What makes this an interesting observation? Firstly, it strikes me that our CIOs and IT Directors have been spending far too much of their time concentrating on keeping the lights on in the data centre and ensuring that we have a sense of security surrounding the users and equipment used to access information in those data centres. Traditionally this has led to an 80:20 split for IT leaders, 80% on keeping the IT systems operational and 20% on delivering new services and capabilities requested by the business. If you are in that category don’t be too depressed, at least 80% of IT Managers are there too (no data, just the pareto principle at work)!

However, there were a couple of truisms which struck me forcefully in the quote from someone who clearly “gets” the implications of consumerisation and the cloud. Firstly, that there is an earnest desire in our colleagues to use their own equipment for work and play, wherever they are, and that providing access to work information systems is a capability to be added, not the rationale for handing out more equipment to be carried around. With the further complication of software applications which are “company standard” and yet not wanted, particularly by the younger members of staff. Why can’t we use the software packages we prefer?

Secondly, the provision of services as standard from the cloud is shaking the foundations of the independent software vendor world. It is clear that this charity is not going to invest in building a “me too” system when an appropriate service is available on demand. This immediately brings to question what services must be run in house and how much capacity is requires to serve the business.

To give a real example here. Jon Jenkins (@jonjenk) the Amazon CIO reported to the Amazon Web Services summit last year that he had shifted the whole of Amazon.Com to Amazon Web Services in November 2010 and as a result he now spent only 30% of his time worrying about IT delivery and 70% of his time on delivering new services. In addition, he reported that his CFO patted him on the back from time to time with the news that the monthly costs had gone down, as AWS reduced its prices. Don’t forget, Amazon.Com is probably the biggest e-commerce platform on the Internet with massive peaks of activity from hundreds of millions of customers ahead of Christmas. After all, this annual challenge and the dilemma of how to cope was the imperative that drove the creation of AWS in the first place.

However, as the quote at the head of this piece points out, managing the information systems and employee access is only 2 parts of the job. The third piece is Information.

Managing the Information piece has been largely abandoned in many places over the years. I don’t mean that it has not been delivered as a functional requirement. Rather I mean that we typically have multiple systems, running multiple business applications with multiple copies of the same data that cannot comfortably be shared or updated in a coherent manner across the business. This leads us into substantial amounts of effort every time someone in the business has a bright idea which should be offered “to our customers” or indeed, the customers themselves request that they not be offered anything by the business. A legal requirement in the UK and European Union. It has also led to an explosion of storage in data centres containing eye watering amounts of redundant data!

Now in my work with big business, especially in the public sector, this problem manifests itself as multiple systems, purchased by line of business managers, each of which has its own database and duplication of data, systems and software licensing costs. At the recent Crown Procurement Conference run by the Cabinet Office, Phil Pavitt, CIO for HMRC, stated that he was on a mission to reduce the 900 or so systems run in his, very large, department to a handful running on a few “computers”. Since there are only 60M citizens in the UK and all of them are known in that department, one would hope that a focus on information will really repay the effort in terms of a coherent information architecture and derived services, reduced costs and increased efficiency downstream. This is a worthy goal for all of us Information Technologists. After all, the I for Information has always been in the label on the tin!

Dear Colleague, As part of its planning process, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) is entering into a brief consultation to better understand the reasons that some organisations are deciding not to adopt cloud computing services to meet their information technology needs. To this end, we have prepared a short survey aimed at highlighting the key issues, risks and consequences which are driving these business decisions to be administered by the Information and Communications Technology Knowledge Transfer Network (ICT KTN).

In preparation for this, I have completed an analysis to provide context and some definitions. This is attached as a table below. However, what we are really interested in uncovering are the primary criteria for decisions being made and where opportunities may lie for innovation in addressing the concerns raised.

So we have developed a short survey which should not take longer than 20 minutes. We will be planning follow up workshops early in December and will advise on venue and logistics shortly. Please reserve Tuesday, December 6^th and Wednesday, December 7^th as possible dates should you be interested.

Responses to the survey should be submitted by close of play 2nd December 2011.

Problem Statement:

The adoption of Cloud based services will accelerate productivity and growth in the UK through the increased intensity of IT services employed directly in the line of business. These services can be obtained dynamically, usually at a low price for near immediate availability. The services are targeted at line of business managers who are not interested in the provision of IT systems and software, but rather the availability of services which improve their operational effectiveness and business processes. Examples include the use of Customer Relationship Management services from Salesforce; the availability of Office tools from Google and Microsoft 365; and applications which automate the access to company products and services delivered via smartphones and tablet computers. With the advent of Platform services such as Force.com, there are new possibilities to develop and deliver customer cloud services for use within the organisation as well as  beyond to the organisations’ customers.

However, the increase in dependence upon third party services beyond the organisation’s control raises concerns related to governance, security, accessibility, dependability and operational management in an highly scalable environment. What are these concerns expressed by the end users for whom Cloud services are deemed important? How do these concerns affect the productivity of the organisation? What are the impacts of them in terms of speed of adoption by end user organisations?

This investigation is seeking to identify and qualify the list of end user concerns which are impacting cloud adoption which can provide a basis for testing the feasibility of actions to be taken which will counter the concerns and mitigate their impact on adoption. Ultimately, if there are areas in which investment can make a difference, we would like to identify them and quantify the expected changes which such investment should make.

Then I stopped to think more about the world of services and remembered the model and architecture being implemented at Amazon Web Services today. Not object oriented in the sense described above, services must be invoked for a purpose, but very much service oriented which has come to provide a mechanism that allows services interoperate together to deliver information to the user in a synchronous way. Perhaps this is the architecture we should be adopting for future manycore systems? The Cloud architecture. Surely the problems are similar in nature, if not in scale. Who out there is able to think this through further?

Meanwhile I am retiring to re-read the Smalltalk-80 Bluebook, a foundation document for our early interests in Object-Orientation at the HP Office Productivity Division located at Wokingham during the early 80′s. It was there that we discovered Smalltalk and the work of Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre, it influenced us to develop a prototype of an Advanced Office System to replace the HP Mail system then entering service on the HP 3000 and other platforms. It is strange to think that I cycled past the Xerox PARC offices every day on my commute to 1501 Page Mill Road where I started my HP career in Palo Alto. The building was small and always looked empty. I discovered in the years that followed that XEROX PARC had a major new centre to the West of Foothill Expressway in the foothills. This place was the cradle of so many modern computing innovations in the 70s and early 80s. Windows, icons, mice and pointer displays; local area networking; laser printers and the power book (perhaps now instantiated as  the macbook/iPad) all had their roots in PARC. Most of which has now seen the light of day through the exciting growth and innovation at Apple – an early adopter of these ideas. Radical indeed for a 1970′s home pc hobby business.

The updated ICT Strategy capitalises on this work but is focused more directly on savings which can be made in the short term. These savings are concentrated in the area of data centre consolidation. Central Government’s existing estate amounts to a modest number of servers, spread across a large number of locations and typically under-utilised by modern standards. Therefore the first step in implementation of the ICT Strategy is to consolidate this estate and increase efficiency. In doing this changes will be required in the standard risk assessment policies operated by Government Departments. The policy framework is owned by CESG in Cheltenham, and describes the rules against which risks must be assessed and comply. The role of the Senior Information Risk Officer in assessing risk will change as data is stored in larger shared, shared facilities. The standard rules will need to adapt to best industry practice, which may eventually incorporate public cloud provision. One specific concern will relate to the location of storage. Government Data is often required to be stored in the UK by law. Most major cloud service providers are multiple national, they offer replication for information security. Replicas can often be stored in other legislative domains.

Application Store is next up, this is a portal which offers dynamic provision of services to authenticated users. These services are expected to be provided at the current lowest cost across Government, with new services and applications made available to the civil servant through a dynamic marketplace accessed via the Apps Store portal. Delivery of the Apps Store will depend upon convergence in identity and authentication services across government, effective service catalogue management, including service integration, and virtualisation to allow dynamic provisioning. However, the ability to dynamically scale services, achieve convergence of successful services and effective management of service delivery costs offers much value to Government. The potential is that the Apps Store mechanism will expand across all branches of government, Central and Local, potentially to the citizen too, as the provision of services expands either “in-house” or in the marketplace for privately offered services operating on open data sources. This would provide an excellent mechanism for small and medium sized businesses to offer their services into government. Thus accelerating the pace of change and innovation to meet the goals of the Efficiency and Reform agenda.

Finally, attention is needed to the procurement process in order to facilitate the inclusion of SME businesses in the provision of services to government. This ICT Strategy will certainly open doors for smaller businesses to introduce their services, but the current heavyweight procurement processes will prevent them doing so without change. More work to be done there!

For more information see http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/uk-government-ict-strategy-resources

Now, this is not a new rendering of the problem. In fact the auspicious IEEE Computer Society, of which I am also a member, announced in its Outlook 2011 edition of Computer, that there was an increasingly urgent need for new approaches and tools for programming these scalable computing devices. In fact, you might also make the same assertion about programming for the Cloud! Much of the same challenge exists when we seek to execute programmes in parallel to improve throughput and/or performance. Where is the understanding that can help us begin to grasp this nettle and move forwards?

I would point in two directions for at least some insight. Firstly, I attended the Amazon Web Services Summit 2011 in London last week. We were addressed by the mighty Werner Vogels, @werner, CTO of Amazon.com, amongst many others. Werner drew our attention to the evolving nature of the services available on the AWS cloud platform. These services are typically simple components with which one can build a resilient and scalable implementation of the application and services to be delivered. The guiding principle of their design is that they are simple. They have eschewed the niche opportunities that exist in myriads in our industry to ensure that the services developed meet the objectives of the developer and those responsible for operation. An industrial design model for the future perhaps. Proof of the pudding lies in the fact that Amazon.com switched off its last dedicated server for its online services last November. The services provided are now entirely served by AWS and the peaks of utilisation have been comfortably managed thus far by the infrastructure. They estimate that this has saved them about 79% of their peak infrastructure costs – had they built their own! Do recall that this amounts to hundreds of millions of customers generating billions of transactions much of which happens at the same time in December!

Another source of insight, comes from the diehard parallel programming scholars, from where Peter Dzwig originally hails. This is a forgotten community of innovators and sceptics, whom have carried the vision and light from earlier movements (e.g. Transputer; Functional Programming, etc.) into the modern world of C++, Java, Fortran and Excel programming. These elders in the field understand the fundamental nature of threads and their executability. Of Data Flow and Rules based programming. Either way, it is clear that our existing passion for serial lines of logic cannot be met in this increasingly parallel world. We need to get back to basics and think about transformations and entry and exit criteria to allow our computing infrastructures to be fully utilised.

Along these lines the ICT KTN is running a couple of events in the next few months which seek to examine this. The first is in Edinburgh on Tuesday, June 28th. See below!

Scalable Computing, a new Dawn? This event to be held at Heriot-Watt University, on Tuesday June 28th starting at 12:15pm, will include a free lunch, a glass of wine, and much talk of things parallel, from Professors Greg Michaelson and Phil Trinder from the University; and colleagues from Freescale, CriticalBlue and Cloudsoft. The objective is to review the advancing world of multi-core and distributed, Cloud, computing from the perspective of tools and techniques for parallel computing. It’s free and further information and registration details can be found here.

My role in the new KTN is to lead in the area of Enterprise computing. Topics included in this list to start with are:- IT as a Service, Government Computing (Platform/Service) and Scalability. Scalability is the process of taking systematic advantage of scalable resources in Cloud or Multi-core infrastructures. Along the way I will also keep an eye on developments in the Green IT space, via colleagues in the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group and their excellent work as part of a global network of innovators including Green Grid and an international standards body for defining metrics.

The challenge here is two-fold. Firstly, making more efficient use of power deployed in delivering computing services and, secondly, improved used of computing services to minimise expenditure of carbon. Both of these looking forwards to the 20:20:20 goals carbon emission targets set by the UK Government. I think that these targets are a genuinely useful filter to apply to advances in the industry as a whole. If you combine the target to double compute power each year, while reducing the carbon emissions to achieve a 20% reduction of power consumed and emissions generated by 2020, that should do the trick – as a start.

However, the main purpose of this first post is to reflect on the last 18 months of work in the Cloud and Government areas and offer some pointers to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Most of my work has been in the context of the Digital Systems KTN now coming to a close. We have looked widely at the concepts of cloud computing, potential for implementation and some genuine user case studies. All of which can be found on the KTN website. As of April 1st, I would contend that most attendees at events to which I have contributed recently are ready to explore adoption, or are already on their way.

Examples include:

• organisations using the cloud to deliver their software as a service;
• organisations using cloud services to supplement or replace existing in-house business processes;
• organisations looking to introduce cloud services to underpin other users. This includes Infrastructure service providers and the emerging platform service providers.

The balance towards adoption is demonstrably tipping and we will move forwards by focusing on practical activities to allow potential adopters to meet and learn from other users and their suppliers.

Nowhere is the potential more rich than in Government or the market for small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). A year ago the last UK Government concluded work on the G-Cloud, an innovative strategy for changing the way that government services may be delivered using Cloud computing at its core. The documents from that project have been made available here and there is much of interest for students of government computing around the world.

The challenge in both cases is to find that judicious balance of bought-in services versus unique contributions which make the adoption of cloud anything but a trivial exercise from the IT side. There are risks in Security (though maybe not what the usual assumptions about this are); Supplier Dependability; Network Access and Scalability. There are also complications on service level agreements and billing. All of which we will highlight in our events and activities to help ensure better advice and understanding in user and supplier.

Related to this is my interest in open standards, which in Cloud computing terms are usually employed to describe standard application programming interfaces (APIs) which may be used to allow multiple sources of supply and thus avoid “lock-in”. It’s early days here but the work underway at Cloud-Standards.Org, the Open Grid Forum (OGF) and Open Stack are all aimed at moving the industry forwards in this area. A European funded initiative, Siena, is carrying the torch for the European Commission, which is waking up to the challenge and opportunity.

Scalability is a work in progress and growing in importance and understanding at the same time. In the next few months we will be working to bring insight to this area with colleagues from the industry leaders and from our academic friends. My colleagues at the BCS Distributed and Scalable Computing Specialist Group are keenly interested in this topic, but growing their new community too.

Underpinning all of this is the Knowledge Transfer agenda. The idea of bringing together those with an opportunity for innovation and those with the ability to help deliver business success. We will continue to use the tools that we know work well around the nation. Face to face events; speaking slots at industry conferences; webinars for wider access and reference and case studies demonstrating success “in the wild”. It is the members of the KTN community which are key to this. Please bring us your thoughts, interests, challenges and get involved. Membership of the ICT KTN is free and you can register for all the KTNs on the TSB _connect platform, an innovators network where you will meet like minded professionals from all walks or work life.