5G is Future of mobility

5G is Future of mobility

by | 9 Apr 2016 | Cloud, Technology

5G is coming and it is the future of mobile

In 5G, wireless will grow up into a true horizontal industry that provides a support system for literally everything

Scouting the news feeds on where we are going with respect to the world of mobility and up popped this interesting article written by Alan Carlton, who has 25 years in the wireless technology industry spanning 2G, 3G, 4G and beyond and of course the focus at this year’s 2016 Mobile World Conference is 5G and how it will take the use of mobility to new reaches for IoT.

It is fair to say that it is still early days for 5G, but research efforts have been rolling for some time and standardization is expected to start in the next few months. Perhaps the two most-cited requirements in 5G are the 1000x improvement in peak data rates (on LTE 2010) and a big reduction in end-to-end latency. These KPIs are important, of course, and keep us engineers pointed in the right direction. But really, they only tell a small part of the 5G story.

A better way to understand 5G is first through a historical lens. It is astonishing to reflect that this mobile industry adventure really only began a little over 20 years ago with the proliferation of GSM. In those days, peak data rate support was a massive 9.6 kbps! Today, deployed LTE systems have improved upon this metric by 100000x. Presented in this context, the 1000x goal of 5G doesn’t really seem so crazy, does it? GSM or 2G, of course, was not designed for data. 2G was designed really for only one thing: basic telephony applications. 3G raised the bar with a specification that supported more voice users and the beginnings of a mobile internet. 4G took this further with the first real system designed principally to support video. It is this evolution that has driven the 100000x. And further, it is this service roadmap that has also driven latency reduction on a parallel path. At the simplest level, 5G will certainly be about more of this. However, the true 5G vision is a lot more interesting.

In 5G, wireless will grow up into a true horizontal industry that provides a support system for literally everything. 5G is the first generation to target supporting the full array of vertical markets (e.g. Automotive, Transport, and Health) that in themselves will define the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). This is the real 5G challenge, and in this respect 5G and the IoT are simply two sides of the same coin. Think about this challenge: what do a car and a thermostat have in common? They are all part of the IoT! So, how will 5G go about tackling this “everything” challenge?

Think flexibility. Think simplification. Think re-imagination. These concepts will permeate all aspects of 5G from the services supported, how the network is designed, and all way down to the elemental new waveforms that may provide us with some new acronyms and labels for this fifth generation.

5G will be built on a foundation of established IT thinking. The cloud, Network function virtualisation, and programmable networking (aka SDN/NFV) will provide the cornerstones. These technologies inherently deliver flexibility and, at least through the eyes of any IT professional, are a lot simpler than the legacy approach of telecom. 5G will, however, take these technologies to new levels and depths of integration, and in so doing will shape the 5G specification that will be defined in the months and years ahead.

“Reading my previous blog on the IEEE predictions for technology advancement in 2016 both 5G and Network function virtualisation (NFV) are on the top of their list”, states Craig Ashmole, Founding Partner of London based IT Consulting firm CCServe. “The other item coming across is Containers, which hold SW application logic and all of its dependencies, running as an isolated process, and execute the same in any environment. This creates parity between dev and production, and enables developers to confidently break up apps into discreet chunks”.

SDN/NFV in telecom is a hot topic today, but where we are now only scratches the surface of its original vision. The focus of work in this area now is primarily Total Cost of Ownership and OPEX reduction through switch hardware commoditization and the efficient relocation of a subset of network functions.

In 5G, SDN/NFV concepts will be pushed much further, returning to the original value proposition, namely that of enabling true architectural innovation. In 5G, it will not simply be about virtualizing the network functions, but entirely changing the way of its inner working. Network evolution will be the frontline in the realization of many 5G requirements (e.g. low latency). Today’s internet is simply not designed to support low latency. However, through programmable networking, new, more efficient approaches will become possible.

In 5G, virtualization will touch every element in the system, spanning backhaul, fronthaul, and radio access. It is within this flexible, dynamically configurable fabric that system resources will be optimally and instantaneously orchestrated to deliver the next generation experience to end users.

This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Business Changing IT Spend

Business Changing IT Spend

by | 2 Feb 2016 | Technology

How business outcomes are transforming IT spending

According to a recently released study by Datalink and IDG, business is playing a bigger role than ever in IT spending.

The relationship between business leaders and IT is equal parts necessary and contentious. More and more, though, decisions made on the business side are having an even greater impact on IT.

International Data Group IDG has just released the results of a study commissioned by Datalink, which showed just how closely linked IT investments are becoming with business results. The study polled more than 100 IT executives and senior level managers from large U.S. organisations and took place in Q4 2015.

When asked where they wanted to invest their IT dollars currently, respondents listed the following areas as their top five considerations:

  1. Improving of IT security – 70%
  2. Improving customer/client experiences – 59%
  3. Managing costs – 59%
  4. Boosting operational efficiency – 52%
  5. Mitigating risk – 44%

However, what may be more interesting is not where these organisations are making their investments in IT, but when. According to the report, 70% of respondents said it’s critical that they’re able to link IT investments to tangible business outcomes.

So, if an understanding of IT’s impact is this important, do these organisations feel that they are communicating that clearly enough? Well…not necessarily. Only 47% said that their organisations are doing an excellent or very good job at communicating how a particular IT investment impacted a business outcome. The remaining 53% said their organisation needs a least some, if not significant, improvement in doing so.

Not only did respondents say that identifying the impact on the business was important, but 68% of them said that, when making an IT investment decision, the business goals were more important than any of IT’s operational goals.

Since business is this important a consideration in each IT investment, let’s take a look at what the top running initiatives are, so far, among respondents. Here are the top five:

  1. Security
  2. Disaster recovery/business continuity
  3. IT governance/compliance management
  4. Cloud/virtualisation management
  5. Public cloud (including SaaS)

Of the projects currently in the build stage, the top three were agile development platforms, converged data center infrastructure, and process automation.

This, of course, begs the question of which IT initiatives are actually driving business outcomes. According to the report, process automation got top marks, and security, application performance management, and cloud/virtualisation management all got a nod as well. Although, all four of these were listed as the most difficult to deploy and maintain.

The IT lifecycle as a whole has its challenges, though. In building out an initiative, 41% said the planning stage was the most difficult, 36% claimed the building stage was the hardest, and 32% labeled testing the most challenging.

As businesses seek to tie in business success to IT investment, a few distinct roadblocks come up. Here is how respondents labeled the top five challenges in driving business outcomes through IT investments.

  1. Difficulty standardising/streamlining business processes – 34%
  2. Too many manual processes (need for more automation) – 33%
  3. Difficulty keeping up with demand for new application dev – 31%
  4. Poor communication between IT and lines of business – 29%
  5. Lack of support/sponsorship from executive management – 29%

Moving forward, as more of these leaders seek to connect the dots between their IT investments and how their business fares, most (56%) are looking to streamline the operational processes to make it more apparent. Others are increasing standardisation (38%) or moving away from legacy systems (37%) to accomplish the same.

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Agile Project Management changing the Business approach

Agile Project Management changing the Business approach

by | 3 Jan 2016 | Consulting

Once considered a fad, Agile has matured into a popular and respected set of PM development methods

The question isn’t who can and can’t be Agile, Everyone can! — The real question however is: How can one make Agile work for you and your organisation?

In fact, you may have seen Agile expanding outside of software development and IT into sectors like banking, management consulting, automotive manufacturing, and healthcare. Companies are moving to Agile methods because the global marketplace demands they bring products to market that better reflect their customers’ needs. Where the traditional “waterfall” approach —with its sequential phases and heavy investment in large-scale, up-front design—lacks the flexibility to respond swiftly to changing markets, Agile approaches offer faster delivery, higher quality, and an engaged development team that can deliver on its commitments.

Agile can improve your efficiency. Instead of designing an end-to-end, upfront solution (a solution that may be infeasible or outdated before it’s even implemented,) Agile teams build the solution incrementally—allowing you to mitigate risks, accommodate changing market needs, and deliver valuable features more quickly. Agile methods have been shown to cut time-to-market by 50% and increase productivity by 25%.

According to a recent global survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers on the state of project management, 34% of you now use Agile PM methods within your companies and a majority of PMs (62%) are certified Agile practitioners.

The only people in danger of losing their jobs from Agile are those who’ve been hiding within the inefficiency of the system (Agile is remarkably good at holding up a mirror to an organisation and exposing its waste, inefficiency, and dysfunction). What matters most in Agile project management is not your title or your role, but your contributions: what you do to add value and keep the organisation moving forward.

Mapping Waterfall Project Management to Agile Practices

Agile and waterfall development aren’t as different as people imagine.

Both approaches recognise the triple constraints of cost, schedule, and scope; where they differ is in the implementation.

  1. First, waterfall development encourages locking down scope requirements so that schedule and cost can be planned, and sees feedback as “rework” — something to be avoided through better planning. Agile, on the other hand, recognises that scope is always variable, and sees feedback as a critical and inextricable part of a planning process that continues through execution.
  2. Second, Agile shuns waterfall’s traditional directive tactics in favour of collaboration and facilitative support—or what’s known as “servant leadership.”

In traditional project management, you—the project manager—are responsible for balancing scope, cost, and schedule, as well as managing quality, reporting, and interpersonal issues. In Agile project management, the whole team commits to shared decisions and collaborates in its work to meet these commitments. Your Agile project management support equips the team to become fully engaged and motivated contributors, who can produce high-quality work at a faster pace.

Despite the differences between Project Management Institute (PMI) and Agile approaches, many of the practices identified in the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) are quite compatible with Agile practices. In fact, when followed with discipline and rigour, Agile methods are just as compliant with the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as traditional waterfall methods. The differences lie in when and how these practices are executed and the lexicon used by their practitioners as seen in the table below.

Agile v WFall
Agile versus Waterfall PM

The PMBOK identifies Initiating, Planning, Executing, Controlling, and Closing as the process groups within project management. The Agile process phases of Envisioning, Roadmap, Release, Adapting, and Closing are similar to the PMBOK phases, but better reflect the reality of how a project is delivered or software solutions are actually developed.

“The question isn’t who can and can’t be Agile”, states Craig Ashmole, Founding Director of London based CCServe IT consulting services. “Everyone can ! — The real question however is : How can one make Agile work for you and your organisation?

Most large IT departments are typically set in their ways and resist change as it takes individuals out of their comfort zones, especially those hiding behind the wall of, ‘Well IT is working why change.’ — This will be the biggest challenge the CIO office will face.”

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Request For Proposal

Request For Proposal

by | 29 Dec 2015 | Outsourcing, Technology

CIOs Seeking Innovation – Should the RFP process be replaced by the innovative RFS?

There’s an innovative way to build and drive the RFP process as CIOs look to expand service capability and innovation but should the RFP be replaced with the RFS (Request For Solutions).

Many CIOs are tasked with replacing aging legacy systems and implementing efficient IT infrastructures and effective applications that can deliver an edge in a highly competitive business environment. Innovative IT outsourcing initiatives can address this challenge, but many businesses have failed to integrate supplier expertise and achieve real value or fresh ideas from their outsourced or technology relationships.

Rather than leveraging the skills and capabilities of third parties, CIOs find that their sourcing initiatives are often limited to staff augmentation, with suppliers essentially filling the role of pure order-takers and very little innovative ideas being brought to the table. For those corporations that are able to bring in relevant or specific or unique domain expertise, either through a third party or a captive operation, they are then faced with managing price which becomes an issue of unique skills value.

“For their part, outsourcers offer technical expertise but often lack the understanding of actual client business issues needed to offer a compelling solution that addresses a client’s hot buttons.” Comments Craig Ashmole, Founding Partner of London based IT Consulting CCServe. “This is largely due to a lack of understanding the business that their client sits in and looking to be a differentiator to new clients. There’s too much replication of services being provided, to utilise economies of scale.”

Ultimately, clients struggle to articulate their requirements and providers struggle to articulate their value proposition – the result is a lose/lose proposition. The art of really differentiating services is being muddied in the waters.
Part of the problem may also lie in the manner in which CIOs define their objectives and select service providers. In a traditional RFP, clients articulate a specific set of requirements, and vendors respond by filling in the prescribed blanks. Increasingly, all parties are finding that this approach can stifle innovation, as it essentially defines the solution to the problem rather than soliciting new ideas.

An emerging alternative – the “Request for Solution” – takes a more open-ended approach and invites providers to show their creativity. Consider this analogy: A CIO requires the cost of utility services like his BPO admin be outsourced to reduce costs. This is the basic dynamic that characterises the traditional RFP process.

Alternatively, a CIO provides a list of capabilities that need to be addressed with a set of broad criteria: Administration, HR, Recruitment, Payroll, Training and Disciplinary process review for a budget not exceeding x amount of dollars. In this scenario, the Vendor/Outsourcer has the leeway to be creative and offer a variety of solutions and even introduce innovation technology that could reduce staffing levels. This approach more closely resembles the RFS (Request For Solutions) process.

A similar re-think is taking place with regard to contracting. Rather than a highly detailed, voluminous document that take months to prepare, review and complete, clients are seeking more flexible approaches that allow both parties to test the waters and develop the relationship further if it’s of mutual benefit. In describing this concept of “Evolutionary Contracting,” ISG’s Tom Young, challenges the industry bromide that outsourcing relationships are like marriage, and that both require commitment over the long term. Tom argues that, rather than viewing their service provider contracts as wedding vows, clients should think of outsourcing as more of a dating game.

We are by no means suggesting that traditional outsourcing RFPs and contracts are becoming irrelevant. Indeed, they remain essential to initiatives aimed at optimising existing operational models. But we are seeing more and more situations where clients have transformational requirements and face problems that have more than one right answer. Many CIOs struggle to make the most of opportunities presented by mobility, big data and other emerging technologies.

Perhaps it’s time to give the RFS and Evolutionary Contracting a closer look.

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe

Outsourcing and As-A-Service

Outsourcing and As-A-Service

by | 7 Dec 2015 | Outsourcing

Outsourcing is on life support, with many BPO providers failing to invest in As-a-Service

It has been hard to change processes, drive common standards across clients, build a utility model that can be scaled and made cost-efficient, for the Outsource vendors when you’re really just moving work around the world with the goal of getting it done cheaper. Think As-A-Service!

Scouting round the Industry experts on BPO and Outsourcing I came across a very interesting article from Horses for Sources (HfS) which made me just realise how slow some of the larger ‘dinosaur’ vendor players are missing an opportunity to address their clients real business issues, and that’s SERVICE.

“We have seen the Outsource market come back into fashion late 2014 and pick up throughout 2015 but as we close in on the beginning of the new 2016 procurement cycle many outsource firms are still not looking at agility and being able to do a deep dive on their clients real operational needs.” Comments Craig Ashmole, Founding Partner of London-based IT Consulting CCServe. “Customers are crying out for proper service focused delivery models and not just looking at bottom line cost savings.”

The following article from HfS below encapsulates what the Outsourcing market should be looking out for:

HfS analyst Phil Fersht stated, If I have to hear another advisor, lawyer or provider sales executive whining about their lack of business, I am just going to tell them straight – “You’re a dinosaur, you are selling a capability from a bygone era. The reason clients don’t call you anymore is because you are not offering them what they really need – or at least educating them on what they need to haul their legacy back ends out of the dark ages.”

The narrative simply has to change. Today’s enterprise world is littered with literally hundreds of legacy outsourcing relationships where the service providers are unwilling (and many just plain incapable) of making any genuine productivity improvements.

What’s more, the leadership in their clients is quickly wizening up to what’s going on and simply does not trust them to invest in their delivery capability, or share risks with them to find new thresholds of value. Close to half (47%) the enterprise leadership we spoke to in our recent As-a-Service study view their service provider’s unwillingness to cannibalize their existing revenue model as a highly significant obstacle to make the As-a-Service shift, and a similar number (44%) view their provider’s lack of support to share any risk as a key issue:

Providers-unwilling-to-change-the-model

The outsourcing industry is stuck in a legacy holding pattern and is in real danger of decline

This may well be the opportunity for Global In-house Centres (where they exist) move up the value chain, build the competency, and keep the skills developed internally but leverage the economies of the HR and personal hire through the outsource players to create more effective hybrid models.

This would help take the burden off the business by working with its parent as well as leveraging service providers from a commodity service and time for parent organisations to give up the controlling mind set of captives, treat them as partners, and build a better risk-management.

The problem we have, today, is that the leadership within many enterprise “buyer” clients is under huge pressure to take their operations to the next level, but most of their middle and lower management clearly only care about keeping the current status quo. In a nutshell, our industry is suffering from hundreds of stagnating outsourcing relationships, where the service provider has zero incentive to do anything much beyond keeping the margins consistent, while the middle management on the buy side has a similarly lethargic ambition not to do anything much… bar keeping the lights on.

However, when we anonymously polled 60 outsourcing services buyers in a private focus group last year, 43% said that giving more responsibility to their service provider would be the most important factor to improve the quality and outcomes of their outsourcing initiatives. Clearly we have reached a paradoxical situation:

Trust-to-give-providers-more

The Bottom-line: Here’s the great modern-day outsourcing paradox – many enterprises want to give up more to their service providers, but many of the providers are just not interested in investing in As-a-Service capabilities

The reality today is that senior buyer executives want to progress the operating model towards As-a-Service, while their counterpart service provider leaders are talking a big game about delivering Digital and As-a-Service capabilities to their clients, which can spread the wealth generated by better automation, actionable analytics and a multi-tenant model. Hmmm… reminds me a bit of outsourcing 1.0, where the leaderships in many enterprises dove into outsourcing fuelled primarily by lower cost labour, forcing the situation on their underlings. Now a similar pattern in emerging, with the difference being the “tangible” productivity factor is automation, while access to better, more actionable data to make business decisions the ultimate desired outcome.

The challenge today, quite simply, is less of an appetite from the sell side to absorb the risk. Making savings through automation is a lot more “risky” for many providers than the ease of swapping out bodies. However, taking these risks, and investing in the talent and technology to de-risk these situations, is what is key to survival.

Most service providers, while talking a big game, are not convincing their clients they are really prepared to share risk and make genuine investments to build out a true multi-tenant As-a-Service delivery capability. That’s probably because they only really care about making their quarterly numbers, not having a sustainable, well-planned long-term strategy.

This situation spells a near-certain recipe for failure for the outsourcing industry, where the decision-making layers claim they want to shift the gears, but the existing relationships are clearly stuck in a depressing holding pattern. In fact, from many client discussions we are having today, execution from certain providers (you know who you are) is deteriorating further, as they simply cannot say no to the increasingly complex needs of their clients, but are too stingy (or should I say cannibalistic) to invest in better talent and capabilities to up their game. It’s a situation that is going to end in outsourcing failure for many, if steps are not taken to arrest this decline in delivery quality, and investments made in future capability – most notably robotic process automation, real time analytics solutions and a roadmap for self-learning and artificial intelligence.

Those providers with these capabilities can break this cycle by building multi-tenant solutions for the future – and will be the winners. I believe this could happen in barely a couple of years, when you look at the current pace of change and mood in the market. The key is to pick off the next 15-20 deals they can win at lower margins in order to invest in common automation, common analytics, common SaaS underpinnings and common service skills – hence a more competitive, more scalable multi-tenant As-a-Service delivery model.

It’s easy to point fingers at certain service providers for preserving the legacy FTE labour model, but the stark reality is that many of them simply don’t have leadership prepared to invest in the depth of talent, or technology capability to drive genuine advancements. So – let’s face facts here – we’re at an impasse. There are tremendous opportunities to create genuine productivity advancements through robotic process automation, smarter analytics and the onset of cognitive computing, but much of the present service provider bunch are not going to be the ones to take true advantage of them. I predict a few will break out, but the next winners will be from a new breed of As-a-Service provider, many of whom many not even have been formed yet.

Having spent a majority of my career working with and supporting the Corporate CIO Function, I now seek to provide a forum whereby CIOs or IT Directors can learn from the experience of others to address burning Change or Transformation challenges.

Craig Ashmole

Founding Director CCServe