Top 10 lists are sure fire way to get some on-line coverage and chatter, so I will further reinforce that by referencing this "Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services Will Soar in 2008" from consulting firm THINKStrategies.  You can read the entire write up via the link but I thought #9 was particularly relevant to what we are doing at Hubspan and the value we provide:

9. IT Discovers Services are the Solution: In the past, the IT
department was the biggest barrier to managed services and SaaS
adoption. Many IT professionals were afraid these on-demand solutions
would eliminate their jobs. Now, a growing proportion of IT people see
managed services and SaaS as a way to out-task mundane work or overcome
complex application/technology deployment and maintenance
responsibilities. As they learn to take advantage of these on-demand
solutions, IT departments will finally be able to put their daily
firefights aside and focus on addressing the strategic needs of their
business users.

Our friends at Gartner have released their latest set of IT predictions.  Full release here.  Here’s a few highlights: 

1. By 2012, 50 per cent of traveling workers will leave their notebooks at home in favour of other devices.
2. By 2012, 80 per cent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology.
3. By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending
   will be as service subscription instead of as product license.
4. By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and
   instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.
5. By 2010, end-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and services acquisitions made by IT.

Reinforces many of the IT trends we are seeing.  I personally can’t wait until I can leave my notebook at home although I think there are hurdles there.  My Blackberry works great to monitor, read, and respond but isn’t all that great to do things like writing and number crunching.  We’ll see…

Selling to the enterprise?  Here’s what is on the mind of the CEO according to a recent survey from The Conference Board.  You’ll notice IT doesn’t make the top 10 but some of the benefits certainly do (via CIO Insight):

1. Sustained and steady top-line growth   41.3%
2. Excellence in execution   39.6%
3. Consistent execution of strategy by top management   38.5%
4. Profit growth   29.9%
5. Customer loyalty/retention   25.6%
6. Finding qualified managerial talent   20.9%
7. Top management succession   20.1%
8. Corporate reputation   19.7%
9. Stimulating innovation/creativity/enabling entrepreneurship   19.2%
10. Speed, flexibility, adaptability to change   18.2%

Picked this up randomly and spent some time digging through it today.  This is a survey of over 150 senior IT execs on the topic of Information Management and where they are putting their dollars and time going forward.  Some interesting tidbits:

• Include both structured (database) and unstructured (email, web, etc.) data in an overall strategy and be aware of reconciling the differences in control history between the two.
• Data quality identified as top obstacle to deriving value from information management along with lack of funding, absence of business case, and competing initiatives.
• No single solution to support analytic, enterprise, and business needs across the five user communities of IT, power users, business users, casual users, and extended enteprise users.
• Plan on focusing on data quality, security, and governance with a significant emphasis on analytics.
• Want to provide greater end-user access to data and spreading "information democracy" so that the right people have access to the right data.
• Portals provide an enterprise access point and "mash up" applications can provide better end-user access and experience.
• A focus on revenue and adding value to customer/markets versus cost and compliance as the latter is deemed to prepared for and addressed with workable solutions at this point.
• Outsourcing is on the mind but mostly in the areas of indexing, data cleansing, taxonomy, and portal activities.

The obstacle discussion highlights the realized pain as data quality with lack of funding, business value, and competing initiatives ranked ahead of governance and security.  I’m also a bit skeptical of the lower ranking of cost reduction as I’ve not spoken with a CIO that’s not interested in direct cost takeout opportunities.

An interesting read.  Here’s the link. 

Here’s the third and final post on this topic for now.  This seems to be high on the interest list of the business media as I have had several press calls discussing it in detail recently.  The overriding question from the business press is what are enterprises to do as new devices, new technologies, and new habits enter the workforce.  What security measures must be taken?  I’ll cover my thoughts on that in another post. 

The final overriding point that was made to us during our research was that there is a pretty firm personal boundary line in how this group communicates.  For example, it is acceptable for friends to text message back and forth but was perceived to be awkward (too personal) if a supervisor requested a phone number in order to be able to send text messages.  That more formal communication was thought to be best conducted through email.  Interestingly, peer communication in the workplace via text messaging was viewed as acceptable albeit the exception not the norm.

One thing that really struck me was that this group appears to understand the difference between personal and business related communication preserving personal relationships through informal formats like text and using email for more formal ones. Both text and email are viewed as private (ie, one to one) although there was no expectation of privacy in company supplied email and pretty much consensus that company supplied email was for work-related activities not personal ones. 

The difference I see here is that those of us that entered the workforce "pre-email" have blurred the line between work and personal because we had no real convienient alternative for personal electronic communications.  Even if we had a personal email account, access was relegated to the home as very few companies had open internet access and even there connection speeds were slow.  My first email experience was at Arthur Andersen where we utilized Lotus Notes for internal messaging and collaboration.  It was a huge step to expose this platform beyond the four walls and enable external email communication.

This next wave of workers will have built its personal social relationships either through broadband connected personal email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) and/or text messaging versus using the corporate network (and better bandwidth) to blur the line.  Effectively a more clear separation of what is appropriate for work versus what is for personal communication. 

Another interesting point made around site messaging or social networks like Facebook or MySpace (of which this group were limited users) was that they are viewed as more (too) public and not the place for meaningful interchange.  Almost a backlash against the amount of time spent and information disclosed on these types of services – certainly a contrarian point to current hype.  Also out of favor was instant messaging with several logged in but "invisible" using it as an alert service to be informed of the arrival of a new email.  It was viewed as too invasive and reinforces the point I made in Part 2 about connections on their terms.

Here’s the second post of three on this topic.  Being connected is not a new concept to any of us but the emphasis on being connected to be "in the loop" was interesting to hear and how this desire for constant connection is part of daily life.

If you do not have a mobile phone, you are disconnected and out of touch.  And we are not talking about the latest PDA or Blackberry but about a standard keypad flip-type phone.  The former were viewed as more for business people and generally the older set.  This group could get it all done by using T9 predictive texting language. This is consistent with how this group communicates at this point.  They are not sharing presentations and spreadsheets so the notion of having a full function keyboard for communicating is not top of mind.  Browsing the web via a mobile device did not come up either through my lack of direct questioning about it or the absence of this type of use.

There are very few, if any, places the phone doesn’t go and several could even text without looking at the keypad – quite a skill.  On the topic of email, there was consensus that they could not live without it but that it had a very defined, more formal role like communication outside of their closest personal network (professors, supervisors, etc.). 

Although constantly connected, this connection is on their terms versus face-to-face or even voice-to-voice with many opting to text versus talk.

We recently completed a series of focus groups with members of "Generation Y" or, more specifically, those that are finishing college and about to enter the workforce.  This segment has various definitions but those born between 1978 & 2000 generally fall into it – roughly 76 million folks.  This is a follow-up on one of the themes covered in our most recent MarketInsight on information security trends – younger workers will bring to the workforce a whole new dimension of productivity tools and associated security challenges. 

This will be a three part series covering what we discovered during the course of our research.

One of my open-ended questions for this group was "what is it that the older generation doesn’t understand about your generation and electronic communications?"

The answer was "speed." 

It’s not so much about multi-tasking as that certainly plays into it but more about the speed of communication and response.  Text messaging is preferred because it is fast, short, personal, and to the point.  It can be held in your hand and carried around with you (mobile phone) with no need to find a hotspot, wi-fi, or network connection.  Text provides a real-time interactivity unique to this set of future workers that is something current workers (i.e, older) don’t fully understand as they utilize email for these exchanges.

Even VC Fred Wilson did a recent post on this – "Texting beats Emailing."  Fred’s not a member of Generation Y but invests in them and hits an additional great point here about the absence of noise (i.e., spam) on this channel.  Here’s somewhat of a counterpoint to Fred from Mike Feinstein citing convergence of the two over time.

Here’s a link to a panel discussion from the Software 2007 conference held in May in Santa Clara.  Good discussion by Neil Cameron of Unilever, Rob Carter of FedEx, Patricia Morrison of Motorola and Tony Scott of Disney.  I had the chance to chat with Tony Scott a year or so ago about messaging at Disney.  He is a very knowledgeable and very down to earth guy – something that really comes through in this clip.

The full text of MessageGate’s recently released MarketInsight is now available through the links below.  If you’d like the formatted .pdf version, let me know.

New study identifies 5 trends in information security

Organizational dynamics and their influence on information security

Take a practical approach to information safeguards for email

What to do about email archiving – a universal question

You can’t take the user out of the equation – Part 1

You can’t take the user out of the equation – Part 2

Navigating the legal & regulatory aspects of corporate messaging

Understanding messaging use

An enterprise view of messaging technologies

This is the final post from MessageGate’s recent MarketInsight report:  Reshaping Information Security. I’ll do a follow-up post that lists all the links for those of you looking for a full on-line version.  This section deals more specifically with the messaging technologies being used in the enterprise.

Messaging

On the broader technical topic of messaging, there was a great deal of discussion around looking beyond email to multiple transmission protocols as data can be packaged in many ways.  Instant Messaging (IM) emergence is a concern as it is a conduit for sharing files, document, and other such things.  Although email is narrow in scope, it is the most pressing messaging issue at the moment.

Unified messaging is being looked at to some degree, but turning voice mails into emails appealed to no one.  Email systems have too many single points of failure based on how they have been developed and deployed over the years.  There is no way to get rid of email, but there needs to be a way to address issues like chain mails, forwards of forwards, replies to all, and remote workers.

Email is not going away, but messaging is constantly changing.  If you cut the wire (email), an alternative must be provided and there is currently no better alternative.