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Taxi app combines microservices with DevOps methods to get ahead of rivalsHailo’s approach to software development enables it to continually roll out new functionality

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Google slashes public cloud prices to undercut rivalsGoogle has overhauled its Cloud Platform pricing structure and claims that users can now run their workloads in its public cloud 40% more cheaply than in its competi-tors’. The latest round of price cuts apply to every Google Compute Engine instance type, the com-pany confirmed in a blog post. “Compared to other public cloud providers, Google Cloud Platform is now 40% less expensive for many workloads,” it stated.

IT system related to prosecution of subpostmasters under reviewThe Criminal Cases Review Commission has received 20 applications from subpostmasters related to prosecutions for account shortfalls, which they blame on the Post Office’s Horizon computer system. The applicants were con-victed for offences such as fraud, false accounting and theft when the shortfalls were found.

M&S sees drop in yearly online sales due to website changes Marks & Spencer suffered a 2% decrease in online sales for the year to 28 March 2015, after moving its website away from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) e-commerce system and bringing it back in-house. In its annual results, the firm stated that although the move away from AWS provided it with its first year of control over the website, the change had more of an effect on customers than expected, leading to a drop in sales.

Finance and retail sectors struggle to spot cyber intrusionsFinance and retail organisations rate advanced cyber threats as the most serious challenge, yet both sectors struggle to identify attacks inside their networks, a study has revealed. Identifying attacks in pro-gress takes financial services firms up to 98 days, while retailers take up to 197 days, according to the Ponemon Institute study.

Premier Inn integrates Apple Watch with its customer appThe latest company to join the Apple Watch app bandwagon is Premier Inn, whose customers can use an Apple Watch to control the heating, lighting and entertainment systems in the chain’s showcase hotels.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online

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Company employees ignore cyber risks, survey revealsEmployees viewing adult content sites on a work device

THE WEEK IN IT

Shadow home secretary backs call for more women in ITShadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has said the government should listen to calls for change from Martha Lane Fox, after the Labour leadership contender backed the Lastminute.com founder’s plans for more women in technology.

Leeds Building Society embarks on digital services push with HPLeeds Building Society has signed a 10-year agreement with HP that will see the hardware giant assist the firm with delivering an improved online banking and digital service to its customers.

Fledgling bank Euro Pacific moves core system to the cloudEuro Pacific Bank has moved from multiple proprietary systems for its core banking to cloud-based software from Temenos, which will enable it to compete and grow without a huge IT investment.

Barclays adds extra security through domain name switchBarclays Bank and Barclaycard are moving away from using .com and .co.uk domain names in a move that will add extra security for customers. The bank and credit card company are switching from barclays.com and barclaycard.com to .barclays and .barclaycard.

IT problems lead to 588% rise in complaints for Scottish PowerProblems with Scottish Power’s new IT system have led to it receiving the biggest rise in complaints any energy supplier has ever seen. Some customers did not receive bills and were charged for late payments.

IT suppliers call on GDS for commitment to G-Cloud’s futureG-Cloud suppliers are urging the newly elected Conservative govern-ment not to make any sweeping changes to the framework, for fear it could put the public sector off procuring services through it. n

.❯ WIT and Cybrary to train girls in cyber security skills.

❯ Cyber attackers show ingenuity in first quarter of 2015.

❯ BT and BDUK failed to make costs transparent.

❯ CSC prepares itself for sale to Indian supplier.

❯Catch up with the latest IT news online

Source: Blue Coat Systems/Vanson Bourne

Fran

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Mex

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UK

2% 5% 9% 10%

Ger

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19%

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Can OpenStack free up enterprise IT to support software-driven business?Major companies are leading the way in deploying open-source infrastructure. Cliff Saran reports from Vancouver

With Walmart going public with its use of OpenStack, now could be the time for major organisations to take the technology seriously. During the OpenStack

Summit in Vancouver, the supermarket giant announced how it was deploying OpenStack to power its e-commerce strategy.

“E-commerce 3.0 is all about combining distribution so all inventory is available to all customers all the time, integrating the digital and physical,” said Amandeep Singh Juneja, senior director for cloud operations and engineering at WalmartLabs.

OpenStack has been a key component of Walmart’s e-com-merce strategy. It has enabled the world’s largest retailer to give developers the freedom and flexibility to deploy applications quickly by using a private cloud for new applications.

Walmart’s aim is to empower developers to build and deploy applications focused on improving the customer shopping experi-ence across multiple channels.

Another organisation ramping up its OpenStack infrastructure is PayPal, which is running 100% of its financial transactions on the technology. While at sister company eBay only 20% of the IT

infrastructure is OpenStack-based, 100% of its development and testing runs on OpenStack. It is being used to give the auction site’s developers greater agility and flexibility, enabling them to deploy apps more quickly.

ANALYSIS

Amandeep Singh Juneja, WalmartLabs: “E-commerce

3.0 is all about combining distribution so all inventory

is available to all customers all the time”

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Being open source, OpenStack promises to reduce the costs of building private clouds. At the same time, organisations such as eBay, Cern, Comcast and PayPal are adopting OpenStack directly to avoid supplier lock-in, according to analyst Forrester. But it promises far more than just cheaper IT infrastructure.

Agility And efficiencyIn Forrester’s OpenStack is ready, are you? report, analyst Lauren Nelson wrote: “In reality, OpenStack sits behind net-new envi-ronments designed to launch enterprises into a revolutionised

continuous development experience. It supports a much larger transformation toward agility and development efficiency and is not tied to virtualisation or consolidation efforts.”

OpenStack is often associated with migrating traditional IT onto a private cloud. Nelson said CIOs should look at a private cloud not just as a way to make their existing datacentre infrastructure more efficient and cheaper to run, but should consider creating an entirely new approach to IT to support changing business drivers.

“Using a private cloud to keep costs down is the wrong approach,” she said. “OpenStack enables time efficiency, enabling developers to spin up new services quickly.”

IT departments that could not give the business this agility would soon find they were no longer relevant, Nelson warned. Rather than focusing on using OpenStack to put existing datacen-tre workloads into a private cloud, private clouds “should be used for future applications and systems of engagement to respond to industry disruption”, she said.

customer experienceThe biggest competition for organisations such as City Group are websites like Facebook and Pinterest, which are putting pressure on traditional organisations to revolutionise their cus-tomer experience, said Nelson.

Although it is often considered as a way to build a private cloud, OpenStack can also be used to provision datacentre hardware directly. Subbu Allamaraju, chief engineer for cloud at eBay, said he would like to use OpenStack as the application programming interface (API) for accessing all datacentre resources, but the technology is not yet mature enough.

Walmart’s Juneja added: “We aim to move more markets onto OpenStack and eventually offer datacentre as a service.”

ANALYSIS

“Using a private cloUd to keep costs down is the wrong approach. openstack enables

time efficiency, enabling developers to spin Up new

services qUickly”Lauren neLson, Forrester

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OpenStack can also be used to manage physical, bare metal server hardware. James Penick, cloud architect at Yahoo, said the internet portal and search engine had been using bare metal OpenStack alongside virtualisation. The company runs hundreds of thousands of physical servers and tens of thousands of virtual machines (VMs), which are now managed by OpenStack.

“When you provision compute, whether bare metal or VM, you use OpenStack,” said Junejan.

Although OpenStack has proved its credentials in some of world’s biggest businesses, many enterprises face huge technical challenges in deploying it, and it is also plagued with bugs.

“An enterprise can buy any Linux distribution and easily deploy it,” said Imad Susou, vice-president of Intel’s open-source technol-ogy centre. “We need to get here with OpenStack. It will take a lot of effort to get OpenStack mature. It will take all of us to get OpenStack to where it becomes the software-defined infrastructure.”

openstAck-poweredAt the Vancouver Summit, OpenStack unveiled an initiative called OpenStack-powered to make it easier for businesses to build IT infrastructures on OpenStack spanning private and public cloud infrastructure.

OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce said the initiative would offer global interoperable clouds, with OpenStack-powered cloud services made simpler for businesses to integrate.

Red Hat, Ubuntu and VMware are among the firms with prod-ucts certified with the OpenStack-powered logo. “You can count on this as a solid foundation to build your application,” said Bryce.

Intel’s Susou described the future of IT as software-defined infrastructure based on OpenStack. Such infrastructure is start-ing to give developers at Walmart and other major organisations the flexibility and agility they need to make the business more customer-centric.

Given that it is an open-source project, OpenStack functionality is driven by the community of users. With OpenStack-powered, it can provide a single interface across private and public clouds. OpenStack is also being extended to container technology includ-ing Docker and Kubernetes.

During the summit, Sandeep Parikh, cloud solutions architect at Google, showed how Kubernetes running on top of a Rackspace OpenStack cloud could be load-balanced with the same appli-cation running on the Google Cloud Platform in the Google Container Engine.

OpenStack it is still an evolving technology, but Forrester’s Nelson urged CIOs to give it serious consideration. Despite its publicised bugs and complexity of implementations, she said many organi-sations were deploying OpenStack in production environments. Business is becoming software-driven, said Nelson, and as busi-nesses build new applications, they will need more flexible IT. A private cloud built on OpenStack is one way to achieve this. n

“it will take a lot of effort to get openstack matUre”

Imad susou, InteL

ANALYSIS

❯OpenStack has introduced interoperability initiative to reduce complexity

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The software behind Hailo’s successHailo’s head of platform automation tells Cliff Saran how the cab firm keeps ahead of the competition by combining microservices and DevOps methods to make regular updates to its mobile app

Taxi app company Hailo’s platform automation lead, Boyan Dimitrov, believes software development needs to change to keep pace with the demands of the modern world.

Computer Weekly met Dimitrov following his presentation at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in London, where he described to delegates how the taxi booking app uses cloud ser-vices on AWS.

What is significant about Hailo is that the back-end applica-tion is engineered in a fundamentally different way to traditional enterprise software. By combining microservices with a DevOps approach to software development, it is able to roll out new func-tionality to the Hailo service continually, which is of growing importance as more taxi apps become available.

This approach would have been unheard of a few years ago. Other than the likes of Google and Facebook, few businesses would have had the resources to keep adding func-tions and services to software to remain ahead of the competition. And even if it was the CEO’s ambition, few IT departments would have been able to keep up with the relentless pace of inno-vation this would have required.

In the past, a traditional enterprise application, such as a back-end banking system, would have been developed as a monolithic piece of software. Such an approach may have suited large enter-prises, but, according to Dimitrov, there are inherent problems.

“The logic in a banking application is quite easy to follow. But the challenge for enterprise applications is that they are massive and require work split across teams in a way where release cycles are in a weekly order,” he says.

Dimitrov says monolithic applications pose a big problem for the business because the software can only be released

INTERVIEW

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every few months. “This may be fine for a bank, but a startup needs to keep adding features to the business as quickly as possible,” he says.

When Hailo’s taxi app business started four years ago, the company built its software development team traditionally. But this was holding back the business, according to Dimitrov. “We could not increase our velocity. It was harder to add new features because everyone in the team was working on the same code base,” he says.

So instead of programming for a big, monolithic application, Hailo dissected the software into smaller chunks – what the indus-try now calls microservices. A complete team of software engi-neers and quality assurance testers were then assigned to each component. “We got people to work on individual components, such as the service that runs customer registration or the service that tells customers how quickly their cab will arrive,” he says.

working with microservicesAccording to Dimitrov, each of the constituent components of Hailo are relatively straightforward, in terms of coding work. “Each of these small components can scale independently, and have their own software development lifecycle,” he says. This means they can be released to production at different times, ranging from several times a day to once every few weeks.

The essence of the approach Hailo has taken to software devel-opment is that each of its software teams takes full ownership of the components, right through the development, release, refresh and, ultimately, the decommissioning process.

INTERVIEW

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monolithic applications Updated every few months “may be fine

for a bank, bUt a startUp needs to keep adding featUres to the

bUsiness as qUickly as possible”Boyan dImItrov, HaILo

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“It is such a small building block that people can take ownership of it. When there is a problem, they have to fix it,” says Dimitrov. This makes quality control far easier than with traditional mon-olithic applications, where identifying the individual problem code can be difficult.

from development to productionThe architecture diagram for Hailo is a mass of components that are intricately interconnected. Dimitrov says this mass of com-plexity would be impossible to manage without automation.

“Our developers provision their components and the system takes care of placing the service where it needs to be running, routing traffic to it and bringing feedback to the developers, who can control how much traffic is routed to the new service,” he says. This allows the development team to see if they have built something that does not work.

“It is important for us to get the services we develop into pro-duction as quickly as possible, so we have automated testing, starting with the Hailo application and going back through inte-gration testing of all its constituent components,” he says.

One of the challenges a traditional software development team faces with DevOps is how testing and quality assurance fits in with continuous development and rollout.

Hailo uses a system to generate robot customers based on an island in the South Pacific. “You basically see cabs driving round and people trying to hail them,” says Dimitrov. “As long as this works and people can hail a cab, it shows that the components in our system are working.” But if it breaks, such that people are

unable to hail a cab, the simulation shows there is a problem.For the future, Dimitrov says Hailo is also creating systems to

enable developers to push the components they develop straight through to production, without the need for a staging step. “We will be able to deploy straight to production and do testing directly on the production systems,” he says.

In effect, new software components will run side-by-side with existing components, allowing developers to compare how well the new service performs. “Testing will be entirely transparent to our customers. We will be able to verify if it works and the system will throw it back if it doesn’t,” says Dimitrov.

testing microservicesIt is relatively easy for Hailo to test a new function on a single microservice by redirecting 20% of customers to it for compari-son. But Dimitrov says it sometimes needs to make changes to

“we bUild in redUndancy and systems that can tolerate

failUres, so if one component goes down we can still work”

Boyan dImItrov, HaILo

INTERVIEW

❯DevOps will become mainstream approach to app development and deployment

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five or more microservices at a time, which means if there is a problem with the new functionality, it is extremely difficult for Hailo to test which microservice is at fault.

One of the major challenges in microservices architecture is that some services are provided externally, so they are not directly controlled by Hailo.

So how does the company maintain quality of service given that it does not have end-to-end control?

“The application services are decoupled in a way that allows us to identify critical services, which are then prioritised,” says Dimitrov.

“External services absolutely contribute to our uptime. We build in redundancy and systems that can tolerate failures, so if one component goes down we can still work. There are fall-back mechanisms all the way up the software stack,” he adds.

Even the client app on a smartphone has a reconciliation system built in to make sure there is a good customer experience in the event of a problem with the back-end Hailo system.

The taxi app uses an Amazon Web Services back end. Its approach to software development means the back-end compo-nents can be updated independently. Each component can scale independently and works as part of a highly distributed system that makes up the Hailo service. For Dimitrov, this is the future of software development.

“In the world we live in we have to be able to execute quickly. Decoupling is the only way to achieve this because it overcomes heavy operational processes that prevent you from releasing soft-ware quickly enough,” he says. n

The Hailo app uses an AWS back end and its approach to software development

means components can be updated independently.

INTERVIEW

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Employing the transformative power of IT to help the long-term jobless back to workWorking Links CIO Omid Shiraji combines technological expertise with ethical values. Mark Samuels reports

Omid Shiraji, CIO at Working Links, is just one year into his first technology leadership role, but is already simultane-ously embarking on a team rebuild, a cost reduction plan

and a digital transformation programme.“I’ve had to keep the lights on, make sure the cost of IT is appro-

priate and help support the business as it seeks out new opportu-nities,” he says.

A specialist organisation that helps the long-term unemployed get back into work, Working Links set itself the goal in 2013 of doubling its size and services within three years. Shiraji has used IT to deliver that target in just 12 months.

different perspective“I wear about four different hats,” he says. “You have to take a different perspective to everything. But I enjoy the role because the organisation is values-driven. The way we behave and the principles we hold are at the core of the organisation.”

Working Links is an expert in complex case management and has helped more than 50,000 long-term unemployed people

INTERVIEW

Omid Shiraji: “I try to understand people’s

business problems rather than thinking in terms of

technology projects”

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return to work in the past three years. After honing his IT pro-fessionalism in the academic sector, Shiraji is pleased his first IT leadership post gives him the opportunity to continue working for an organisation that is not simply focused on pounds and pence.

“Very few CIO roles give you the opportunity to live by strong community values,” he explains. “So I might be wearing many dif-

ferent hats, but I am also able to transform the business through IT in an ethical manner, which I find extremely satisfying.”

Shiraji joined Working Links in August 2013, having spent more than a decade at City University in London. His first position at the university was as a contractor on the helpdesk. After moving into a permanent role, he landed a series of management positions.

During this period, he moved functions every 18 months or so, becoming involved in project management, network implementa-tion and strategy development. His final role at City, before joining Working Links, was as director of service.

“Five or six years ago, I came to the decision that I wanted to be a CIO one day,” he says. His manager at the time inspired a pas-sion for technology leadership in him. “He was the first boss I’d

had who didn’t just talk about the technology. What really inter-ested me was how organisations can derive real value from the exploitation of technology.”

Shiraji’s interest in IT leadership led him to actively manage his career. “I realised pretty quickly that I’d get nowhere if I just talked to my business peers about the bits and bytes of technology,” he says, suggesting that language is a crucial component for a business-focused CIO.

“I’ve always been positive about new opportunities and tried to understand people’s business problems rather than thinking in terms of technology projects.”

informAtion leAdershipShiraji says he was able to hone these skills while completing a masters in information leadership from Cass Business School between 2010 and 2013.

At the same time, he planned and implemented an IT transfor-mation programme at City. It was at this point he started to think about his next move. Rather than launch another change project at City, he opted to leave and seek new challenges.

Recruiters gave him the option of Working Links or a position at a finance firm. Working Links provided the best fit, both person-ally and professionally. “One of my key drivers was to work for an organisation that I felt was doing something worthwhile,” he says.

“The chief executive had a vision of what he wanted to achieve and recognised that technology would play a critical role. I real-ised I had the opportunity to become a crucial element in the radi-cal transformation of business operations.”

INTERVIEW

“i am able to transform the bUsiness throUgh it in an ethical manner, which i find satisfying”

omId sHIrajI, WorkIng LInks

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Now over a year in and Shiraji says he is relishing the role and that there are still many new targets to hit.

“It’s challenging but very enjoyable,” he says. “I’ve achieved some of what I wanted to do and there’s still a lot more to do. There has been lots of organisational change at Working Links and I and my senior colleagues have had to work hard to help everyone across the organisation to really understand the trans-formative power of IT.”

Shiraji inherited a mix of contractors and permanent IT staff when he joined Working Links, many of whom had limited expe-rience and knowledge of the organisation. He felt the IT setup would not support the chief executive’s growth strategy, both in terms of staff and systems.

Boost it’s reputAtionWorking Links was reliant on legacy infrastructure and Shiraji wanted to boost the internal reputation of IT. The organisation, he says, was not an IT-enabled business. Before his appoint-ment, IT procurement tended to be handled by individual teams, such as HR and finance, that would go out and try to find spot solutions to the challenges. It was an arrangement Shiraji recog-nised was unsuitable for an organisation aiming to grow quickly.

“I started looking at how we could build a platform to enable growth,” he says. “I wanted to move away from the internal build-ing of IT systems and towards a cloud-first approach. On-demand technology provides the scale and agility that we need.”

Shiraji says he was upfront about the changes to the in-house IT team that would be required. He says the transformation has

involved some tough conversations – but being honest meant his core IT team responded well.

“I knew we didn’t have all the skills and capabilities internally to meet the growth agenda of the business,” he says. “So I started looking for external partners who could bring global IT excellence, but who also understood UK operations and shared our values.”

Shiraji is now working through a series of negotiations with ser-vice providers to help further transform technology activities dur-

ing the next 12 months. The key, he says, will be to move as many back-office IT functions as possible to the cloud.

“As an IT department, we must understand the needs and moti-vations of the rest of the business. IT is not a core competency and that’s why we’re looking to outsource more technology systems and activities,” he says. “My aim is to take current IT operations, improve the quality of service and reduce the overall cost to the business. By freeing up resources in operational areas, I can think about how to use IT to help the business develop new capabilities.”

“i wanted to move away from the internal bUilding of it

systems and towards a cloUd-first approach”

omId sHIrajI, WorkIng LInks

INTERVIEW

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This kind of IT-enabled business thinking is new to Working Links, says Shiraji. Since becoming CIO, he has worked hard to change the way staff think of – and use – IT systems. For exam-ple, a year ago the organisation did not use basic communications technology. Shiraji’s transformation project is working to make col-laboration, via digital and cloud-based platforms, the new norm.

“Real innovation comes from the capabilities of the technol-ogy and how we can then change the engagement model with our customers,” he says. “We are looking to create communities

based on social technology, so we can help like-minded citizens to help each other. If we get that right, we can try to transform what the organisation offers and how it works with people.”

He says international expansion provides a key opportunity for digitally enabled change. Working Links is keen to find ways to use the expertise it has developed in the UK across other regions. It is exploring how to use its model elsewhere, including the Republic of Ireland, and technology will play a crucial enabling role.

“As a business, there is a huge opportunity to work internation-ally,” he says. “I have the chance to help the organisation grow globally through the use of IT. We are going to take what we do, bottle it and use our technology platform in other countries. The key will be cloud-based systems, such as Salesforce.com, which won’t just deal with customer relationship management, but will also provide a platform for change.”

The organisation is also keen to find ways to use its knowledge in other areas of UK provision. One potential area is the rehabili-tation of offenders. “We want to take on – and then transform – service provision,” says Shiraji. “So in the area of offenders, that might involve working with community rehabilitation organisa-tions to work towards reducing re-offending in the most effective manner possible. Technology will always play a crucial role as we move into new business areas.”

long-term AimsJust one year into his first CIO role, Shiraji is focused on the aims of the business and is clear about how technology can help to meet Working Links’ long-term aims. As far as his own aspira-tions are concerned, Shiraji says he wants IT to be viewed as a key differentiator that helps the organisation generate new ben-efits as quickly as possible.

“I want the way that we help people to be digitally enabled,” he says. “I don’t want IT to be viewed as a separate area, but as just another part of the business. And I want the technology we provide to help engage people and change lives more quickly than would have ever been possible before.” n

❯The wrong skills: Why are computing students unemployed?

“we are going to take what we do, bottle it and Use oUr

technology platform in other coUntries”

omId sHIrajI, WorkIng LInks

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The French could take Friday off and still produce more than Britons do in a week, according to The Economist. While UK employment is high and the broad economy is

recovering, productivity has fallen consistently since 2008. If we can’t improve it, real wages will stay low, affecting hard-pressed families. So what’s going on?

One thing is that organisations are stuck in the past. Personal productivity tools were introduced in the 1990s and many busi-nesses haven’t moved on much since then.

New technologies are delivering amazing returns in startup communities, which are disrupting larger businesses using agile, collaborative ways of working. However, larger businesses seem content to set up workers to send emails all day and sit on telephone conference calls for hours, making it difficult for them to be very productive.

The digital natives entering the workforce today collaborate and work together intuitively. To become more creative, competitive and productive, we need to let them use consumer technologies to do their jobs.

madonna for ceoThe smartest businesses, and the most successful long-term, are the “Madonna” businesses which constantly reinvent them-selves, their processes and the tools they use.

Business needs a light-touch environment where employees seamlessly collaborate to create amazing results. Instead, busi-nesses are using layers of antiquated IT systems that are difficult to use and add little value.

OPINION

Fix outdated working practices to solve productivity puzzleThe Economist says the French could take Friday off and still produce more than Britons in a week. Nina Bjornstad looks at how smarter use of technology could fix this.

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All these constraints are leading to the rise of a whole class of tools being used by workers, but not managed by organisations. The risk of the so-called “shadow IT” environment, where employ-ees work around existing systems using consumer technologies to achieve success, is real.

So how can we take both the productivity puzzle and the “shadow IT” threat and fix them Madonna-style?

Here are five simple and safe steps any business can take to begin the reinvention journey:n Workers want freedom

Workers want to be able to work wherever they are – whether in the office, at home, with customers or while travelling. Organisations need to liberate business content, but safely manage it so it doesn’t escape. Moving to secure, managed cloud-based file storage systems is a good start. This means using consumerised, but corporately managed, cloud services that can quickly and simply be rolled out to employees to share all their files, on any device, anywhere.

n Teams can work together betterEmployees constantly struggle to work within their teams, across lines of business and with their partners. How often do you waste time with conflicting versions of documents that several people are working on at the same time? Technology exists that lets you work with multiple people at once in the same document, in real time.

n See me, hear me One of the biggest productivity thieves in any organisation is the conference call. How many pointless calls have you sat

through in your life? Too many, I expect. They stealthily demo-tivate people, sucking the energy from them and making things difficult to action. At Google we don’t do conference calls. In the offices where I’m based we don’t even have telephones. We have laptops or Chromeboxes on every desk and our cho-sen mobile device. So how do we conference? We use video.

n Flexi-workSome of us are more productive if we don’t burn our enthu-siasm in a 90-minute horror commute. So giving workers the tools to work from where suits them is key. Because we use a simple browser-based system, no matter what computer I use, I just open Chrome, log in, tap my security key and have immediate access to email, documents, files and the internet.

n Email is a tool, not an outcomeModern email and messaging technologies deliver new and highly productive ways of managing the important conversa-tions that happen on email. Noise can be filtered out or paused until later – no need to delete or clean out. n

OPINION

Nina Bjornstad is country manager for the UK and Ireland at

Google for Work.

This is an edited excerpt. Click here to read full article online.

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Going digital makes IT the business

Digital is undoubtedly the buzzword of the day in conversations between IT leaders and their executive counterparts in the organisation. But it’s only recently that the full implications of “going digital” are becoming clear in the IT department.

We hear plenty about how digital is changing business – increasing customer engagement, opening up new channels, break-ing down old silos and so on. And we hear even more about digital in the public sector, such as government as a platform, reform of service delivery, agile policy design and so forth.

But we’ve heard a lot less about what digital means for IT departments, the skills they need and the way IT develops, delivers and supports technology. It’s increasingly clear that the changes are more fundamental than many had thought. We’ve heard a lot of talk about what Gartner calls “bimodal IT”, which is effectively having one IT team responsible for the traditional IT operational disciplines for keeping the lights on; and another to look after the agile, fast-moving, digital stuff.

But at best, this two-speed IT is only a transitional phase. It’s certainly not something you hear talked about at the most advanced digi-tal businesses. Hailo, the taxi app, is an example – developing its software using highly componentised microservices, public cloud and DevOps techniques to deliver the sort of flexibility and speed of change that conventional IT departments would barely recognise.

In the US, companies such as Walmart, PayPal and Yahoo are using OpenStack – an open-source tool created mostly for private clouds but being used by such firms as a highly flexible environment for managing IT operations. The way they develop, test, release and run software is very different to the traditional corporate datacentre.

In the same way that digital promises to break down barriers between businesses and customers, and between citizens and government, it also breaks down barriers between IT and the business. Digital doesn’t just put IT teams at the heart of business, in many situations it means IT teams are the business. The ability to rapidly develop and release new software is what will determine successful businesses in the digital era. It will be the difference between success and failure.

IT leaders and their teams need to prepare for the digital IT department – it’s already starting to happen in your competitors. n

❯Read the latest Computer Weekly blogs

EDITOR’S COMMENTHome

the ability to rapidly develop and release new software is

what will determine sUccessfUl bUsinesses in the digital era

computerweekly.com 26 May-1 June 2015 18

A t one time, the internet appeared to offer all organi-sations a simple proposition: email connectivity and a clickable presence in the form of a website. Today, multiple messaging options have blossomed in addi-

tion to the universal acceptance of email, and web presence has rapidly evolved with interactive content and the ability to deliver transactional experiences – or e-commerce.

As the web experience has grown, one of its biggest bug-bears is content – who owns, creates and edits it; how differ-ent media are managed; and how that media will play on the multiplicity of platforms customers have at their disposal. Over the web’s 20 years, the use of development tools has long since moved on from hypertext markup language editors and visualisers to the need for a complete suite of capabilities and management platforms.

There still remain some organisational challenges to get to grips with. Influence and control has shifted from technical, skilled IT departments, through the business groups that have typically exploited the web presence, to the user or customer. While the customer wants to interact with a unified customer experience, behind it there will be a mixed bag of separate com-ponents, each with a particular application focus.

Digital customer experience: BeyonD the weBsite

Organisations are faced with the challenge of delivering their customers with an online experience that goes far beyond just a website.

Rob Bamforth reports

BUYER’S GUIDE TO CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT | PART 1 OF 3

IMA

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HomeROBU

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OC

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This is beginning to change and cloud-based unified platforms are emerging to offer the complete digital customer experience, often through acquisition – which is where Oracle, IBM, Salesforce.com and SDL have all been especially busy. However, some of these unified offerings still give away their individual heritage by having greater emphasis in one specific area or reveal-ing internal inconsistencies. So how does an organisation decide what it needs?

The first thing is to identify the main aspects that form the digi-tal customer experience, see where these intersect most closely with the underlying organisational strategy and then investigate what sort of tools might match those needs.

content and digital assetsContent is a primary driver. Even the simplest websites can struggle with it, and so they should all be built on a solid web content management foundation. Good-quality and relevant content is fundamental for the customer expe-rience to be interesting, efficient and ultimately productive.

Managing content effectively is vital not only for customer experi-ence, but also to ensure content is suitably protected, accurate and meets compliance regulations. Web

content management has to combine both the capabilities of data and workflow management with the specific needs of web structures, models and applications, as well as being able to adapt content for a diverse range of viewing platforms.

Many suppliers have a rich content management legacy – OpenText pre-dates the popularisation of the internet, while HP’s Autonomy offers a robust

approach to deal with governance issues alongside multiple sources and large volumes of content. Others, such as IBM, focus on balancing ease of content creation by non-technical content developers with the need for IT to retain control.

Beyond straightforward web content, there are other digital assets – images, audio and video – that will require more sophis-ticated management. This is not only a matter of data volumes, but also requires an understanding of formats, and how these might differ and need to be transcoded or adapted. This is where companies with a rich media heritage, such as Adobe, or a strong

understanding of how to get the best out of output media no matter what the platform, such as Sitecore, can play a strong role.

transactionsContent needs to convey more than just information, it needs to encourage action and, more to the point, financial transactions. But

good-qUality and relevant content is fUndamental for the cUstomer experience to

be interesting, efficient and Ultimately prodUctive

BUYER’S GUIDE

❯After internationalising its e-commerce offering across Europe, Timberland is setting

out its next priority – refining its online customer experience.

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e-commerce is no longer simply the ability to take payments online. A truly multi-channel experience incorporates the physi-cal world of bricks as well as digital clicks. This means full integra-tion between initial engagement, order placement, stock control and logistics, many of which may be separate systems.

This often means the established software giants such as Oracle and IBM have plenty to offer, as they have a track record of back-end systems over many years. This goes for more recent powerhouses in consumer retail as well, such as eBay with eBay Enterprise. But these options may lack fully integrated front-end customer relationship management systems. The highly interactive and global nature of digitally enhanced commerce opens up opportu-nities for those with wide international commerce expertise, such as Digital River, and multi-channel offerings including those from NetSuite, Demandware, SAP company hybris, and Intershop.

tailoring to tHe needs of tHe customerEven the best transactional systems need marketing pull, entic-ing offers and demand creation. Not only can this be automated, its results can be tested more directly, closing the loop. However, people also play an important role through social media – although there is evidence emerging that this might not be living up to its earlier hype. According to Capgemini’s latest Digital Shopper

research, social media dropped in importance in the customer journey between 2012 and 2014.

One reason for this could be the rapid expansion of paid amplifi-cation, with recommendations moving on from being simply a col-lection of customer experiences to a business in their own right.

Many organisations and industry sectors derive a great deal of value from recommendations, so many will be investing in platforms from sector leaders Outbrain and Taboola, or recent entrants such as Contextly and Gravity to generate vital page views.

The community experience does still play a valid role, but even more important is the

one-to-one relationship between seller and buyer. Getting this right is becoming paramount, as even supermarket giants can no longer rely on old shopping habits and loyalty. Offers must increasingly be personalised to the customer and the journey they are undertaking.

This means building a deeper understanding of customer needs, including the context of the moment of interaction – what device they are using, time of day and location – as well as who they are and a track record of previous experiences. This requires systems that capture the information and are able to take instant decisions to deliver offers tailored to what customers need.

BUYER’S GUIDE

getting the one-to-one relationship between seller

and bUyer right is paramoUnt. offers mUst increasingly be

personalised to the cUstomer

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Many systems still base a lot of their personalisation on history – clicks, ads viewed and so on – but this can be a little too simplistic and miss out on what customers are really looking for. Sophisticated analytics are required, which offer more com-plete insights into customers, as well as how the system and ser-vices that surround their journey responds. For example, tools like Telerik’s Sitefinity integrate customer relationship, web content and marketing automation to encourage closer understanding of customer behaviours and optimisation of the offer to them.

a unified and strategic approacHThe impact of the digital experience is so significant that organisa-tions cannot ignore it, nor confine it to an area for special projects. It needs to be an integral part of any customer strategy. There are several key areas to focus on:n Customer

Understand who they are and what their needs are at every stage along the journey. Seamlessly offer all channels of inter-action that may be required, never assume the journey will be simple or linear, but always ensure that from the customer’s perspective it is consistent. Track and respond to their behav-iour in real time.

n Content Empower those who best understand its relevance to the business, unify diverse sources and manage based on an understanding that scale is critical. Increasingly rich media is becoming important to retaining customer interest, but it brings challenges to be effective and efficiently delivered.

n Context Go beyond simple tailoring to the individual and pick up the context that surrounds them. The information is available, but needs to be harvested and aggregated so that smart deci-sions can be taken automatically to align more closely with customer needs.

n IntegrationProcesses are critical, so ensure that both people and systems are properly integrated. People need to collaborate seamlessly between roles as customers belong to no single department. Systems that may have grown up in discrete silos now need to share data and intelligence. This will require a careful analysis of the diverse ecosystems of suppliers to see where partner-ships are really adding value.

Online interaction and communications may have changed many things, but certain underlying key principles remain – the experience is all about the customer, the offer and the journey they have in finding, engaging and transacting with the supplier. These principles have to be placed ahead of internal agendas and the capabilities of existing systems when trying to embark on the challenge of improving the digital customer experience.

In many cases, fully integrated systems will make the task sim-pler, but even the best tools only support a strategy, and if the strategy and processes are fragmented, the customer experience will be poor. It’s better to build the right attitudes in people and integrated processes first, and then bring in the technology. n

Rob Bamforth is an analyst at Quocirca.

BUYER’S GUIDE

computerweekly.com 26 May-1 June 2015 22

IT outsourcing is emotive, but it is hard to find a company today that doesn’t do it in some way.

Outsourcing is also changing fast. In the past, IT out-sourcing was a case of handing over the running of the back

office, with suppliers offering to manage “the mess for less”. This extended to companies choosing to have the mess managed for even less in offshore locations, particularly India, where the cost of labour is lower.

But developments in cloud computing, automation software and big data technology are changing the way outsourcers offer services and how businesses consume them.

Traditional application development and maintenance out-sourcing is being shaken up as a result of cloud computing and the software as a service it brings. Offshore business processes and IT services are being replaced by automation technology, reduc-ing the need for low-cost, full-time staff to run them. Meanwhile, big data is turning suppliers into information gatherers and trans-lators rather than software maintainers.

Another change taking place is the digitisation of business, which is placing difficult demands on in-house IT resources.

where next for it outsourcing?

At a recent meeting of Computer Weekly’s CW500 Club, IT leaders discussed how IT outsourcing is changing and what

this means for businesses. Karl Flinders reports

IT OUTSOURCING

Home

PAVLOTYSCHUK/ISTOCK

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Businesses want support in the back end to free up staff for digital projects at the front end, where their business knowledge is vital.

All this means IT outsourcing is set to continue, but will change in its form. Computer Weekly’s CW500 Club recently discussed the future of IT outsourcing, with CIOs from Croydon Council, Cambridge University Press and clothes retailer Monsoon Accessorize describing some of the changes that are taking place and their effect on IT outsourcing.

public sector open to cHangeThe fact that the public sector is transparent is the reason we hear so many public sector IT outsourcing horror stories – not simply because there are more of them. Private sector compa-nies, on the other hand, are unlikely to publicise failed outsourc-ing arrangements. But outsourcing in the public sector does have its challenges.

Outsourcing is an attractive cost-cutting mechanism for any organi-sation forced to reduce spending. The London Borough of Croydon is a good example of an organisation facing this, as the council must cut £100m from its budget over the next three years. Nick Roberts, head of ICT at London Borough of Croydon, says while many commercial

organisations are coming out of austerity and are able to invest, local government is only about half-way through the process.

Outsourcing provides cost-cutting opportunities, so public sector bodies, with seemingly impossible austerity targets, will inevitably look to the market for options. But while outsourcing contracts prom-ise cost savings, it seems they are failing to sup-

port the future plans of customers, despite the importance of IT in these plans.

Roberts says government organisations have had bad experi-ences with large outsourcing contracts, many of which were set up with the knowledge of what was required from day one, with the supplier offering a competitive price to deliver.

“But then day two comes and you have to change things, but this is a commercial process,” he says.

The supplier has its own targets, so making changes to the agreed contract is not easy. He says this situation inevitably

causes problems, with the inability to change being “difficult to manage in a world where the only constant is change”.

Roberts, not surprisingly, “has a few gripes” about traditional out-sourcing contracts. “They focus on the current operational state and are not built for change,” he says. “That change process is always

IT OUTSOURCING

❯Global Services Location Index shows India is the best place for businesses to outsource

services and is unrivalled in its scale and availability of skills.

“traditional oUtsoUrcing contracts focUs on the cUrrent operational state and are not

bUilt for change”nIck roBerts, London BorougH oF croydon

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mired in a commercial process. The business wants to change, but it can’t because it has to go through this commercial process.”

He says contracts reinforce this because they are written to measure success in terms of support rather than the ability to change and be flexible.

But cloud is bringing change, according to Roberts. “A lot of the contracts in place are effectively in-house datacentre support contracts. But the big change is the move to native cloud, which takes that out of the equation,” he says. For example, enterprise

applications that were kept up to date by suppliers are not rel-evant with software as a service. The hardware estate is also not managed in the same way, with staff using a large number of dif-ferent devices.

IT that supports the customer-facing operation needs to be in-house. The in-house teams that understand the relationship with customers have vital skills for IT today, because IT is an interface with citizens rather than just a technology function that underpins systems. Roberts says increased multi-sourcing

IT OUTSOURCING

Cambridge University Press has outsourced operations, many of which are in offshore locations,

including the Philippines and India

NU

LLPL

US/

ISTO

CK

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mixed with in-house services and shared services will be the make-up of IT services going forward.

wHere sHall i take my it?While outsourcing changes, so do the locations from which it is delivered.

Mark Maddocks, CIO at Cambridge University Press, says the publisher is in the process of moving from print to digital pub-lishing, which is a big step for an organisation that is almost 500 years old.

Cambridge University Press pub-lishes academic journals and books and has English language courses and education businesses across the world. Most of its sales are out-side the UK.

The company has significant out-sourced operations, many of which are in offshore locations. Maddocks says it uses four types of outsourc-ing and, following success with the approach, has increased its offshore operations over the last five years.

“We have a traditional outsourcing model. We buy services where we are looking for scale and cost reduction. Here we are not really looking for differentiation and I would be quite happy if all our competitors used the same service,” he says. “This works a treat when you have a really clear interface and when you can measure it. We use this for all sorts of things, such as hosting.”

The company also has offshore captive operations. Its first was in Manila, Philippines, where it started around five years ago with 40 staff focused on software development and testing, supporting its online digital product. Currently, it has just over 250 people and expects over 300 by the end of 2015. The Manila centre now has 18 separate teams carrying out a wide range of internal services.

According to Maddocks, it is “cost-effective, low attrition and wage inflation is not as bad as people say”.

But there are disadvantages. Maddocks says it requires man-agement time and overhead. “They are my team and I still have to man-age them.”

The company’s third model is offshore software development in India, with development centres in Calcutta and Hyderabad. These are with two very large Indian IT ser-vices providers and both centres have about 50 people in them.

The Calcutta centre supports the organisation’s learning management platform, which is an English language resource used by about 500,000 people worldwide.

“I put this in Calcutta, rather than Manila, for access to skills. There was a particular technology stack I did not think I could bring in quick enough in Manila,” says Maddocks. “We have built a long-term relationship and are in the fourth year of working with that supplier. In Hyderabad we are in the third year of a deal to run one of our internal systems,” he adds.

IT OUTSOURCING

cambridge University press Uses foUr types of oUtsoUrcing and has increased its offshore

operations in recent years

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The fourth model, a hybrid of traditional offshoring to a supplier and a captive, has just been launched through a business process outsourcing operation, where it shares a building with the existing team in Hyderabad.

“We have big growth plans and will expand from about 10 peo-ple to more than 100 by the end of the year,” says Maddocks.

This model uses an Indian partner to help the company recruit for a centre that uses a traditional supplier/customer model, but will have the ability to change to a captive centre easily if the organisa-tion wants it to, he says.

His advice to CIOs thinking about outsourcing and offshoring is to “be really clear what your aims are and think beyond cost reduction and getting rid of a problem”.

“Think about accountabilities and make sure teams have ownership of the relationships with the peo-ple you work with and have good offshore leads,” he adds. “Spend time building relationships with teams offshore.”

it takes centre stageIt is clear the changing role of the IT department is moving it from the dark depths of the basement to the shop window.

Retail’s speedy and necessary take-up of digital customer ser-vices is a good example of a sector where IT is split in two. Today

there will be teams, probably outsourced, supporting legacy sys-tems, while in-house IT, which understands the business, focuses on providing customer-facing apps and understanding customer behaviour through data.

John Bovill, IT and e-commerce director at Monsoon Accessorize, says the retail industry is in a state of flux.

“People are interacting with our company in different ways and this has put IT at the front of house,” he says.

About half of Monsoon Accessorize’s customers have first contact with the store via the website and the other half through stores, but 75% of final transactions still take place in-store. Changing customer behaviour meant in-house IT had to change. Resources can no longer focus on the systems that keep the company running but must be dedi-cated to attracting customers.

In the past, says Bovill, stock was sent to outlets and sold on the high street to consumers who were physically browsing in the stores. But today it is about drawing customers in, which means understanding them.

“The corporate IT function as we know it in our industry will be very different. Consumerisation will turn it on its head. It will be analytics-based and all about understanding data and using it in an intelligent way,” says Bovill. “The day-to-day IT grunt and robust solutions will be provided by suppliers.” n

IT OUTSOURCING

“the corporate it fUnction in retail will be all aboUt

Understanding data and Using it in an intelligent way”

joHn BovILL, monsoon accessorIze

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Google Maps hit by another user edit gaffeGoogle has revoked the right for users to edit and update the content of its Maps service after some ne’er-do-wells took it upon themselves to deface it with racial slurs and offensive images.

Readers, believe us when we say, we’re just as surprised as you that giving people free rein to do whatever they like with a publicly accessible internet service has backfired so spectacularly. And yes, that was Downtime’s attempt at sarcasm.

Up until very recently, anyone who used Google Maps to locate the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi would have been presented with a picture of an Android robot urinating on a crudely drawn depiction of the

Apple logo.The most shocking thing about the whole

sorry tale is that the search engine giant – which prides itself on being able to pre-empt what

users might want to search for with its Autofill tool – never saw this coming. n

“pUll qUote here pUll bitter bold small caps 22pt xx

xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx”

DOWNTIME

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