine. David Cearly, (another Cloud guru) prefers single malt scotch and I prefer a tall frosty 40 oz. bottle of Ole English. At the end of the night we all get a little tipsy and that’s the desired result; who cares how we get there. OK maybe that’s not a good analogy. OK here’s another… You need visibility into your sales pipe and your IT shop says they need to integrate Salesforce.com with you backend SAP system. They want to do this with an appliance from Cast Iron, fine. Or maybe they prefer to do so with Software AG’s webMethods Fabric, that’s cool too. You just want to know how much it will cost, how fast it can be done and most of all you want a guarantee that the result is visibility into your entire sales pipe. By the way I don’t unilaterally advocate one approach over the other (different strokes for different folks, call us if you really want our recommendation), all I really care about is that you get the results you want.

This is what makes Cloud Computing so cool. Since I get what I need as a service, I’m reluctant to care about what’s underneath. All I care about is getting my result, correctly, securely and on time. Some may say this is overly simplistic but those are the same folks who check their power transformers, wood poles, underground piping, CAT 5 converters, and transformation drums (don’t ask). I prefer to leave all that stuff to the electric company; holding them responsible for when my “frige don’t get cold and lights don’t turn on”.

So from my pickup truck in front of the feed store in Tampa, I offer my “down south county boy” mantra for all you consumers of Cloud services:

• I don’t care how you do the transformation, just GIT ‘ER DONE, and GIT ‘ER DONE correctly.
• I don’t care how you do the workflow GIT ‘ER DONE and make sure it gets to whom it supposed to, when it’s supposed to.

• I don’t care if it’s a web services or a FORTRAN script, GIT ‘ER DONE
• Encrypt the hell outta it, leave a junkyard dog by the servers running the Oracle apps, heck even require your employees use that fancy iris scanning authentication, I don’t care just GIT ‘ER DONE and GIT ‘ER DONE securely and protect my stuff!

Seriously think about the outcome and its impact on the business. Think about the business process and the business service. But don’t get bogged down on the implementation until you figured the rest out. Yep the devil is in the details, but don’t confront him until you have to.

What he said:

“Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.”

What he means:

“We had governance but we didn’t enforce it. So the governance had no meaning…” (Sound familiar all you app developers out there? )

What he said:

“That is why I have asked Vice-President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort – because nobody messes with Joe. I have told each member of my cabinet as well as mayors and governors across the country that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend.”

What he means:

“We are going to redo our governance processes and build enforcement mechanisms into the process. I will expect reports and I will audit and I will reward/ punish for compliance.”

What he said:

“I understand that on any given day, Wall Street may be more comforted by an approach that gives banks bail-outs with no strings attached, and that holds nobody accountable for their reckless decisions. But such an approach won’t solve the problem.”

What he means:

“It’s maybe easier, both politically and technically to create rules and then ignore them but in the long run that approach always fails.”

What he said:

“I intend to hold these banks fully accountable for the assistance they receive, and this time, they will have to clearly demonstrate how taxpayer dollars result in more lending for the American taxpayer.”

What he means:

“I will audit for compliance and by the way since I’m auditing are you SOX, HIPPA, BASEL, PIC, *fill in the blank* compliant?”

What he said:

“Finally, because we’re also suffering from a deficit of trust, I am committed to restoring a sense of honesty and accountability to our budget.”

What he means:

See any of the above and multiply times 10.

Ok so maybe I’m reading in to this way more than I should but let’s stop and think about how we are governing our businesses and our IT shops and decisions. Are we monitoring? Are we measuring? Are we enforcing? At the very least, the American Government is going to start asking for proof that you are.

(cue that horrible whistling theme from that commercial)

So the other day I was surfing the web and a colleague who shall remain nameless sent me a link to a humorous video that had been making its way around the web. It seems that the content was quite adult and one of the two stars let a little gas slip. Oh how immature! But still funny in a MAD magazine sorta way. When I clicked through I found myself on a site that was much like You Tube but was 100% adult content. The advertisements were off to the sides, the content was free and the community was vibrant and very much participating. While I won’t share the name of the site (I don’t need the Google crawlers logging it) I will tell you a little research and the owners of the site was a company that started out distributing VHS tapes, then DVDs and now giving the content away.  After a few emails with the owner it became evident that it’s the same ole game plan that the adult industry has followed from day one.   

When the adult industry realized that less and less people were buying content (in any form), they gave it away for free and monetized the communities built around the content. Viewers that preferred a certain type of film clip were bought together in an effort to share their favorite clips. Specific advertisements and value added services were added to the community and bingo, revenue streams opened up again. Utilizing current technologies and deployment models for storing and playing media (cloud storage) and hosted search, provisioning and account management capabilities (many adult sites will leverage existing email accounts) have kept these firms lean and clean; without traditional IT departments and razor focus of their business models.

Taking cues from the adult industry isn’t something new; it’s just something we don’t want to admit. But lets face it, the tipping point in the VHS vs. Beta discussions came down to the adult industry (it was cheaper). The tipping point for Blue Ray vs. HD DVD came down to a decision from the manufacturer to not grant a license to adult companies. Some of the trends are large like the above; some are small… think DIVX, downloadable flash and avatars. While we saw some adult content come into virtual worlds like Second Life, most of that was via end users and NOT larger adult companies. (In fact many had already tried virtual worlds and passed on the idea for various reasons.)

Just something to think about and I volunteer to lead that research agenda and chair that conference. Any helpers out there?

-f

Twas about nine days before Xmas

And in my Google browser

I was ordering from eBay

Because I am to busy to go to a real mall (Hey I never said this would rhyme!)

After using PayPal to send money to 5 different sellers in a 24hr chain, the governance mechanisms of PayPal kicked off processes that sent emails to the seller that said…

Ahhh wherever eBay and the PayPal guys learned it they learned well! Looking at my virtually inactive PayPal account that was over foyur years old but seldom used, PayPal’s monitoring systems showed some strange transactions all within the same 24 hour period. I mean could it really be Frank Kenney that bought:

• A new bass guitar,
• Refills for Propellerhead’s Reason,
• A Gwen Stefani L.A.M.B. watch and bracelet,
• A limited addition DVD of Duran Duran’s Rio (Ohhh don’t start! YOU KNOW YOU WANT A COPY),
• And some perfume???

I mean no interactions for the better part of 2 years then a flurry of activity. So here I am getting emails from sellers telling me that they were not going to send my presents out until PayPal said it was ok. All in all the process worked very well. In fact it worked too well.

But I did authorize the purchases and they were paid from my checking accounts. Hmmm so much like air travel and the dreaded “SSSS” (The airlines way of flagging you to the TSA) I was on a list that I didn’t deserve to be on. Worse yet with eight days until Christmas there was a real chance that I would not have the gifts in time. Oh what to do?

Oh, I called the 800 number, authenticated my self and a very nice man, very quickly executed a process that removed me from the bad guys list and sent out emails to the sellers. Problem solved.

Moral of the story? Automated governance processes are way cool! In fact if it wasn’t me buying all that merchandise, then I would be ecstatic that PayPal stopped the entire process and more importantly protected my money. The best policies and processes are those that have very clearly defined exceptions.

I would like to thank all of Gartner’s clients and associates who helped us stay successful and I look forward to another 400K of travel. Seriously, lets do it again.

Oh by the way… Cloud Governance…. Hehehe you know you want to know more… Stay tuned!

-f