On Monday I blogged about the potential values of Cloud Computing. Today I want to jump straight into the same topic and enlarge the introduced model by analyzing the value of Cloud Computing from a public and a private perspective.

Public means, that the cloud offerings are owned and managed by a third party. From these remote installations others can rent capacities. The private perspective puts the focus on infrastructure that you install and own, but that implements many of the technology platform features found in large “scale-out” server farms run by public cloud providers.

Thicker lines around the value element mean, that more emphasis is placed on that element. Fainter lines mark the less important or missing value elements.

As the diagram says, strategic and economic values seem to be more important in public cloud offerings. Architectural values can be found as well, even if people do not always keep this value category in mind. In contrast, private cloud offerings are limited only to the architectural values.

From this point of view, public and private cloud offerings seem to be the complete opposite of each other. That does not mean, one is better than the other. It’s just necessary to understand the differences and benefit from that knowledge.

How can public and private cloud offerings be combined to receive the maximum value? Are there other points to be considered in the value model? What are your thoughts about cloud values? Let me know what you think!

Found at: mwdadvisors.com

What is your preferred frame of mind when facing challenges in professional- or personal life? Are you attracted to the notion of problems that want to be solved or do you see an outcome, an opportunity that wants to be realized? If you want to convince co-workers or yourself to change it can be helpful to switch to »opportunity mode«.

You know you are problem focused when the main part of activities in change initiatives circle around questions like the following:

• What is the problem?
• Who or what caused it?
• What is the root cause?
• What consequences does this problem have?
• What is the solution?

Of cause problems, root-causes and effects are important. But look what a difference it makes if you approach them from a slightly different angle:

• What would an ideal state without the problem look like? (What do you want?)
• What options do you have to get there?
• What else will you have when you get there?
• What do you need to get there?
• What are the immediate next steps?

Doesn’t this sound much better than the »problem version«? I for myself seem to be an instinctive problem solver. By forcing myself to focus on the goal and the benefits linked to reaching it motivating myself has become much easier (most of the times). Using this »mind hack« in professional life helped to motivate stakeholders by avoiding being paralysed by mounting stacks of problems and doubt in early stages of change.

What do you think? All mumbo-jumbo or would you give it a try?

Via CloudBzz comes a neat visualization of the attributes of cloud computing as evangelized by Gartner.

The attributes are detailed here as follows:

Service-Based: Consumer concerns are abstracted from provider concerns through service interfaces that are well-defined. The interfaces hide the implementation details and enable a completely automated response by the provider of the service to the consumer of the service. The service could be considered “ready to use” or “off the shelf” because the service is designed to serve the specific needs of a set of consumers, and the technologies are tailored to that need rather than the service being tailored to how the technology works. The articulation of the service feature is based on service levels and IT outcomes (availability, response time, performance versus price, and clear and predefined operational processes), rather than technology and its capabilities. In other words, what the service needs to do is more important than how the technologies are used to implement the solution.

Scalable and Elastic: The service can scale capacity up or down as the consumer demands at the speed of full automation (which may be seconds for some services and hours for others). Elasticity is a trait of shared pools of resources. Scalability is a feature of the underlying infrastructure and software platforms. Elasticity is associated with not only scale but also an economic model that enables scaling in both directions in an automated fashion. This means that services scale on demand to add or remove resources as needed.

Shared: Services share a pool of resources to build economies of scale. IT resources are used with maximum efficiency. The underlying infrastructure, software or platforms are shared among the consumers of the service (usually unknown to the consumers). This enables unused resources to serve multiple needs for multiple consumers, all working at the same time.

Metered by Use: Services are tracked with usage metrics to enable multiple payment models. The service provider has a usage accounting model for measuring the use of the services, which could then be used to create different pricing plans and models. These may include pay-as-you go plans, subscriptions, fixed plans and even free plans. The implied payment plans will be based on usage, not on the cost of the equipment. These plans are based on the amount of the service used by the consumers, which may be in terms of hours, data transfers or other use-based attributes delivered.

Uses Internet Technologies: The service is delivered using Internet identifiers, formats and protocols, such as URLs, HTTP, IP and representational state transfer Web-oriented architecture. Many examples of Web technology exist as the foundation for Internet-based services. Google’s Gmail, Amazon.com’s book buying, eBay’s auctions and Lolcats’ picture sharing all exhibit the use of Internet and Web technologies and protocols.

It seems there is a good chance that NUMMI the famous joint venture between GM and Toyota is going out of business. For the lean insiders among you this news has to be at least a little suprising.

Why? And why is this news for a blog like this? To get the full picture of this news we have to look at the history of NUMMI.

When it opened for production in 1984, NUMMI was the first joint venture automotive plant in the United States. For Toyota it was a chance to expand its manufacturing to North America. GM on the other side saw this joint venture as an opportunity to learn about the ideas of lean manufacturing from the inventer of lean itself.

Since its beginning the plant, its management values, methods and techniques  served as the shining example and proof that lean and the resulting benefits could be implemented anywhere. Classic lean books like The Toyota Way praise NUMMI for following all 14 principles of lean. The most important and basic being:

Principle 1: Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

The book cites a few situations in which Toyota indeed decided against closing the plant. For example instead of following the trend of the times and moving all of production to places like mexico management only moved a part of the work and found other things for the plant to do. The rationale of all this being that the workers themselves at the end »couldn’t be blamed for having done anything wrong«. The ultimate goal of humanity before profit seemed reachable.

Times seem to be really different this time. To all »believers« in lean values it will be very interesting to watch Toyotas next actions.

Will it stay loyal to its own principles? Or is a paradigm shift near, crushing down the »old «values? Will management give in to the crisis and the omnipresent subliminal call for »drastic actions«?

We’ll stay tuned.

I found a very useful model for the potential value of cloud computing, which distinguishes three value areas.  As the cloud aligns the time and the size of investments with the value you receive, cloud computing delivers an economic value. You don’t need to spend millions of Euros for it-infrastructure today and receive the revenue years later! The architectural value of cloud computing is the simple and abstract environment, that hides the complexity. That makes it easier and faster to develop and deploy applications. The strategic value concentrates on the organization effectiveness. It helps your organization to differentiate from others and focus on the processes that really add value to your business.

Do you think this model can be useful? Do you see any other cloud values which should be captured by the model?

Found at: Mwdadvisors.com

Great overview over the roots and main branches of complexity science inlcuding actual hot topics like self-organization, emergence and ecologies.

Found at Wikimedia.

in daily business communication content should beat shape.

“you know what!” instead of “I want to show off my ingenuity with this buzz word bingo fully animated Powerpoint slideshow”.

Presentations should never be about what I do know but what you need to know.

Skip the beamer or even better give it to charity and start drawing on flip charts again or use big wall papers to move the masses.

Unfortunately I do not have a fully animated slideshow at hand right now to summarize the post for your management…

One concept which goes with almost all discussions of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) is the  application marketplace or app store.

The Promise…

The argument hype goes something like this: If you specify an platform standard, get more than one hoster to host it and finally convince people to develop little applications (or widgets) for it, everyone wins:

• the hoster can leverage its existing customer base including the possibility of cross-sells
• the application developer can sell his app leveraging the combined numbers of customers of all participating hosters
• the customer having access to a huge selection of apps able to be integrated into his homepage

etc.

Reality sets in

Besides technical and cooperational problems the equation bases on the assumption that you get a lot of small or medium sized ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to program against your platform specification. If you are aiming for business developers this means there has to be enough money in there for them to lock into the platform constraints. The promise now is that electronic marketplaces lower the barrier of entry for these developers enough to ensure profit for all.

Promise? Maybe you’ll say »Hey, I know this works! What about Apples app store?« Exactly my first thoughts but let’s look at the numbers provided in a recent blog post of an developer who has to know:

According to the developer of Zen Jar which ranked around position #30 when the article was written he earns as much as……20$ a day with his app. Considering that there are currently over 36.000 applications to choose from I personally had expected much more profit from entering the Top 50 in a popular category.

What are the reasons for this? For one it’s the standard pricing of .99$. To become really rich at this price you have to sell a lot. Looking at the numbers in the article at position #34 you can expect 30-35 downloads a day. If this is not enough for you you have to do marketing which cuts your profit even further.

As also is mentioned in the article this doesn’t mean the business model is wrong. It just shows that app stores aren’t the 1, 2, 3, PROFIT guarantee as some people suggest. There are still some problems to make the model work as »advertised«.

So what?

Just providing a platform to develop and run applications on is not enough. Providing a place to list this apps and provide services for licensing and billing is not enough, either. What is often missing in the discussion of the »application marketplace« is how to aid developers in marketing their product. If you leave the myriads of »little« business oriented developers alone with this task they won’t have enough resources to do it on their own and still be profitable enough.

One more challenge to overcome in the PaaS opportunity…

Have enough of all this »Green IT« talk? Don’t be too fast on this one. There is finally an aspect of »green management« even I could immediately grasp: Green KPIs!

Wal-Mart is is considering to introduce a product labeling with a single number showing the environmental impact of the product from production to disposal.

According to this article what they are planning to do is:

[...] to create a universal rating system that scores products based on how environmentally and socially sustainable they are over the course of their lives. Consider it the green equivalent to nutrition labels.

What especially appeals to me is the simplicity and the enormous impact of the idea.  Customers can see at one glance how »dangerous« a product is for the environment. If it seems too much to bear for them they simply don’t buy the product anymore. Can you imagine the pressure this builds up on the companies? Should be much more immediate than another letter of intent by the country leaders…

What we as IT can take away from it? There are effective uses of KPIs. But mere data collection is not enough at all. It takes clever ideas, simple measures and real motivational impact to make them work.

Many organizations have a large amount of documents of the same type, lying around in shared folders or distributed over different organizational units. The information within these documents cannot be used for a search or accessed directly from outside the document. It is also not available for any kinds of filtering, grouping and sorting. The only known attributes from outside the document are the file name, the title, the date of the last change and the author, who created the document.

Imagine, you have contract documents with the name and the address of the customer inside and want to make it available from outside. So this is there the MOSS 2007 document library offers a smart solution for your problem.

In the first step, you create a document library on the server for Word documents and extend it with the text fields ‘Customer’ and ‘Customer Address’.

Custom document library in SharePoint 2007 with 'Customer' field

Now, if a new document for the library is created, it has the properties ‘Customer’ and ‘Customer Address’ directly available.

Document with custom properties in MS Office Word 2007

The document can now be saved and the values inserted for the two custom fields are visible in the list. So, you can use all out-of-the-box functions for list sorting, filtering, grouping and searching on your custom document content information.

Document library with new contract

But what happens, if you want to change the address of the customer? Just edit the value in the list and the document will be updated or edit the property of the document in MS Office Word 2007 and the list value will be updated.

Editing the properties in the list item

With this technique all important values inside a document can be used and even changed from outside.

Document with changed address value.

So, make your hidden information visible, searchable and changeable!