While the main arguments against SOPA have been focused on free speech and fair use, I have not seen any discussion of a provision that bears directly on the payment industry — the requirement that payment networks refuse to settle transactions with foreign websites alleged to have infringed on copyrights.

The precedent for this provision (Section 103 of H.R. 3261, attached below) is the successful embargo of Wikileaks in 2010 by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, American Express and other payment processors, which effectively put a stop to the site's release of classified government documents. While this action was justified at the time by the payment networks under their terms of service, it opened the door to further US government interference.

Under SOPA, payment network operators will be required to stop processing payments for foreign-based websites within five days of receiving a notification from a copyright holder that the site is infringing copyrights, unless the targeted site files a "counter notification". This will put the payment network provider in the middle of a dispute that may have little merit; as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented, rights holders have been all too willing to abuse the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) with frivolous or over-broad claims.   If the payment network does not cut off service within five days, it faces unlimited liability should the matter go to court.

Even worse, the provision governing counter-notifications contains a "poison pill" requiring the foreign site to agree to be governed by US law, a condition that no foreign site would be willing to accept.  Thus, it is unlikely that any counter-notifications would be received in these cases.  Therefore, SOPA effectively bestows sweeping power to copyright holders to cut off funds to sites they deem threatening. There is no requirement for a court order; just the notification is sufficient. The administrative burden on payment network providers will be heavy, as will the legal and customer service costs.

The long-term threat to the payments industry is that it will be become politicised, seen as a tool of the US government and a strategic weapon against other states. Just last week, the European Commission issued a green paper that reiterated the EC's desire for a European alternative to Visa and MasterCard.

Further use of US payments companies to achieve political ends will hinder the global expansion of the industry, as individual governments seek to preserve their sovereignty by establishing or reinforcing domestic payment systems. Since most of the growth for US payments companies is now overseas, this poses a serious threat to their future.

1. ACTA will limit the access to the internet and will censor websites.

Read the text of the ACTA Agreement - there is no single paragraph in ACTA thatsubstantiates this claim. ACTA is about tackling large scale illegal activity, often pursued by criminal organisations. It is not about how people use the internet in their everyday lives. Internet users can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA will not limit people's rights on the internet nor will it shut down websites, unlike the proposals discussed in the US (SOPA and PIPA).

There are some convenient half-truths here. Its supporters may claim that ACTA is about tackling large-scale illegal activity but nowhere in the document is there mentioned any minimum level for its operation. That is, potentially, it can apply to the actions of a single person, perhaps even sharing a single file, depending upon the circumstances. The problem is, ACTA's framing is so vague that it's not clear exactly who might be caught by its terms. Whatever the Commission may say now, it's how the text is interpreted later that matters.

After all, if the Commission had really wanted only to tackle "large-scale illegal activity", it would have added a minimum level to exclude the risk that ordinary Internet users would be affected. The refusal to add that minimum level to the treaty - something that would have been easy to do - can only mean that the Commission does indeed want the option of applying ACTA's rules to ordinary citizens, and that its claims to the contrary are simply whitewashing.

The next half-truth is: "Internet users can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web". But what exactly is "non-pirated material"? Who decides? Because copyright has become such a complex set of laws that it is rarely clear - even to copyright lawyers - what exactly is or isn't "pirated": often the courts have to decide whether something is covered by "fair dealing/fair use", for example. So how can ordinary citizens possibly know in every case whether what they are sharing is "pirated"?

In particular, there is the situation that the term of copyright varies by country, and what may be in the public domain in one, is still in copyright in another. So what happens when someone in a country where some creation is in the public domain shares it with someone in a country where it isn't? The continuing injustice of the O'Dwyer case shows us that the US tries to applies its laws everywhere in the world: so does that mean its copyright laws apply in Europe?

Finally, while it is true that ACTA will not "shut down websites" directly, there is another clause that is even worse (Article 10):

"judicial authorities have the authority to order that materials and implements, the predominant use of which has been in the manufacture or creation of such infringing goods, be, without undue delay and without compensation of any sort, destroyed or disposed of"

Now, by definition, a Web site "creates" infringing copies when it sends or streams them to users; so lawyers could - and almost certainly will, knowing lawyers - argue that ACTA provides for the destruction and disposal of any computers whose "predominant use" is copyright infringement. So, no simple censorship, certainly, just the seizure and physical destruction of computers (assuming they are in one of the ACTA signatories), and probably the domain name too.

Not only that, but another section (Article 12) allows for "materials and implements" to be seized without informing the party affected, and even without any guarantee that people can defend themselves afterwards - so much for due process and justice.

3. ACTA is a secret agreement. Negotiations were not transparent and conducted "behind closed doors". The European Parliament was not fully informed, stakeholders were not consulted.

Likewise, the public was informed since the launch of the negotiations about the objectives and general thrust of the negotiations. The Commission released summary reports after every negotiation round and the negotiating text since April 2010. It organised press briefings and four stakeholder conferences on ACTA, one of them evenonly a few days before the first negotiating round.

This is extraordinarily duplicitous. The text of ACTA may be available to everyone now, but that is after the negotiations have been concluded - in other words, as a fait accompli. Even though the ACTA discussions began in 2006, the first formal draft that was officially released was only in 2010. The only reason people knew what was in ACTA was thanks to a document posted in Wikileaks in 2008: in other words, if the ACTA negotiators had got their way, ACTA would have been negotiated behind closed doors for four years before the public was allowed to see anything (and had there not been the Wikileaks leak, it's possible that even the draft would not have been released.)

The Commission claims "the public was informed since the launch of the negotiations about the objectives and general thrust of the negotiations": but what matters, of course, are the details, not the "general thrust". A few press briefings and stakeholder conferences are no substitute for actually allowing the public to give some - any - input to the ACTA process. But in the many years of negotiations, there was no possibility whatsoever to do that.

And yet even though the public was denied any opportunity to comment on a treaty that would have important implications for their lives, certain privileged groups were not just given access but consulted on their views, as Wikipedia explains:

"Apart from the participating governments, an advisory committee of large US-based multinational corporations was consulted on the content of the draft treaty, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (which includes the Business Software Alliance, Motion Picture Association of America, and Recording Industry Association of America). A 2009 Freedom of Information request showed that the following companies also received copies of the draft under a nondisclosure agreement: Google, eBay, Intel, Dell, News Corporation, Sony Pictures, Time Warner, and Verizon."

Given the fact that major US corporations that stand to benefit directly from ACTA's disproportionate enforcement terms were allowed to shape its details from early on, while the 300 million European citizens who will be subject to those same terms had not a single formal opportunity even to express their views, the Commission's attempt to suggest that this was not a secret treaty, and that the public was consulted, is risible and insulting.

ACTA Update I
ACTA Update II

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

I don't need to wax poetic about just how good the MacBook Air itself is. Plenty of testers have already explained just what makes the MacBook Air the ultra ultabook. See Engadget, CNET, Fortune. (And of course ultrabooks were all the rage at CES this year, see HP's showcased by Serena in Gossip Girl and Dell's XPS 13.)

But I do need to describe my experience with this travel-friendly, totally modern, and practical combination of hardware and software. I'll then also point out some things that are still challenging in using the MacBook Air in a Windows-centric business world. First, the experience in four bullets:

1. The machine itself is a wonder. I drop it on the floor and it keeps ticking. The battery lasts a flight across country. It fires up and finds a network in seconds. It's lickety-splitly fast and deliciously light. It's thin and light enough to slide unnoticed into my bag. (I have to look to check that I didn't forget it.) It boots in seconds, finds Wi-Fi in moments, and discovers new video connections without problems. And it draws looks of envy from colleagues and respect from customers. It's worth the price.
2. Parallels virtual machine is easy to use (and easy enough to set up though I'm not much of a do-it-yourselfer). The software is stable, and it behaves just like a Windows machine at work. No performance issues, totally compliant with our security and network requirements, running all our corporate software. It's like having your cake and eating it, too. (Colleagues also rave about the VMware Fusion virtual machine.)
3. Windows runs just like I expect it to. It was critical to me for this machine to run our business image. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to use it the way I live, where work and life blend together like milk & honey. I can keep the practical bits running while embracing the new bits. (Pun intended.)
4. The OS X Lion software is more post-PC (I like the new scrolling motion and touch-aligned things) and more fun than previous versions. The App Store alone makes the software worth running. You get the same app experience on the Mac as you get on an iPhone or iPad. And the number of apps is growing -- all my regular apps (like Evernote, TweetDeck, Kindle) are there. Apple says 100 million downloads to Macs already.

• I haven't quite cracked the code on iPass, our corporate Wi-Fi access software. It doesn't seem to find sites or log on from the Windows side. And I don't have a corporate-provided Mac version.
• Our Cisco softphone doesn't seem to run on the Windows image, either. That is, it might, but with my limited skills I haven't yet figured out how.
• The display drivers, particularly in PowerPoint 2010, don't always work well. Sometimes when going into slideshow mode in PowerPoint, the display goes a little whacko. I can usually bring it back to heel by alt-tabbing my way to a different application and back.
• Chrome (and Safari) run tediously slow. There's some network traffic thingy that I don't notice in the VoIP or video apps, but I do notice a lot (and detest) in the browser page loads. The Parallels people want me to disable my security software (no can do) and change the network settings (also can't do) to fix it. It ain't good, but I live with it.
• I live in fear that that some other Windows application will crap out. Early on, I had huge problems with an uncontrolled process in our security software. If it happens again, then I'm back to rebooting every 10 minutes.
• The ability to scale this solution up to every employee is still hard to imagine. I had to walk the machine upstairs and draw on highly expert IT resources to get the image ported and stabilised. I don't yet see how we could scale this up to meet the needs of every employee.

But these are far from deal breakers for a lone employee, and I am very happy with the Mac over our business machine. The coolest thing is that I can remain backwardly compatible with my organisation's requirements while embracing the new architectures of apps and devices. Nice work, Apple, Parallels, and our network & security team! For some real research on just how popular this Mac-running-Windows phenomenon is, see my colleague Dave Johnson's report, caught here in a blog post: Repeal Prohibition.

What's your Mac experience running Windows?

Posted by Ted Schadler

For the last three years, the OSI Board has been aware of a need for change. It’s mission needs a renewed expression. The Board decided the best way to achieve this was to switch from a Board-only organization focused largely on licensing to a member-led organization with an elected Board of facilitators. We discovered this was hard to invent, and last year eventually settled on the approach of incremental transformation. The first step of that transformation is now real. OSI now has the core of an Affiliate membership, with delegates from as many open source communities as are willing to participate. The Board has invited an initial set of Affiliates to join and collectively devise the new OSI.

What will that new OSI do? It will naturally continue stewardship of the Open Source Definition and the canonical list of approved licenses. But it will now also embrace the other parts of its mission:

• Build bridges between parts of the community, over which greater collaboration on open source can occur
• Provide a venue for that united community to speak with a unified voice when issues arise that affect us all, such as the ACTA treaty or the CPTN patent issue last year.
• Promote the understanding of open source through shared academic and advocacy activities.

I made three important announcements on OSI's behalf which initiate that embrace:

• OSI welcomes twelve non-profit communities as the initial Affiliates for OSI (see right). They will work with the Board to devise the governance and structures of the new OSI. OSI invites all non-profit communities committed to increasing software freedom to become an OSI Affiliate. Contact me to explore how to join. In the future, we hope to broaden the criteria for Affiliates to allow non-incorporated community entities to affiliate too.
• We will be introducing a way for you to join OSI personally. Please take our survey so we know what you want OSI membership to include.
• We are hosting a new project to create a “Body of Knowledge” to support academic curriculum. You could join this new FLOSSBOK initiative and contribute to a central resource for educators globally.

These are just the first steps; we’ve still a long way to go. Now we have a body of Affiliates on board, I hope both that they will accelerate the Board’s progress towards change and that they will self-organise as obvious opportunities are identified. I hope we can use an "open source" approach to create a new OSI for the new decade.

Follow Simon as @webmink on Twitter and Identi.Ca and also on Google+. First published at the OSI web site

There are many definitions of innovation outsourcing. The NOA innovation Steering Committee, spearheaded by Lee Ayling of KPMG and IBM’s Tony Morgan, define it as "the application of new ideas, ways of working and/or the use of existing ideas in a new context to deliver value through change".

The above definition is a mashup of other definitions from across the industry. That’s what innovation is mostly, a mashup. We in live in an age where hardly anything is new, everything is a bricolage of ideas and intellectual property that are already out there.

Five years in the making, a mega mashup of existing technology and ideas has landed in the Square Mile to give litterbug city boys and girls somewhere to drop their used newspapers. But it’s much more than just a bin. It’s got functionality that James Bond’s gadgetsmith Q would be proud of.

The Renew Bin is a receptacle for recycling with LCD screens providing transport updates and news headlines. Some critics say this is pointless, as people have mobile devices for both those functions. But this super-bin is capable of interacting with smartphones, and as it is fully Wi-Fi capable, it will soon be bringing internet hotspots to the streets of the City.  

For a rubbish bin, it’s good in a crisis too. That’s when they could really come into their own. Not only is it bomb proof - numerous explosions in the New Mexico desert bear testament to that - it displays vital information in times of emergency, such as bomb scares, to direct pedestrians away from certain localities or tube stations. So when the phone networks are overloaded, Londoners can remain in the loop and out of the danger zone. 

It’s an innovative outsourcing contract too. Although are the bins are rumoured to cost £30k each, no money is believed to have changed hands between the City of London and Renew. Instead, the ‘recycling unit’ manufacturer makes its money through sponsorship by companies wanting to adorn the bins, to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility credentials.

The Renew recycling unit is a classic example of innovation: bringing a wide variety of existing concepts together, to form something fresh that fulfils a need, profitably. 

Bravo Renew, bravo.

Along with many observers, I noted that the original SeaMicro server was well-suited to many light-weight edge processing tasks, but that the system would not support more traditional compute-intensive tasks due to the performance of the Atom core. I was, however, quite taken with the basic architecture, which uses a proprietary high-speed (1.28 Tb/s) 3D mesh interconnect to allow the CPU cores to share network, BIOS and disk resources that are normally replicated on eper server in conventional designs, with commensurate reductions in power and an increase in density.

18 months later SeaMicro, again with support from Intel, has extended this architecture to the Xeon CPU, and has introduced the SM1000-EX, based on the Intel Xeon E3-1260L, a 45W quad-core design targeted at low power single socket servers, currently widely deployed in HPC environments. The resulting system can be configured with up to 64 CPUs, for a total of 256 cores in 10U.

While impressive, this is not actually leading-edge density - there are other dense-pack servers that can deliver equal or higher core density with Xeon CPUs. What is significant is the power consumption - SeaMicro manages to do this on an aggregate power budget that comes out to a claimed 55W per core, only 10W over the power required for the core itself. In contrast, a conventional server design today would require at least 2 - 3X the power of the core itself, giving the New SeaMicro design a substantial edge in energy efficiency.

For Intel, SeaMicro represents a microscopic proportion of their business, but is a highly visible ally in the quest to prove that x86 servers can compete in an increasingly energy-conscious world as alternative architectures such as ARM raise the spectre of another competing architecture in the datacentre.

For the industry as a whole, I think the implications of some of the recent server developments from Intel/SeaMicro and Calxeda/HP are even more significant - if we connect the dots, we can see the developing shape of what may be the most significant evolution in fundamental server architecture in about 25 years - the transition to scalable fabric-based as opposed to bus-based architectures.

But in the best tradition of Charles Dickens, that’s a story for the next edition :)

Posted by Richard Fichera

For organisations that are targeting users in the developed world, many are simplifying this challenge to target smartphones only. However even here to create local native applications requires solutions that support Apple’s iOS, Windows, Android and Java (Blackberry).

There are many mobile development platforms available to assist with creating "write once deploy everywhere" apps. The main constrains here are that you end up with deployments to many different stores, and that quite often still write platform specific code to take advantage of platform specific features.

HTML5 has long been a strong candidate for mobile applications, but is it ready? Are mobile browsers upto date with HTML5?

The answer to this question can be a simple "No", no mobile browser supports the full HTML5 specification. Or a “Maybe” depending on what features (camera, phone book and GPS) of the phone you require you may have support from HTML5.

Push that up to a resounding "Yes", if you want to move an application that currently runs on the web to run on mobile. Of course, I should also caveat the above with 'there are grey areas' in between these responses, not very helpful I know.

For corporates looking to support mobile users with line of business applications I believe there are some great examples that prove HTML5 is ready for them. For a start Facebook is one such application taking full advantage of HTML5, and promoting its use for Facebook apps.

The key areas of HTML5 that are supported across mainstream mobile browsers are offline storage, geolocation, multimedia, graphics (canvas), touch events and large parts of CSS3. The mobile HTML5 site provides a list of mobile browser capabilities.

In the past marketers are argued that presence on App Stores adds value to "brand awareness", and whilst this is true, there is nothing stopping an organisation having using both native apps and HTML. For example, take LloydsTSB. You can download their app, which effectively once downloaded then runs a "browser" version of their Internet banking service.

There are also some great libraries out there that make cross platform mobile development much easier and provide features that make your web applications feel much more like a native phone app. JQueryMobile is a great example.

So what are you waiting for?

You may use this platform on the White House website to create and sign petitions that call for the federal government to take action on a range of issues. For each topic included in We the People, you can petition the Administration to address a problem, support or oppose a proposal, or otherwise change or continue federal government policy or actions. As explained below, if a petition meets the signature goal within the designated period, the White House will respond to that petition in a timely fashion.

The threshold for a reply is actually reasonable low - currently 25,000 signatures within 30 days. That's meant all kinds of interesting - and vaguely surprising - petitions have received an answer from the White House.

Here's one of them:

Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents

To return sanity to the software industry - one of the few industries still going strong in America - direct the patent office to cease issuing software patents and to void all previously issued software patents.

Even though that failed to reach the 25,000 signature threshold, the White House has nonetheless offered a reply, which is noteworthy in itself. Here's the main thrust of its argument:

The America Invents Act directly addresses certain categories of patents, like patents involving tax strategies, but it did not change the law regarding the patentability of software-related inventions. There's a lot we can do through the new law to improve patent quality and to ensure that only true inventions are given patent protection. But it's important to note that the executive branch doesn't set the boundaries of what is patentable all by itself. Congress has set forth broad categories of inventions that are eligible for patent protection. The courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have interpreted the statute to include some software-related inventions.

That's basically trying to off-load blame on to Congress and the courts. But that disappointing non-answer is following by something remarkable: a paean to open source software:

We understand that the concern about software patents stems, in part, from concerns that overly broad patents on software-based inventions may stifle the very innovative and creative open source software development community. As an Administration, we recognize the tremendous value of open source innovation and rely on it to accomplish key missions. For example, the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan recently announced that the source code for We the People and Data.gov would be open sourced for the entire world. Federal agencies are likewise spurring innovation through open source energy. For example, the Department of Defense issued clarifying guidance on the use of open software at the Department. And, the Department of Health and Human Services has become a leader in standards-based, open sourced policy to power innovations in health care quality and enable research into efficient care delivery. The tremendous growth of the open source and open data communities over the years, for delivery of both commercial and non-commercial services, shows that innovation can flourish in both the proprietary and open source software environments.

What's interesting here is that open source was nowhere mentioned in the original petition. So it shows a commendable savviness on the part of the person who actually wrote the reply - Quentin Palfrey, Senior Advisor to CTO for Jobs and Competitiveness at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy - that much of the concern about software patents is the deletorious effect they have on free software.

So even if the e-petition failed to get President Obama to agree to abolish software patents (admittedly a bit of a long shot), it did have the beneficial effect of eliciting this strong vote in favour of open source from a very high-profile site.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

There are many potential benefits from ITIL adoption, particularly around productivity, service quality, business reputation, and cost savings. However, ITIL is fraught with adoption challenges that could be prevented or at least minimised through better planning and execution.

The key ITIL adoption challenges and pitfalls (at a very, very high level)

• Focusing too much on the reactive elements of ITIL and ITSM (for some, however, this might be enough).
• Overstating ITIL and ITSM adoption levels - “We do ITIL.”
• Overstating ITIL and ITSM maturity - where IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) organisations often think that they are more advanced than they actually are - “We have a super-duper service catalogue.”
• Not focusing on the customer and business outcomes.
• Lacking momentum post technology implementation project.
• Noticeable dissatisfaction with traditional service desk tools.

With people-related challenges to be found in most if not all of the above.

Want more detail on the challenges?

These are explored in greater detail in the Forrester report from which this high-level extract is taken:

• Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL

If you don’t have access to Forrester’s online content (it's behind the Forrester.com pay wall), more information on the above (albeit in a more disjointed fashion) can be found in previous Forrester blogs:

• “We Need To Talk About ITIL”
• Top 10 IT Service Management Challenges For 2012
• The ABC Of ICT - The Top 10 People Success Factors For IT Service Management
• ITIL: What Constitutes Success?
• Top 20 (OK, 50) ITIL Adoption Mistakes
• What Next For ITIL?

So what are the 5 steps to help with successful ITIL adoption?

Despite these challenges, I&O executives and their teams can significantly improve the probability of success when adopting ITIL and reduce the pain of what is ultimately a considerable organisational and cultural change. The trick is to ensure that sufficient planning leads to optimal adoption, not just in the short term, for example, selecting and implementing a service desk tool, but also in the longer-term through an ITSM maturity vision, phased adoption, and support for continued improvement.

Whether you’re embarking on a greenfield ITIL adoption or wanting to improve the IT support and IT service delivery of your existing ITSM operations, Forrester recommends that I&O executives and their teams get started by following these five steps:

• Step No. 1: Understand what ITIL is all about, especially the importance of people.
• Step No. 2: Be realistic about existing ITSM process maturity and improve them gradually.
• Step No. 3: Evaluate technology only after you’ve addressed goals, people, and processes.
• Step No. 4: Get the initial planning right, but also plan beyond the “technology project.”
• Step No. 5: Regularly communicate ITIL’s value and involve the IT and non-IT stakeholder.

Finally, also consider how ITIL and enabling technologies can be used outside of IT. Think about how the processes and technology can be leveraged by other business functions such as facilities management, complaint management, or people management. Think about it early even if you don’t plan to do anything about it for a while.

The Forrester report from which the above text has been extracted and edited down, is aimed at helping I&O professionals plan for ITIL adoption success by understanding what commonly goes wrong and by employing recognised good practices to mitigate these risks.

Finally … Yes, this is a thinly-disguised but infrequent plug for the work that pays my wages. I would, however, still love to hear your thoughts, comments, and ideas.

Posted by Stephen Mann

Related Forrester Research

Unravelling ISO, CMM, And ITIL IT Management Frameworks

Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL

The State Of IT Service Management In 2011

Develop An IT Service Management And Automation Strategic Plan

There are many potential benefits from ITIL adoption, particularly around productivity, service quality, business reputation, and cost savings. However, ITIL is fraught with adoption challenges that could be prevented or at least minimised through better planning and execution.

The key ITIL adoption challenges and pitfalls (at a very, very high level)

• Focusing too much on the reactive elements of ITIL and ITSM (for some, however, this might be enough).


• Overstating ITIL and ITSM adoption levels - “We do ITIL.”


• Overstating ITIL and ITSM maturity - where IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) organisations often think that they are more advanced than they actually are - “We have a super-duper service catalogue.”


• Not focusing on the customer and business outcomes.


• Lacking momentum post technology implementation project.


• Noticeable dissatisfaction with traditional service desk tools.

With people-related challenges to be found in most if not all of the above.

Want more detail on the challenges?

These are explored in greater detail in the Forrester report from which this high-level extract is taken:

• Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL

If you don’t have access to Forrester’s online content (it's behind the Forrester.com pay wall), more information on the above (albeit in a more disjointed fashion) can be found in previous Forrester blogs:

• “We Need To Talk About ITIL”
• Top 10 IT Service Management Challenges For 2012
• The ABC Of ICT - The Top 10 People Success Factors For IT Service Management
• ITIL: What Constitutes Success?
• Top 20 (OK, 50) ITIL Adoption Mistakes
• What Next For ITIL?

So what are the 5 steps to help with successful ITIL adoption?

Despite these challenges, I&O executives and their teams can significantly improve the probability of success when adopting ITIL and reduce the pain of what is ultimately a considerable organisational and cultural change. The trick is to ensure that sufficient planning leads to optimal adoption, not just in the short term, for example, selecting and implementing a service desk tool, but also in the longer-term through an ITSM maturity vision, phased adoption, and support for continued improvement.

Whether you’re embarking on a greenfield ITIL adoption or wanting to improve the IT support and IT service delivery of your existing ITSM operations, Forrester recommends that I&O executives and their teams get started by following these five steps:

• Step No. 1: Understand what ITIL is all about, especially the importance of people.


• Step No. 2: Be realistic about existing ITSM process maturity and improve them gradually.


• Step No. 3: Evaluate technology only after you’ve addressed goals, people, and processes.


• Step No. 4: Get the initial planning right, but also plan beyond the “technology project.”


• Step No. 5: Regularly communicate ITIL’s value and involve the IT and non-IT stakeholder.

Finally, also consider how ITIL and enabling technologies can be used outside of IT. Think about how the processes and technology can be leveraged by other business functions such as facilities management, complaint management, or people management. Think about it early even if you don’t plan to do anything about it for a while.

The Forrester report from which the above text has been extracted and edited down, is aimed at helping I&O professionals plan for ITIL adoption success by understanding what commonly goes wrong and by employing recognised good practices to mitigate these risks.

Finally … Yes, this is a thinly-disguised but infrequent plug for the work that pays my wages. I would, however, still love to hear your thoughts, comments, and ideas.

Posted by Stephen Mann

Related Forrester Research

Unravelling ISO, CMM, And ITIL IT Management Frameworks
Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL
The State Of IT Service Management In 2011
Develop An IT Service Management And Automation Strategic Plan
Categories:
I&O, IT Infrastructure and Operations, IT service management, IT services, ITIL, ITSM, Organisational Change, Service Desk, it support, organisational culture, forrester

There are many potential benefits from ITIL adoption, particularly around productivity, service quality, business reputation, and cost savings. However, ITIL is fraught with adoption challenges that could be prevented or at least minimised through better planning and execution.

The key ITIL adoption challenges and pitfalls (at a very, very high level)

• Focusing too much on the reactive elements of ITIL and ITSM (for some, however, this might be enough).


• Overstating ITIL and ITSM adoption levels - “We do ITIL.”


• Overstating ITIL and ITSM maturity - where IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) organisations often think that they are more advanced than they actually are - “We have a super-duper service catalogue.”


• Not focusing on the customer and business outcomes.


• Lacking momentum post technology implementation project.


• Noticeable dissatisfaction with traditional service desk tools.

With people-related challenges to be found in most if not all of the above.

Want more detail on the challenges?

These are explored in greater detail in the Forrester report from which this high-level extract is taken:

• Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL

If you don’t have access to Forrester’s online content (it's behind the Forrester.com pay wall), more information on the above (albeit in a more disjointed fashion) can be found in previous Forrester blogs:

• “We Need To Talk About ITIL”
• Top 10 IT Service Management Challenges For 2012
• The ABC Of ICT - The Top 10 People Success Factors For IT Service Management
• ITIL: What Constitutes Success?
• Top 20 (OK, 50) ITIL Adoption Mistakes
• What Next For ITIL?

So what are the 5 steps to help with successful ITIL adoption?

Despite these challenges, I&O executives and their teams can significantly improve the probability of success when adopting ITIL and reduce the pain of what is ultimately a considerable organisational and cultural change. The trick is to ensure that sufficient planning leads to optimal adoption, not just in the short term, for example, selecting and implementing a service desk tool, but also in the longer-term through an ITSM maturity vision, phased adoption, and support for continued improvement.

Whether you’re embarking on a greenfield ITIL adoption or wanting to improve the IT support and IT service delivery of your existing ITSM operations, Forrester recommends that I&O executives and their teams get started by following these five steps:

• Step No. 1: Understand what ITIL is all about, especially the importance of people.


• Step No. 2: Be realistic about existing ITSM process maturity and improve them gradually.


• Step No. 3: Evaluate technology only after you’ve addressed goals, people, and processes.


• Step No. 4: Get the initial planning right, but also plan beyond the “technology project.”


• Step No. 5: Regularly communicate ITIL’s value and involve the IT and non-IT stakeholder.

Finally, also consider how ITIL and enabling technologies can be used outside of IT. Think about how the processes and technology can be leveraged by other business functions such as facilities management, complaint management, or people management. Think about it early even if you don’t plan to do anything about it for a while.

The Forrester report from which the above text has been extracted and edited down, is aimed at helping I&O professionals plan for ITIL adoption success by understanding what commonly goes wrong and by employing recognised good practices to mitigate these risks.

Finally … Yes, this is a thinly-disguised but infrequent plug for the work that pays my wages. I would, however, still love to hear your thoughts, comments, and ideas.

Posted by Stephen Mann

Related Forrester Research

Unravelling ISO, CMM, And ITIL IT Management Frameworks
Planning Road Map: Adopting ITIL
The State Of IT Service Management In 2011
Develop An IT Service Management And Automation Strategic Plan
Categories:
I&O, IT Infrastructure and Operations, IT service management, IT services, ITIL, ITSM, Organisational Change, Service Desk, it support, organisational culture, forrester

I think the US is unlikely to do that, for two reasons. First, ACTA is essentially the US copyright industries' shopping list of measures that they would like to see forced on the rest of the world: it gives huge benefits to Hollywood and the recording industry, but little to anyone else.

The second reason is that the US government is taking the line that ACTA is not a treaty, but an "executive agreement", which basically means that it can be pushed through without asking anyone's permission - not even the US Congress or Senate (which is pretty much what happened in the UK, of course.)

That implies attention is really focussed on what happens in Europe. As I mentioned in the first update, the European Parliament has the opportunity to kill ACTA completely; whether it does that will depend critically on how much momentum the anti-ACTA movement gains in Europe. So I thought I would devote this second update to exploring some of the interesting things that have already happened in the European space.

By far the most dramatic - and arguably important in terms of its impact - was the statement from the French MEP Kader Arif, who was the "rapporteur" for ACTA, tasked with piloting it through the final stages of ratification. This is what he published on his official web site:

I condemn the whole process which led to the signature of this agreement : no consultation of the civil society, lack of transparency since the beginning of negotiations, repeated delays of the signature of the text without any explanation given, reject of Parliament's recommendations as given in several resolutions of our assembly.

This agreement can have major consequences on citizen's lives, however everything is made to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.

That's pretty extraordinary, coming from someone who had a unique insight into what ACTA really means for citizens. In an interview in the Guardian he explained one particular issue that has not been highlighted much yet:

"The problem with Acta is that, by focusing on the fight against violation of intellectual property rights in general, it treats a generic drug just as a counterfeited drug. This means the patent holder can stop the shipping of the drugs to a developing country, seize the cargo and even order the destruction of the drugs as a preventive measure."

As a result generic drugs - not counterfeits, but low-cost versions for use in poorer countries that afford to pay Western prices for vital medicine - could be impounded and destroyed as they pass through an ACTA signatory if manufacturers of the more expensive commercial varieties complain. Since many of these drugs are literally life-saving, that means that people in developing countries are likely to die as a direct result of ACTA's over-broad reach.

That's on top of the better-know problems with ACTA, which Arif also touched on in the Guardian interview:

Internet freedoms could also be under threat if Acta is ratified in its present form, he says. "The chapter on internet is particularly worrying as some experts consider it reintroduces the concept of liability of internet providers, which is clearly excluded in the European legislation." That could make ISPs, who provide internet access, liable for users' illicit file-sharing.

"This is relevant for the trade of fake shoes or bags for example, but what about data downloaded from the internet? If a customs officer considers that you may set up a commercial activity just by having one movie or one song on your computer, which is true in theory, you could face criminal sanctions.

Nor was Kadif the only European involved in the ACTA process who now regrets being involved. Here's an astonishing post from the Slovenian Ambassador to Japan, one of the people who signed ACTA last week:

I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention. Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children.

Alongside these brave acts - it's hard to see the ambassador's career flourishing much after this - a number of other politicians have started to voice their doubts. For example, in Bulgaria, MEPs from the "Blue Coalition" expressed their opposition, as did another MEP from the left.

One MEP, Marietje Schaake from the Netherlands, has gone even further, and put together an excellent briefing document about ACTA (on Reddit, too - how savvy is that?) Crucially, she explains what happens next:

The European Parliament has the decisive voice on ACTA and the INTA committee has the lead. Other committees will be developing their opinions on ACTA in the coming months. You can find some more information about the procedures and relevant committees on this official EP website

After that, the most important vote will be during the Strasbourg plenary session on June 11th to 14th, where all MEPs will be able to vote on ACTA. (Please note that these dates may change). If the majority of MEPs vote in favour of ratification ACTA will be ratified by the EU.

She also provides the key dates:

- 29 February/1 March: Discussion in international trade committee,
- April or May: Vote in international trade committee,
- 12, 13 or 14 June: Final vote in plenary (most important vote).

Schaake is on Twitter as @MarietjeD66, and is well-worth following if you want to keep on top of what is happening on this front (although be warned that some of her tweets are in Dutch...)

Finally, I thought I'd point people to an example of how the supporters of ACTA are trying to convince "ordinary" people that the growing number of citizen protests around Europe are all much ado about nothing.

It's an article entitled "ACTA is a victory for Denmark" by Pia Olsen-Dyhr, the Danish Minister for Trade and Investment - in English, too, so you can read the interesting angle the minister chooses to take. Since it addresses both that choice of perspective and wider problems with ACTA, I include here my comment to that post, now up on the Danish site.

The minister highlights problems with counterfeit goods. These undoubtedly exist, and are especially worrying for things like medicines or spare aircraft parts. But this does not address the real problem with ACTA: that it seeks to apply the same harsh legislation aimed at curbing dangerous counterfeit goods to the simplest digital copyright infringement.

Since ACTA has been drawn up and agreed behind closed doors, there is now no way to amend these problematic passages. In order to protect European citizens from the disproportionate punishments that ACTA provides for, to preserve their privacy and the assumption of innocence before being proved guilty, the only solution is for the European Parliament to reject ACTA when it is presented for ratification, and for new treaties to be drawn up that deal with counterfeits and digital infringement separately.

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Driving into the car park and taking my bag from the boot I was reminded of the kind of camps we went on at school - wooden cabins with dormitory-style rooms huddled together under the trees.

After checking in and opening the room to my door, I was pleasantly surprised. It was modest but functional. Just the kind of room I would need for what was to follow in the next two days of my PRINCE2 Professional assessment.

Sitting on the grass outside the bar waiting for the first session to start I got into conversation with some of the other PRINCE2 trainers also attending the assessment. There was a bit of apprehension about what was to come.

Anyway, the clock ticked by and it was time to assemble for our first session. There were 16 PRINCE2 trainers, 4 evaluators and several moderators in the room. The evaluators and moderators all came from the APM Group (APMG), the PRINCE2 accreditation body. The APMG had organized the event and had invited PRINCE2 trainers (myself included) as guinea pigs to trial the new PRINCE2 Professional assessment.

The moderator was stern when explaining the process we were about to embark upon. Perhaps he came from a military background. I could imagine him in a uniform with stick in hand explaining his battle plan to his troops. The one thing which was repeated and which stuck in my mind from this first session was the statement that “you must show evidence. Remember, if you don’t show us the evidence then you will not pass the assessment and we will not be able to extract it from you”. I’m glad these words stuck in my mind so early because they were to prove very valuable in later sessions during the assessment.

What he was alluding to was the fact that to pass a PRINCE2 Professional assessment you must show evidence to the evaluators of your competencies for 19 different performance criteria. Of these 19 criteria, three of them (interpersonal skills, managing your own performance and managing team performance) are generic and not related to PRINCE2 per se. Since project management involves managing people, then it seems like a good idea to assess these competencies in addition to the PRINCE2 method itself.

We were to be separated into groups of four people for each session. There would be seven group sessions over the next two days along with one written exercise which was to be completed individually. The personnel in each group would be rotated as much as possible, giving candidates the opportunity to work with different people each time.

Not quite knowing what to expect, the meeting ended and we went for dinner. Over dinner, it was a good opportunity to clarify our understanding of the process with the other candidates and then it was straight into the first proper session. We were given the case study and told that we must prepare the Project Product Description for the project. During this and all other group sessions there was a whiteboard and flipchart with pens and post-it notes. This allowed the group to discuss ideas and plan our work appropriately.

After some intensive discussion and brainstorming we finished our task on the flipchart and then it was straight into some further questions. It turned out that if you had failed to show sufficient evidence of your competencies to the evaluator during the session you would face one or more further questions where you would be asked your opinion on a certain matter, or would be asked to clarify something you had said during the discussion. These questions were your opportunity to show more evidence to the evaluators if you hadn’t already done so during the session itself.

The session ended at 9:30pm and then it was straight back to the room for an early night. Wow - what an intensive start and we would be starting our next session at 8:30am the next day.

A full English breakfast the next morning was the right thing to eat before embarking on what turned out to be one of the most gruelling days of my life. There would be four more sessions, one of which stretched for three hours with the last session finishing at 7pm. We ended up designing the project management team, defining variances from corporate strategies, performing the product based planning technique, planning the project, refining the Business Case, preparing an End Stage Report and capturing lessons learned. In other words, we performed more or less the whole of PRINCE2’s Initiating a Project process in one day!

I should have pointed out that after the mammoth three hour session where we planned the project we had a 45 minute written exercise where we had to write one of the PRINCE2 management products based upon the case study.

A final debrief session wrapped up the day and it was time for dinner by which time it was almost 9pm. Time for a swift drink in the bar with my fellow students (PRINCE2 trainers) to try to digest the day’s events. There were times during the day when the intensity of concentration required was quite staggering. The day certainly required a lot of stamina and by the end of it I was more than ready for a well deserved pint in the bar.

The second full day started off with an individual interview with the evaluators. These started at 8am, but luckily for me, mine was at 9am which meant I could have one more hour in bed when compared with some of the other students. The interview was short - maybe 20 minutes - and the evaluators focused on questions which had arisen during the previous day, as well as putting me on the spot by giving me some additional information to consider and then asking me what would I do in this situation. I think I handled it OK, because when I finally got my marks just before Christmas, I had managed to get the requisite marks to pass.

Anyway, there were still 2 more two hour sessions to go before the end of the day. These seemed easier than the sessions on the previous day possibly because the day was much shorter and possibly because on the previous day I had found the whole assessment quite exhausting. We had to prepare a Work Package and apply the issue and change control procedure.

We finished with planning and conducting the Closing a Project process where we had to write an End Project Report and Lessons Report. Finally there was another de-brief and at 4pm we were able to leave.

It had been an absolutely exhausting 48 hours but also quite exhilarating at the same time. Having your knowledge and understanding of PRINCE2 challenged by other candidates and evaluators was very stressful. On another level, it was also highly satisfying knowing that you had been really stretched to show your understanding and application of PRINCE2.

To be honest, I had no idea if I would pass or not, but when the result finally came through just before Christmas I had not only passed all 19 performance criteria but I had also scored considerably more than the 1.6 average mark required for all criteria.

So, would I recommend that people attend one of the new PRINCE2 Professional assessment centres? The answer is definitely yes. With almost 250,000 people holding the PRINCE2 Practitioner certificate in the UK alone, it’s becoming harder for a job candidate to differentiate themselves from all other candidates holding the PRINCE2 Practitioner certificate. Knowing how difficult the PRINCE2 Professional assessment is, anyone who passes, in my opinion, really does have a good grasp of how to apply PRINCE2 on a non-complex project.

Posted by Simon Buehring

This is a beta, and is the first of three phases:

Public beta test of the site delivering the mainstream, citizen-facing aspects of GOV.UK.

A first draft of a GOV.UK ‘Global Experience Language’, to provide clear, consistent design, user-experience and brand clarity for those developing sites for the single GOV.UK domain. (see BBC.co.uk/gel for an example).

Even in this early stage, it's attractive and seems to work pretty well. But for the purposes of this column, what's much more interesting is what is to be found under the bonnet:

Hosting and Infrastructure

MaPit geocoding and information service from mySociety
MaPit not only does conventional geocoding (what’s the lon/lat for a postcode) but also gives us details of all the local government areas a postcode is in, which lets us point visitors to relevant local services

That's a pretty staggering array of open source (and a nice vote of confidence for Ubuntu). What this means is that the core UK government site will not only be running almost entirely on open source, but will act as an incredible advertisement for what open source can do. Indeed, I don't see how any corporate IT director will be able to arguably plausibly against open source deployment in the face of this massive roll-out by the UK government.

Of course, it's still a beta, and things could still go horribly pear-shaped; but this is shaping up really well. Kudos to all those involved.

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The first is that the immediate threat of SOPA and PIPA has subsided somewhat (although it's important to stress that they are by no means dead, and that they, or something very like them, will come back soon enough.) With that fire now put out, I've been able to turn my attention back to ACTA - and just in time, it seems.

For on Thursday 20 January, 22 members of the European Union signed the treaty - including the UK, to its shame. There has not been a single opportunity for members of the public in this country to express their views on any aspect of this treaty. Indeed, the treaty was negotiated in complete secrecy, broken only by the occasional leaks, including a key one from Wikileaks that really proved crucial in terms of allowing the general public to see how they were being stitched up behind closed doors.

Since it is signed, you might think we are just stuck with it; fortunately, because of the Byzantine way the European Union works, the European Parliament too must formally accept the treaty - and that is our opportunity. For the defeat of SOPA/PIPA, albeit temporary, and the Wikipedia blackout that took place on 18 January, has changed many things.

It has changed how politicians regard traditionally dull areas like copyright: as the US politicians suddenly discovered, supporting unpopular copyright bills like SOPA and PIPA could threaten their re-election chances. And anything that starts to turn into a liability is quickly dumped. This offers us the chance to make clear to European politicians that the same risk is attached to their vote.

Perhaps even more importantly, the mobilisation against SOPA has made the users of the Internet aware that there are rather a lot of them, and that collectively they wield huge power. So if we can get a similar wave of action against ACTA as was generated against SOPA, then it's quite possible that the former can be defeated. And if the European Parliament fails to pass it - it can't modify it at this stage - it is dead.

I first wrote about ACTA in May 2008, and I've blogged about it many times here on Computerworld UK, so readers of this blog will already know why ACTA is such bad news for open source, the Internet and users of both. In future posts I intend to concentrate more on what is happening around ACTA, and how the fight against it is going - and what we can all do personally. I'll be passing on analyses that others make, as well as throwing a few of mine into the mix too. And, of course, I'd be interested to hear your views on what is written about ACTA in this column or elsewhere, and more generally how we can stop ACTA before it's too late.

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It may sound bonkers but 40 years ago this kind of socio-economic engineering was commonplace. I was one of many who followed such a path.

If business really wanted home-grown computer skills it would pay for them. Before the 1944 education act, it was normal for businesses to set up and fund schools. It was overwhelmingly in their interests to do so. They needed higher levels of numeracy, literacy and technical expertise to drive their business in the new competitive world. Unconstrained by league tables or a national curriculum they designed their own utilitarian programmes and funded them.

Thirty years ago, it was also commonplace for British companies to subsidise university education for students destined to work for them.

Obviously from current behaviour neither group actually cares about the issue of home-grown computer skills, but why should that be?

Firstly, sometime in the 1980s, market forces came to dominate government thinking. They correctly recognised the power of the market to act as arbiter of survival, but completely failed to understand that the market was blind.

They attributed sentience to the serious of decisions that constitute the market, a mistake no evolutionary biologist would make when dealing with its sister force ‘natural selection’.

At the same time business was becoming global, progressively severing the link between the nation state and the organisations that it traded in or owned companies in.

These two cultural shifts had a peculiar disembodying effect. There was a sudden and catastrophic abdication of responsibility by, for lack of a better term, ‘grown-ups’. The market was now the arbiter of all things, including education.

What followed next was a predictable extension of that abdication. Children as young as 12 were required to choose, using their judgement alone, what to study in order to define their futures and that of the country. Parents merely acquiesced.

The market provided a wealth of choice of study, and now for 14-16 year old children there are over 4000 approved GCSE and equivalents, all ‘paid for’ qualifications. Moreover, half of these children will soon be choosing their own degree courses from the new university market, with equally silly expensive consequences.

So now we have barely a handful studying Computer Science and nearly a hundred thousand studying Psychology.

We let the market decide our fate and gave the responsibility for the future to our children.

The Dodo lost its wings as in the island where it lived for so long in the absence of predators they became merely an expensive encumbrance. Dodos with smaller and ultimately no wings did better, and had more offspring than their flighted forebears. This is how natural selection works.

They were not to know they would need them when the sailors came.

The most potent advantage that organisations can gain from mobile BI is in-the-moment transformation of their business processes. All this creates game-changing operational efficiencies as well as faster and higher quality customer service.

Indeed, one public sector agency that operates a huge network of distribution centres is currently using mobile BI to capture machine efficiency statistics in real time. Managers can spot and address problems immediately rather than waiting for more sporadic reports — achieving efficiencies not typically associated with government agencies.

While mobile BI offers key advantages, it also presents challenges. To manage these so you can capitalise on mobile BI value, one of the first steps is to determine whether your organisation is ready. Mobile BI is best suited for enterprises that have already streamlined their data integration processes and standardised their master data. Negative impacts of invalid or unreliable data become apparent sooner in a mobile environment.

Next, educate yourself on the solution options and their relative strengths and weaknesses. For example, gauge the stability of a vendor’s technology and the ease-of-use of its solution offering. Consider how flexibly the solution can accommodate your reporting and visualisation needs. And gauge whether it can be conveniently fitted into your existing enterprise mobile services architecture.

In addition, it is important to use mobile BI strategically, not merely adopting technology for the technology’s sake. How? Identify the areas of your business where mobile BI can deliver a competitive advantage for you in the marketplace. For example, could mobile BI most help you achieve new efficiencies in your business processes? Deepen your understanding of customers? Spot market trends faster than your rivals can?

But keep in mind the practical implications. For instance, you’ll need to determine which devices you want your mobile BI solution to support, what those devices and data plans cost, which devices should be mobile and which not, and how you’ll support the mobile BI solution throughout your global workforce. Will users connect to the network through WiFi, or mobile networks?

Also, it is wise to tailor your mobile BI to the tablet technology instead of merely replicating your enterprise BI solution. You don’t want to make it so users have the same experience on their iPads as they have on their laptops. While laptop technology enables deep analysis, tablet computers are more about in-the-moment monitoring of business activities. So you’ll want to consider customising your enterprise BI solution to the tablet technology, rather than the reverse.

Equally critical, be clear about what users of your mobile BI solution will need and make sure you boil data down to only those metrics required to manage the business interaction or process in question at a particular moment in a user’s work day.

Finally, remember that to maximise mobile strategic value, a good place to start is determining how the tool fits into their overall strategies for business process transformation and analytics.

Posted by Soumendra Mohanty Global Lead - Information Management, Accenture

My colleague Dave Johnson (who is well worth following from a Twitter and blog perspective BTW) wrote an immediate reaction to the BMC announcement yesterday. Of course as analysts we are pre-briefed on such things and having had time to think about the announcement I offer the following somewhat random thoughts and opinions:

1. BMC (and everyone else) is “suffering” at the hands of ServiceNow in the enterprise ITSM space (both new and existing business). Some might see the Numara purchase as a retreat to the mid-market or a tactical diversion to maintain revenue growth in light of shareholder expectations. However, I think it is most likely point 3 (below) - especially in light of the fact that BMC are nearly always in my discussions with Forrester clients on ITSM tool selection (albeit sometimes only from a replacement perspective). And let’s not forget that BMC has long been the dominant ITSM player in terms of customer base with its enterprise and mid-market plays - Remedy and Service Desk Express. BMC continues to win a lot of new business
2. ServiceNow is actually a red herring in respect of the Numara offerings given that it is “above” the lower end of the mid-market now (unless sold in smaller bundles via its partner offerings). Oddly, many mid-market ITSM tool vendors still see ServiceNow as their main threat. In my opinion, this is potentially lethal for them as while they are looking at ServiceNow, BMC RemedyForce, Nimsoft, and maybe someone like ManageEngine will be circling their customers and WILL steal existing business (remember that ITSM tools are changed on average every 5 years, the rise of interest in SaaS ITSM offerings can only accelerate this IMO)
3. BMC is definitely buying people here: Numara’s mid-market customers, and sales, product management, and development people. They already have two mid-market plays for ITSM - Service Desk Express and RemedyForce, do they need more? Also, do they really need the people? BMC has some great people, maybe they need a different type of people, people that can’t sit back and say that “I work for the largest and most successful ITSM tool vendor.” You need to miss a meal or two to really feel the hunger
4. The technology may play a part but I see it as outside the core ITSM-capability space. Maybe IT asset management (ITAM) for the mid-market and Numara will also bring a better mobile management play (that BMC has yet to commit to strategically)
5. RemedyForce is, to me, BMC’s best chance in the SaaS for ITSM space (and as a ServiceNow competitor in all spaces) at least short term (on the back of SalesForce.com’s SaaS credentials and BMC’s for ITSM). I’d hate to see RemedyForce get “lost” in what is an already complicated BMC ITSM-offering set up. Killing the now-superfluous Numara Cloud and Service Desk Express still leaves them with five offerings for salespeople and potential customers to think through
6. BMC needs to get better messaging out about customizing Remedy and associated costs, and the issues-of-old related to the cost and pain of upgrading between product versions. Cost, ease of use, and upgrades are why customers are leaving what is a very, very functionally- rich ITSM offering
7. Finally, BMC is seeing with RemedyForce what I have been talking about for a while … that ITSM tool selection should be as much (if not more) about your ITSM maturity than company size. I still think a massive investment in RemedyForce’s ITIL process “coverage” and marketing will make it ultimately able to compete with ServiceNow at the enterprise level (RemedyForce should not be limited to the mid-market, there is a danger it will be though with the addition of the Numara offerings).
   
   

There you go - a quickly-written blog that hopefully is both insightful and fair. If you think it is a BMC-bashing piece I advise you to read it again. I know BMC and other ITSM tool vendors appreciate honesty above all things (OK, well maybe not above happy customers and revenue growth).

As always your comments, thoughts, and opinions are definitely appreciated.

Posted by Stephen Mann

Related blogs:
Newsflash for the ITSM community: SaaS is a red herring

Are you happy with your IT service management tool?

While superficially about stemming the flow of counterfeit physical goods (ACTA stands for "Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement"), the copyright and patent industries (music, movies, software, pharmaceuticals and more) have successfully infested it and the result is a trade agreement that substantially reduces the scope for discretion over new approaches to business on the internet.

While we are told ACTA "will not require changes to Europe's laws", it creates an environment where we can expect all the most controlling and invasive parts of every country's laws to be emphasised and all the most flexible parts - such as fair use, the public commons and cultural expression - to be minimised. It's a treaty that will be cited every time the USA wants to extradite a British citizen over copyright, for example - even when no law in Europe is being broken. Like DRM, ACTA quantises discretion and reduces all our freedoms.

Despite the fact it is obviously controversial - even the MEP tasked with working on it for the European Parliament quit - the European Commission saw fit to co-ordinate its signing by most European administrations last week. They are now ridiculing opposition to their actions and misrepresenting the impact of ACTA.  A clear gesture of defiance to the popular will expressed against SOPA/PIPA, this is anti-democratic arrogance at its worst and a gift to Britain's euro-sceptics.

Mobilising MEPs

All is not lost, though. ACTA will come to the European Parliament in June for ratification, and there is every chance that MEPs can be mobilised to reject it. Since the treaty has already been finalised in secret and presented to the world as a fait accomplis, rejecting or accepting it whole are the only available options. But since, according to the European Commission, it changes no laws, presumably its rejection is no big loss.

I'm reminded of the battle by the Internet against the Software Patent Directive back in 2005. That too was an unwise legislative direction that would have seriously impacted European business by allowing giant monopolistic international corporations to stifle competition, even for interoperable software permitted by copyright law. MEPs had been told the Directive was a non-controversial piece of industry law that should just be waved through. The European Council waved it through on that basis.

To their surprise, there was a massive backlash from a large number of previously politically silent citizens across Europe, culminating in a huge protest at the European Parliament. MEPs were faced with a public backlash. While the actual mechanism for its defeat was obscure and complicated to explain, the basic reason the Software Patent Directive was defeated was that MEPs discovered they had been deceived and that the topic was in fact highly controversial and citizen-oriented.

We need to demonstrate the same for ACTA. It's not a business-as-usual commercial-only matter. It's a treaty that stifles the soul of the meshed society in the interests of the winners in the technology markets of the twentieth century. In the coming months we all need to speak out.

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The miss was attributed to delayed deal approvals, particularly with Exadata solutions. The share price plummeted and Larry Ellison’s personal stake dropped by over $5bn overnight.

The lingering question is whether this sudden turn in fortunes was simply down to some buying decision delays with clients or whether Oracle is facing deeper issues in its markets.

After all, since 2002 it has made over 75 acquisitions, transforming the dominant enterprise software vendor to a full stack player after taking on the ailing Sun Microsystems business.

How is Oracle performing against SAP, IBM and Microsoft?

The last few weeks have helped put this performance in a market context after key Oracle rivals announced their relative performance.

Microsoft delivered an uninspiring but solid set of results when it announced on Jan 19th. With SQL Server 2012 coming on stream, it is a credible alternative option to Oracle in many enterprise scenarios.

IBM also met expectations on the same day, when it reported another solid set of gains. Its successful focus on analytics and cloud computing showed evidence of success with most of it coming from software and services. Websphere for instance grew by 21%.

Most tellingly for Oracle, SAP reported its results on 25th January. It managed to surprise analysts by exceeding expectations, as it announced its best ever results. Notably its software revenues grew by 25%, striking right at the epicentre of Oracle’s core business.

SAP strikes back at Oracle

What will delight the SAP Executives is not only the core ERP software performance against Oracle’s, but also the contribution from SAP HANA, its next generation application infrastructure designed for high performance cloud, based on in-memory technologies.

This is a real Oracle knockout product that will rival Exalytics; with sales of over $200m in its first six months, it seems to have found a hungry market.

2012 will be a pivotal year for Oracle

Looking back, there is no doubt that 2011 saw Oracle feel a sense of triumph of many of its industry rivals.

Acquisition had driven revenues to all-time highs, operational efficiencies had ripped costs out, its market cap had returned to the highs of old. The company humiliated HP, jumped on the cloud and got its market cap to within $27bn of IBM (its old nemesis has now regained its stride and extended its market capitalisation superiority back to around $80bn).

Oracle has a lot at stake then, as it needs to restore confidence in investors and get clients buying. And there-in lies the challenge in our opinion - it will be torn between resuming its normal highly aggressive "buy now" sales approach to market, and the more mature and client-centric long term approach that benefits full stack "C" level solution selling cycles.

What we are seeing client side in the market is a growing reluctance in many enterprises to increase spend and dependency, on a vendor that has historically been reluctant to genuinely partner with its clients; instead using compliance, complexity and extreme sales pressure to get and retain revenues.

Client executives are realising that regardless of how appealing the lure of Larry’s engineered as one pitch is, placing your database, business applications, middleware, virtualisation, storage, servers and support with a single vendor as self serving, aggressive and domineering as Oracle may be a step too far. Hence we are seeing hesitation and competitor wins.

A potentially sustained client backlash?

Time will tell. It needs to deliver in its third quarter results (due end of February). Having set a big expectation of delayed deals from the second quarter and a record pipeline for the third, it will be interesting to see its actual results as its competitors have demonstrated that budgets are indeed being spent.

Our interest is just how Oracle will drive the revenue - will it increase vendor audit activity and crank up the pressure, or will it take a longer term view and position real value creation through partnering with its clients? Oracle audit activity won’t surprise us.

They have been hard at work rounding out their portfolio to include Client Management (software management, systems management, and OS management), and other areas. Numara has been on a journey to re-invent itself and has been succeeding. Further, we believe that the culture of the Numara organization and BMC's will align well, as long as Numara is given the autonomy and investment they need to grow their portfolio and momentum in the field.

BMC Will Need Time to Work
Numara customers should expect relatively little change in daily operations for the first few months, as BMC aligns the organizations. If history is a reliable guide, BMC will typically give a larger acquisition such as this the opportunity to remain mostly intact, and inject key people and processes to help align the acquired organization with the BMC culture and ways of doing business. If this holds true for Numara, customers should see it as a positive step.

Get Clear Direction from BMC in Areas of Overlap
There are several areas of overlap between Numara and BMC. The most obvious of these lies in the mid-market ITSM space where Service-Now has seen significant traction. BMC was late to the Software-as-a-Service game for the ITSM, which gave competitors like Service-Now the opportunity to get a big head start before BMC caught on. They responded very late with two SaaS offerings: Remedy OnDemand, and Remedyforce Service Desk -- the latter being aimed squarely at the mid-market to try to hold back competition by leveraging the Force.com platform.

How the Remedyforce offering will be positioned alongside (or instead of) Numara's Track-It and Footprints product lines, as well as BMC's own Service Desk Express on-premise offering will need to be explicitly resolved. Customers should give BMC time to work, but should absolutely press them to deliver clear plans and commitments for their investments, and should expect migration plans to firm up as BMC learns what its customers will and will not accept for a transition plan.

Another critical area of overlap lies in the client management product lines. In 2011, BMC partnered with Matrix42 based in Germany to help maintain and develop the BMC Configuration Automation for Clients (formerly Marimba) product line. We saw this as a positive move because Matrix42 also filled critical gaps for BMC with its own organic strengths in client OS provisioning and migration, as well as deep provisioning and management capabilities for Citrix Hosted Virtual Desktop infrastructures, including XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp.

While we believe that BMC's intent will be to continue to offer both mid-market (Numara) and enterprise (BMC/Marimba) client management offerings, Forrester believes that BMC lacks internal market expertise, skilled product leadership, and a winning strategy in that space- particularly with client virtualization.

Disruption in the Client Management Space Means BMC Needs to Act Fast
Client management vendors in general are facing significant disruption in the form of client virtualization, application virtualization, SaaS-based offerings such as Microsoft's terrific inTune, and the explosion of mobile devices. Matrix42 offers BMC strong capabilities for client virtualization and Numara mobile device management with its Fromdistance acquisition in 2011.

However, what customers are really looking for is a set of solutions that can help them manage the technology disruption -- one that they don't have to assemble themselves. Some of the pieces in the BMC portfolio could be re-used, but to get it right would require substantial organic development because customers don't have time for a loosely-coupled ruse.

Summary
Forrester believes that the Numara acquisition will bolster BMC's position in the small to mid market space, that BMC's financial strength will ensure adequate support and ongoing commitment to the Numara product line, and customers should expect a handful of new products to be offered to add to what they already have with Numara, such as Atrium Orchestrator. However, there are several areas of overlap which will require explicit resolution.

Remedyforce and Footprints are the most likely to emerge as BMC’s go-forward mid market ITSM offerings. Until BMC offers clear guidance on its client management strategy, and can present a compelling roadmap that addresses the disruptors facing all client management vendors, Forrester advises caution with client management specifically.

Posted by David Johnson

Eveline Oehrlich, Stephen Mann, Glenn O'Donnell, David K. Johnson

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Yet in the "free age", Apple maintain a huge client base locked into its proprietary and closed hardware, operating systems and stores. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, even the great Bill Gates proclaimed that the world had changed, and that Apple would not survive with Steve Jobs maintaining the company's control over platforms from end to end.

Despite this Apple is a huge success. Is it likely to last?

As a techie, I’d hope not, because we do want to be able to upgrade our hardware, we want the option to use any suppliers' parts and we want the same to be true of our software. Do we care what the hardware looks like as long as it’s fast and powerful, not really.

However as a consumer, too much choice is not necessarily a good thing. As a consumer, we are in a world where things get replaced rather than fixed or upgraded. For the majority style is every bit if not more important than features, and customer experience does matter.

How quickly and easily I can use my device has become more important than whether it has all the latest and best features. Going back to one store is easier than have to search several for apps and music.

Apple started with some engineering innovation, and when Steve Jobs was first ousted focused heavily on engineering; this was its downfall in the late eighties. However with the return of Steve Jobs, and his partnership with Jonathon Ives, a return to a focus on customer experience and design revived the ailing technology company.

So although it pains me to see Apple thrive in such a closed environment they really do highlight that style, ease of use and the overall customer experience really does matter to consumers. Hence I would not forecast the end of Apple for some time in the near future unless it loses its way again to "engineering".

A spokesperson for the Department of Health said: "We were made aware and asked the supplier about this activity. The supplier has subsequently confirmed that they have ceased offering incentives to GPs.”

TPP is one of the main IT suppliers to GPs, alongside EMIS and INPS which sells the Vision system.

Parts of the NHS have clearly-defined rules on the acceptance of gifts or hospitality. NHS Sheffield tells its staff:

“All offers of hospitality should be approached with caution. Modest hospitality, for example, a drink and sandwich during a visit or a working lunch is normal and reasonable and does not require approval of a manager. Offers of hospitality relating to theatre evenings, sporting fixtures, or holiday accommodation, or other hospitality must be declined…”

I asked CSC, which supplies TPP SystmOne under the National Programme for IT [NPfIT, whether it was aware of the incentives and whether it, or TPP, wished to comment.

“Because we are in active negotiations with the government, we are not able to comment in depth on the programme until those negotiations have concluded,” said a CSC spokeswoman who said that the same applied to TPP as “they are a supplier to us working on the National Programme”.

IT company's offer of "tea at The Ritz" to GP leaders

I mentioned George Harrison's case: he was sued for infringement as Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" has a very similar riff to the Chiffon's "He's So Fine". "He's So Fine" was a well known song, and although the court accepted that although he had heard the song, Harrison hadn't consciously copied it, unconsciously he may well have done (or to meet the civil standard of proof, it was more likely than not he had done). Copying had occurred, and Harrison was liable, irrespective of whether it was conscious or unconscious.

Now let's try a thought experiment.

You legally download a bunch of (non-copy protected) MP3s onto your computer from a legitimate source like Amazon or iTunes or 7digital. The licence allows you to use and copy the MP3s for the personal use of yourself and your family, but does not allow you to share them with third parties. You buy a new computer, and decide you are going to sell your old computer to a mate, so being a law-abiding sort of bod, you dutifully delete all the MP3s (having copied them to your new computer, as allowed by the licence) and then give the computer to your mate.

Your mate runs an undelete utility, and suddenly has access to your MP3 library. Wahey! Of course, your mate won't have a licence to these works, so her use will be infringing, but that's not the point here.

The question is, are you breaching your licence to the MP3s as soon as you pass the old computer on to your mate? That breach may have the effect of terminating your own licence to use the MP3s. It would seem pretty unreasonable that you were in breach if you thought you'd deleted them. What if you did know that the delete was likely to be reversible, but didn't think your mate had the technical prowess to undelete them? What if you did you know your mate had that prowess? Was likely to undelete? What if you told your mate (nudge nudge) that the files had been deleted, but not wiped? There's a pretty clear scale of culpability here, but the traditional view is that in all cases, you would be in breach of your licence.

Pedants may notice that this analogy is imperfect - that the intention is not in relation to breach of copyright per se, but to infringement of the licence which attaches to it, and the copyright infringement only occurs as a secondary consequence of the licence infringement. Fair enough. There may be a distinction there. It's possible to create a similar scenario where we are looking directly at copyright infringement, but as the facts are likely to look a little more strained, the analogy is not as immediately resonant.

Let's look at our original scenario. You mate receives your old PC from you, and knows nothing about its previous content, and doesn't care to run an undelete utility on it. Nonetheless, she's a bit of a resilience freak and decides to install another hard disk and mirror it (RAID1). The controller dutifully copies the content of the old drive to the new one on a sector by sector basis, including the infringing MP3s. Is she liable for infringement of the copyright works being copied during the mirroring process, even though she's unaware even of the existence of those works? It would seem pretty unreasonable if she was, yet traditional copyright law suggests she should be.

How about the firmware of the old hard drive detecting that a sector is about to become bad, and moves it. The old sector happened to be part of an infringing MP3. It's copied in breach of copyright law. Is she liable for infringement now, even though she not only was unaware of any infringing files on the system, she also did not initiate any action (like kicking off a disk mirroring process) which involves a copying process?

It's not too fanciful to see that these sort of events (okay, possibly not the HDD self-healing routine one) might be part of a chain of occurrences which results in the release of very high value information (such as a digital file containing an as-yet unreleased major feature film, or the source code to Excel). In that case, should the unknowing perpetrator be liable for the infringement? Or will the courts change the law to avoid clear injustice?

* In case you think my statement in the first sentence about the Court of Appeal "doing the right thing" is inconsistent with the rest of the piece: the Court of Appeal should rule to make it clear that intention to emulate should not render infringing that which would not otherwise have been infringing. The argument in the rest of the piece is that if the infringer has no knowledge of the copying taking place, that should not amount to infringement.