In Cloud we (do not) Trust?

Just recently a student of mine did an interesting survey with small and medium enterprise (SME) people in Hong Kong. She wanted to find out how they were using ICTs and if there were barriers for adoption of Internet-based technologies.

The results showed that although SME people (owners, senior managers) are well educated and understand how ICT can benefit their business, they do not invest too much on Internet applications but on intranets. To communicate with the outside world, most of them have basic information websites for their businesses. But most of them export products/services to other countries.

You might say that in this era where online transactions are the norm of the day in a globalised world this seems odd. But it is not.

At risk of generalising, I think SME owners (including my brother) are good at deciding where to invest their resources. They are very 'hands on' individuals. What is not clear does not get their attention. I still remember when I tried to convince my brother to buy a software suite to help in the accounting and client management tasks of the business. We settled for using a spreadsheet for each of these tasks. To communicate with our suppliers in other countries we used email. And for the payroll we used telephone banking.

As my student, you might also say that SME owners need first to trust in technology and in the people that know about it (let us call them technologists).

Technologists though often do not make themselves any favours by speaking in a very unclear language. Recently I asked a cloud technologist about the business benefits of the cloud. The answer came back with a number of unclear terms: Scalability, Agility, and the last one: Capability. With a capability to navigate through a sea of data, the business can discover new strategies, it can better interact with other businesses (see my previous post).

I wonder if these terms help us to trust in the cloud. For some SME and company directors, it does not matter how and where the data sits. But that is different from scalability, agility or capability. It could well be a way of not getting bogged down by these terms.

We need to create conditions for people to trust in technology. We need translation of terms, getting close to the users and their language. Cloud technologists need to do this regarding all these benefits. In addition, they need to consider how users are to learn to live with a paradox: The paradox of developing a business capability that is not necessarily under our full control.

Not trusting in the cloud is not a sin, it could well be a misunderstanding, but it is not the lay person or the users' fault.

Sitting on gold, or the game called who is clever when it comes to data

Ok here goes a kind of sceptic towards positive post.

Someone knocks on your door. It is called 'necessity' and is desperate to make a living or justify his/her job or mission in life. The person says s/he knows you live a fast life and promises to help you organise things in the house. So that you do not spend too much time cleaning or deciding which clothes you are going to wear on the day. Not to worry any more doing the chores.

The person says s/he will also organise a kind of garage sale for you. S/he can rent out your white goods (washing machine, fridge freezer, etc), the bycicle, the lawnmower and even the old sofa to the neighbours while you are away. You did not know you were sitting on gold. Your house suddenly becomes a valuable asset that you can make work for you. And you are cash strapped, so things seem to look bright.

But you are still sceptic to accept the deal. The person says that s/he has a few clients already, and tries his/her best to persuade you that you will become a member of an exclusive club, those who share things and discover hidden treasures in their attics. All of this for a fee that you can pay whenever you use this person's services. Everything seems fine as it is on demand, which means people only pay for what they need.

To your doubts, this person says that you will have more time to look after your own business. Also, you can help the neighbourhood by being in touch more directly with the neighbours and the local government. You can be more motivated to tell the government what is wrong with your house, the rubbish collection of the police. You can also suggest new ideas to spend money from your taxes. So this is also an opportunity to improve the quality of life around you. All because you can now share and interact.

Would you like to accept this proposal?

mmm...

Hold on, let me just say a few things as a good neighbour.

What if what I just described is a mixture of something called data driven innovation?, what if your neighbours are companies who want data that you hold from your and their customers, and your neighbourhood is an eco-system? What if the other game this person is selling is called IT as a utility, something that you just pay for, like electricity, gas or water?

What if there is another thing called open government in which you can see how the government is doing, and in return the government is 'asking' you to share your data (goods) to improve its knowledge about the neighbourhood?

What if I told you that 'necessity' has a couple of assistants that I know of called Google and the Cloud, the first one speeding up searches on data, and the second one does all the data housekeeping?

Is it a useful set of games?

Maybe, like the pay per view TV, or anything that has the 'pay as you go' feature in it, specially in these times of austerity in some parts of the world. By the way, the name 'necessity' seems appropriate for these times.

We live in the era of technology products and services eco-systems created around them. Private companies and governments (mainly) are being visited by these friends called 'necessities', which we know of and are excited at the prospect of making data available. Telecommunication companies seem to sit in the middle as they hold your data and mine, without explicitly or perhaps properly considering how and if they can benefit from seeing your data go and come as you move in your daily life.

Management of this data inside and outside companies needs good managers. If you hire 'necessity', just make sure they know what they are doing. You and they need good quality standards, which many people are calling Service Level Agreements or SLAs. So now you can expect good services from those who come to clean and maintain your house and do the chores.

Imagine if instead of making your data available you decide to collect data from others, so the idea of 'necessity' became an attractive one and you want to do a similar business. I was just thinking today of a research idea: setting up a cloud based portal in which we could be using things like google docs to gather citizen's perceptions about something: Their views about laws, their health concerns, or their knowledge about diseases and how to cure them. Many citizens would be happy to air their views. Others would be happy to send this data from their mobile phones, and get information about what goes on in their area or locality. Others, more in this area of research would be happy to develop intelligent applications that can monitor how you consume electricity at home and give suggestions to lower your bill.

But then there is something called privacy of data. Those in eco-systems have to be careful with sharing or gathering data in unauthorised ways. We are supposed to help improve the quality of life of people (i.e. you and your household). By gathering data, in authorised or non-authorised ways, we can get to think that we know better than people. If given the chance, we can just suggest, explore, discover, but never impose or monitor.

I am not entirely sure that from now if we play this game we are to become what many people call 'prosumers'. So we are now innovating. We live in our house, someone does the work for us and we keep rearranging the furniture, and telling other people about it. It is like combining and recombining data to discover new ideas or possibilities. I seem to have heard a similar story of something called 'data mining', which is still popular but is not the holy grail (and I respect the data mining experts). We do some work in gathering and mashing up data, in other words making it available to those in the eco-system, including the government.

So in the game, the one who is clever with the data wins, the one who makes it available and the one who exploits it. But you can still enjoy this game by just playing like you do when you go to a casino to have a good time. You can still open your house to others. Just make sure you have some kind of insurance, like what you do by not taking your credit cards when you go to a casino or by making sure you do not end up living in Vegas or Atlantic city (too much of a temptation not to play every day).

Prosumers or not, we are still members of our communities, and we do not need to lose sleep on thinking about if we're sitting on gold or not.

Back to the revolution, back to the blog!

Last post is now over 6 months old. While we waited to see what happened with technologies this year the revolution has spread. Change of regimes, riots, a new war and many efforts to save the world economy in certain parts of our globe have been at the forefront of news.

The revolution has also seen the emergence of social networking so that now Facebook has a value in the market, Apple is now a big legacy to be continued and the alliance between Microsoft and Nokia has given birth to new technology products. Tablets and electronic book readers are now used much more.

And cloud computing is on the up. Yesterday I was at Kingston University in an event about this subject. It is interesting to see how companies like Microsoft have invested in the cloud. Their Azure platform is delivering interesting solutions. One of them is for the Body Shop, which is now a global business. My friend Farid and I coincided in thinking that still the cloud is rather a black box than a cloud. It just delivers what it is asked to do, not many questions being asked, not many pages in a contract to be read or signed.

Still, how these technologies are providing specific benefits so we can say they improve our quality of life and that of our organisations or societies needs attention. Those interested in research say that there is a new ecosystem (see a previous post in this blog) to which we can attach ourselves. End users see that they can get information in real time, presented in a nice way (maps, routes, bookings, news, etc), at their fingertips. Technology developers can now focus on particular parts of information products and services: (Mobile) Applications, middleware, databases or communication networks.

And governments are now more sophisticated in their use of technologies. Mobile applications for citizens are becoming a norm, as digital documents or signatures.

Maybe the revolution within this revolution is not to lose sight of what we can do with all these possibilities, and also to keep the good of what we had. I am still using the same mobile phone, netbook and laptop, am still reading printed copies of papers and books. They do the job for me.

I still think that we need to sort out other problems whilst we use the opportunities brought by technology. The big problem is still how to benefit more people from the changes we experience. It is about not being forgotten but being active in shaping such changes. Many of us would not like to be targeted as consumers but as human beings.