Lessons from BT on joined up operation?

Information and knowledge management within the enterprise is something that Freeform Dynamics has looked at on numerous occasions. A good example of this is our recent report ‘Information Management in the Retail Sector’. So, when I was offered the opportunity to talk to BT about the challenges it has faced with managing information and knowledge internally, and how it has approached these challenges, I was more than a little intrigued.

Individuals are increasingly comfortable with using technologies for contacting people and finding information quickly in their personal lives, and these expectations are being carried through into the work space. Such expectations are often not met, however, as the stark reality is that large and small companies alike so often struggle with inefficient and ineffective management of knowledge. Within the majority of organisations, there is a colossal amount of information being created and stored on a continual basis, often in discrete locations around the company. The problem of finding information or expertise is exacerbated by the fact that it is very much a moving target – information is continually changing, with a not insignificant amount of it being in people’s heads.

A real-life example which illustrates this very nicely concerns a financial services (FS) organisation that was particularly impressed with reports produced by an analyst company about its activities. What it subsequently, and embarrassingly discovered was that the analyst company had obtained a lot of its information from Facebook postings placed by the FS organisation’s own employees. This highlights two important points. The first is that there is an increasing propensity for employees to use social networking tools for work related purposes – whether sanctioned or not. The second, and much more important point is that there was a whole tranche of information about the company that was simply not on the internal radar, and took a third party to locate it, harvest it, analyse it and give it back for it to become useful..

The inability to locate and access information and expertise can have a very real impact on a whole series of company success measures. For example, if employees do not have easy and real-time access to company knowledge, the likelihood is that they will spend extra time looking for it, or, worse, will re-create information. Similarly, when internal teams are created to support a particular project or customer initiative, they will often be pulled together based on personal knowledge of individuals rather than looking across the full skills base of the company and selecting the most appropriate people for the job.

It was with some interest, therefore, that I went to view a demo by BT for its ‘My BT’ tool. My BT, which was developed for internal use within BT, has a feature called SignPost, which intelligently 'joins the dots' between enterprise data repositories and people within the company. It is also able to make connections that, unsurprising for a large company, are not always obviously apparent.

My BT brings the concept of social networking into the corporate environment, and allows people to find other people in the organisation and communicate and collaborate with them. Contact and skills information, as well as projects people have been involved in, and documents they have either written or reviewed is also transparent. And users can search for specific information, for example, on BT’s capability. There is a lot more, besides, but too much to cover in one article. The tool, rather than being a complete ‘build from scratch’ system, overlays and plugs into existing systems, databases and document repositories. It is also neatly designed to make unified communications (UC) more tangible, and, therefore, more accessible.

When I saw a demo of My BT with a colleague, I have to say, we were both impressed. According to BT, it has been shown to save a lot of time and money and the response from staff has been very positive. Although this is an internal development, some of BT’s customers have already expressed an interest in the tool, and are looking at how something similar can be implemented in their own organisation. My colleague, David Tebbutt, explored a similar theme in a recent blog on Knowledge Management. What we see in both cases is that managing such knowledge in a more intelligent, joined-up way can be hugely beneficial and is increasingly of interest to organisations. Of course, it will remain a challenge – but examples such as this show a convincing way forward.

A(nother) Take on Cloud: ‘Nothing to Worry About’

Although we’ve said on several occasions that cloud computing isn’t the revolutionary movement that many would have us believe, my visit to Cloud Expo this week really hammered home a point that could make many businesses breathe a sigh of relief, so I thought I’d reiterate it here.

When it comes to engaging with service providers, most organisations are really only interested in outcomes. The key question is: Does what is on offer here fulfil my requirements? A business wants to achieve a specific goal, and if a service provider meets certain criteria, it wins the business. How the service provider delivers the paid-for outcome is a factor to be included in the due diligence process but only insofar as delivery mechanisms meet the need.

Cloud computing changes absolutely nothing in this regard. If the service provider is using ‘bona fide cloud computing technology’ (whatever that means) in its data centre to help it deliver services with greater economies of scale, resilience, flexibility, and so forth, then so be it. Some customers will care, some will not.

This point became ever more clear to me yesterday at Cloud Expo because most service providers in attendance were offering hosting and/or managed services. The entire event would not have looked any different had it been called ‘Hosting Expo’.

And there’s the point. None of this really matters if all you care about is the outcome you want to achieve from a third party service provider. For practical purposes today it might be easier to consider ‘The Cloud’ as simply a consolidation term, an umbrella term under which all the different types of third party service providers that existed in more narrowly defined boxes in the past now live.

Sure, there is more to it than that, but only if you care about details beyond what you are actually paying for. For example, virtualisation technology allows service providers to offer up ever more specific services to suit lots of different performance, scalability and price point requirements. But this is the difference between ‘what’, and ‘how’, and there is currently far too much mixing up of the two, which is counterproductive to say the least.

Back to third party service providers, then: The effect of ‘cloud’ is greater choice to the customer in terms of what’s on offer and how it is sourced, paid for and used. But nothing has fundamentally changed. Despite so many providers claiming that because something carries a certain label, it must be good, everything you ever knew about using third party service providers remains as important – nay – more important, than ever before.

Managing Recovery – Why do we still have problems?

Over the course of the last few months I have spent a lot of time speaking with end users and vendors about backup and recovery systems and their associated work processes. In fact, just this week, I gave a presentation on some research data that we have generated over the last year or so on the whole area of managing data protection and information management. Talking with end users, one thing is still abundantly clear - despite the fact that data backup and recovery being processes on which organisations, large and small, have spent much time over the years, very few think that they have safe, reliable systems running.

Well the answers here are many and varied. Alas no one thing can make all backup and recovery systems perform flawlessly each and every time. A lot of work needs to be put into the processes themselves whereas, in many instances, ’belief‘ that the technology of the backup and recovery software will function as desired is the only investment of effort undertaken.

It is interesting to see that today even professional service suppliers manage to get things wrong. Or, if not entirely wrong, then too often not quite what really should have been provided. Let me give you an example. I was recently talking with a health care professional who pays for a professional data recovery service on the PC he employs to run sophisticated patient management software and image processing equipment. He is a skin specialist. Well, as certainly as Murphy’s Law operates, there came an occasion when he had a hard disk failure so he called his support service.

They duly arrived in his surgery and confirmed that said PC was indeed non-operational and that they would be able to recover the system and the vital patient data. Perfect. Well, not quite. Instead of being able to get the system operational again within a short period of time, they did not return a working system for over a week! Naturally, during the downtime, the doctor had many patients arrive expecting to be scanned by the imaging system which was not possible due to the non-functional PC. Lo and behold, patients were unhappy at having to arrange a second appointment, with all the associated inconvenience and disruption, to complete everything. And this in a health system where practitioner income is directly related to patient sessions and insurance companies being happy with service provided.

Clearly this is a case where, whilst the recovery service works, it does not appear to provide appropriate service levels for the nature of the business being protected. Now who should shoulder responsibility? The Doctor, the company providing the specialist recovery service, or both? Tricky question.

What this does illustrate is that, unless attention is paid to the real needs of the business service being protected, it is easily possible to provide data protection and recovery systems that are less than perfect. Alas, in many institutions, the real value of recovery systems is only appreciated when they are called upon in anger. And, in too many organisations, the ability to recover data and systems is tested too rarely, if at all. Time and effort need to be expended to understand just what the business requirements are, and then putting in place simple systems that meet the need at an affordable cost.

Today, too many backup and recovery systems operate the way they do because that’s the way they have always functioned and, for some time, no further effort has been spent working out what is really required. With a wide range of affordable and workable recovery systems available to help make data protection more effective and efficient now is a good time to look with fresh eyes at backup, recovery and information protection. The place to start is to find all the data stores that exist in the business, now a more straightforward task than in the past, and then to establish just how they should be protected. Sounds easy but it requires time and effort plus whoever undertakes the task must be ready to talk to the business users to identify their real requirements and then translate these into potential technical solutions.