Hi all

I think its a sure bet that many of you, for your various sins, perform “stakeholder engagement” as part of delivering solutions to your clients or organisations. I also bet that many of you would not be aware that a standard for Stakeholder Engagement has been released. It was written by the nice folks at accountability.org, an organisation dedicated to helping organisations embed accountability into their operations at an ethical, environmental, social, and governance level.

When the standard was released, I read it with some interest, and decided to see what it would look like as an IBIS based issue map. I checked with the report authors and got the okay to do so. The result can be seen by clicking the image below.

Hope you find it of interest, and that it gives you some new insights into the art of stakeholder engagement.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi all

Just a quick note for those of you who are of the academic persuasion or who have an interest in research and academic literature. Kailash and I wrote a paper for the International Journal for Managing Projects in Business. The article is called “Towards a holding environment: building shared understanding and commitment in projects”. The paper is about how to improve shared understanding on projects – particularly at the early stages where ambiguity around objectives tends to be at its highest. While it covers a similar territory to the Heretics Guide, it covers some literature that we did not use for the book. Plus it is peer reviewed of course.

This paper presents a viewpoint on how to build a shared understanding of project goals and a shared commitment to achieving them. One of the ways to achieve shared understanding is through open dialogue, free from political and other constraints. In this paper (and in the Heretics Book) we flesh out what it takes for this to happen and call an environment which fosters such dialogue a holding environment. We illustrate, via a case study:

1. How an alliance-based approach to projects can foster a holding environment.
2. The use of argument visualisation tools such as IBIS (Issue-Based Information System) to clarify different points of view and options within such an environment.

This was my first experience with the peer review process of writing a journal paper. I have to say that, despite the odd bit of teeth gnashing, the review process did make this paper much better than it originally was. Of course, none of this would have even happened without Kailash. This was definitely his baby, and this paper would not exist without his intellect and wide-ranging knowledge.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

  

Hi all

There are a couple of conferences happening this month that you should seriously consider attending. The New Zealand and Australian SharePoint Community Conferences. This year things have changed. There are over 50 Sessions designed to cater to a wide audience of the SharePoint landscape and the most varied range of international speakers I have seen so far. What is all the more pleasing this year is that aside from 20 sessions of technical content, the business side of SharePoint focus has been given greater coverage and there are over 20 customer case studies, which give great insight into how organisations large and small are making the most of their SharePoint deployments. This stuff is gold because it is what happens in the trenches of reality, rather than the nuanced, airbrushed one you tend to get when people are trying to sell you something.

My involvement will include some piano accompaniment while Christian Buckley hits the high notes , and in terms of talks, I will be “keeping it real“ by presenting a talk called “Aligning Business Objectives with SharePoint“. I will also be running a 1 day class on one of the hardest aspects of SharePoint delivery: Business goal alignment. This is workshop is the “how” of goal alignment (plenty of people can tell you the “what”). If you are a BA, PM or recovering tech dude, do not miss this session. It draws a lot of inspiration from my facilitation and sensemaking work and has been very well received wherever I have run it.

The other session I am really looking forward to is a talk called SharePoint 2010 Caveats: Don’t get caught out! Now anybody in SharePoint for long enough has learnt the hard way to test all assumptions. This is because SharePoint is a complex beast with lots of moving parts. Unfortunately these moving parts don’t always integrate the way they one would assume. Usually the result of such an untested assumption is a lot of teeth gnashing and heavily adjusted project plans.

I mentioned airburshed reality before – this is something that occasionally frustrates me, especially when you see SharePoint demonstrations full of gushing praise, via a use case that glosses over inconvenient facts. Michal Pisarek of SharePointAnlystHQ fame, is a SharePoint practitioner who shares my view and a while back, we both decided to present a talk about some of the most common, dangerous and some downright strange caveats that SharePoint has to offer. The session outline is below.

"Yes but…" is a common answer given by experienced SharePoint consultants when asked if a particular solution design "will work". One of the key reasons for this is that SharePoint’s greatest strength is one of its weaknesses. The sheer number of components or features jam packed into the product, means that there are many complex interactions between them – often with small gotchas or large caveats that were not immediately apparent while the sales guy was dutifully taking you through the SharePoint pie diagram.

Unfortunately, some organizations trip up on such untested assumptions at times, and in turn it can render the logical edifice of their solution design invalid. This is costly in terms of lost time to change approaches, but increased complexity since sometimes workarounds are worse than the caveats. In this fun, lively and interactive session, Michal Pisarek will put his MVP (not really) on the line, and with a little help from Paul Culmsee, examine some of SharePoint’s common caveats. Make no mistake, understanding these caveats and the approaches for mitigating them will save you considerable time, money and heartache.

Don’t miss this informative and eye opening session

Now let me state up front that our aim is not to walk into a session and just spent all of the time bitching about all the ills of SharePoint. In fact the aim and intent of this session was from the point of view of “knowing this will save you money”. To that end, if there is a workaround for an issue, we will outline it for you.

Now just about every person who I have mentioned this talk to, have said something along the lines of “Oh I could give you some good ones”. So to that end, we want to hear any of the weird and wacky things that have stopped you in your tracks. If you have any rippers, then leave a comment below or submit them to Michal (michalpisarek@sharepointanlysthq.com)

We will also make this session casual and interactive. So expect some audience participation!

Thanks for reading

 

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hi all and welcome to my 6th post on the weird and wonderful world of cloud computing. The recurring theme in this series has been to point out that the technological aspects of cloud computing have never really been the key issue. Instead, I feel It is everything else around the technology, ranging from immature process, through to the effects of the industry shakeout and consolidation, through to the adaptive change required for certain IT roles. To that end, in the last post, we had fun at the expense of server huggers and the typical defence mechanisms they use to scare the rest of the organization into fitting into their happy-place world of in-house managed infrastructure. In that post I made a note on how you can tell an IT FUD defence because risk averse IT will almost always try use their killer argument up-front to bury the discussion. For many server huggers or risk averse IT, the killer defence is US Patriot Act Issue.

Now just in case you have never been hit with the “…ah but what about the Patriot Act?” line and have no idea what the Patriot Act is all about, let me give you a nice metaphor. It is basically a legislative version of the “Men in Black” movies. Why Men in Black? Because in those movies, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones had the ability to erase the memories of anyone who witnessed any extra-terrestrial activity with that silvery little pen-like device. With the Patriot Act, US law enforcement now has a similar instrument. Best of all, theirs doesn’t need batteries – it is all done on paper.

In short, the Patriot Act provides a means for U.S. law enforcement agencies, to seek a court order allowing access to the personal records of anyone without their knowledge, provided that it is in relation to an anti-terrorism investigation. This act applies to pretty much any organisation who has any kind of presence in the USA and the rationale behind introducing it was to make it much easier for agencies to conduct terrorism investigations and better co-ordinate their efforts. After all, in the reflection and lessons learnt from the 911 tragedy, the need for for better inter-agency co-ordination was a recurring theme.

The implication of this act is for cloud computing should be fairly clear. Imagine our friendly MIB’s Will Smith (Agent J) and Tommy Lee Jones (Agent K) bursting into Google’s headquarters, all guns blazing, forcing them to hand over their customers data. Then when Google staff start asking too many questions, they zap them with the memory eraser gizmo. (Cue Tommy Lee jones stating “You never saw us and you never handed over any data to us.” )

Scary huh? It’s the sort of scenario that warms the heart of the most paranoid server hugger, because surely no-one in their right mind could mount a credible counter-argument to that sort of risk to the confidentiality and integrity of an organisations sensitive data.

But at the end of the day, cloud computing is here to stay and will no doubt grow. Therefore we need to unpack this issue and see what lies behind the rhetoric on both sides of the debate. Thus, I decided to look into the Patriot act a bit further to understand it better. Of course, it should be clear here that I am not a lawyer, and this is just my own opinions from my research and synthesis of various articles, discussion papers and interviews. My personal conclusion is that all the hoo-hah about the Patriot Act is overblown. Yet in stating this, I have to also state that we are more or less screwed anyway (and always were). As you will see later in this post, there are great counter arguments that pretty much dismantle any anti-cloud arguments that are FUD based, but be warned – in using these arguments, you will demonstrate just how much bigger this thing is beyond cloud computing and get a sense of the broader scale of the risk.

So what is the weapon?

The first thing we have to do is understand some specifics about the Patriot Act’s memory erasing device. Within the vast scope of the act, the two areas for greatest concern in relation to data is the National Security Letter and the Section 215 order. Both provide authorities access to certain types of data and I need to briefly explain them:

A National Security Letter (NSL) is a type of subpoena that permits certain law enforcement agencies to compel organisations or individuals to provide certain types of information like financial and credit records, telephone and ISP records (Internet searches, activity logs, etc). Now NSL’s existed prior to the Patriot Act, but the act loosened some of the controls that previously existed. Prior to the act, the information being sought had to be directly related a foreign power or the agent of a foreign power – thereby protecting US citizens. Now, all agencies have to do is assert that the data being sought is relevant in some way to any international terrorism or foreign espionage investigations.

Want to see what a NSL looks like? Check this redacted one from wikipedia.

A Section 215 Order is similar to an NSL in that it is an instrument that law enforcement agencies can use to obtain data. It is also similar to NSL’s in that it existed prior to the Patriot Act – except back then it was called a FISA Order – named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that enacted it. The type of data available under a Section 215 Order is more expansive than what you can eke out of an NSL, but a Section 215 Order does require a judge to let you get hold of it (i.e. there is some judicial oversight). In this case, the FBI obtains a 215 order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which reviews the application. What the Patriot Act did different to the FISA Order was to broaden the definition of what information could be sought. Under the Patriot Act, a Section 215 Order can relate to “any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items).” If these are believed to be relevant to an authorised investigation they are fair game. The act also eased the requirements for obtaining such an order. Previously, the FBI had to present “specific articulable facts” that provided evidence that the subject of an investigation was a “foreign power or the agent of a foreign power.” From my reading, now there is no requirement for evidence and the reviewing judge therefore has little discretion. If the application meets the requirements of Section 215, they will likely issue the order.

So now that we understand the two weapons that are being wielded, let’s walk through the key concerns being raised.

Concern 1: Impacted cloud providers can’t guarantee that sensitive client data won’t be turned over to the US government

CleverWorkArounds short answer:

Yes this is dead-set true and it has happened already.

CleverWorkArounds long answer:

This concern stems from the “loosening” of previous controls on both NSL’s and Section 215 Orders. NSL’s for example, require no probable cause or judicial oversight at all, meaning that the FBI can issue these at their own volition. Now it is important to note that they could do this before the Patriot Act came into being too, but back then the parameters for usage was much stricter. Section 215 Orders on the other hand, do have judicial oversight, but that oversight has also been watered down. Additionally the breadth of information that can be collected is now greater. Add to that the fact that both NSL’s and Section 215 Orders almost always include a compulsory non-disclosure or “gag” order, preventing notification to the data owner that this has even happened.

This concern is not only valid but it has happened and continues to happen. Microsoft has already stated that it cannot guarantee customers would be informed of Patriot Act requests and furthermore, they have also disclosed that they have complied with Patriot Act requests. Amazon and Google are in the same boat. Google also have also disclosed that they have handed data stored in European datacenters back to U.S. law enforcement.

Now some of you – particularly if you live or work in Europe – might be wondering how this could happen, given the European Union’s strict privacy laws. Why is it that these companies have complied with the US authorities regardless of those laws?

That’s where the gag orders come in – which brings us onto the second concern.

Concern 2: The reach of the act goes beyond US borders and bypasses foreign legislation on data protection for affected providers

CleverWorkArounds short answer:

Yes this is dead-set true and it has happened already.

CleverWorkArounds long answer:

The example of Google – a US company – handing over data in its EU datacentres to US authorities, highlights that the Patriot Act is more pervasive than one might think. In terms of who the act applies to, a terrific article put out by Alex C. Lakatos put it really well when he said.

Furthermore, an entity that is subject to US jurisdiction and is served with a valid subpoena must produce any documents within its “possession, custody, or control.” That means that an entity that is subject to US jurisdiction must produce not only materials located within the United States, but any data or materials it maintains in its branches or offices anywhere in the world. The entity even may be required to produce data stored at a non-US subsidiary.

Think about that last point – “non-US subsidiary”.  This gives you a hint to how pervasive this is. So in terms of jurisdiction and whether an organisation can be compelled to hand over data and be subject to a gag order, the list is expansive. Consider these three categories:

• – US based company? Absolutely: That alone takes out Apple, Amazon, Dell, EMC (and RSA), Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Symantec, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, McAfee, Adobe, Dropbox and Rackspace
• – Subsiduary company of a US company (incorporated anywhere else in the world)? It seems so.
• – Non US company that has any form of US presence? It also seems so. Now we are talking about Samsung, Sony, Nokia, RIM and countless others.

The crux of this argument about bypassing is the gag order provisions. If the US company, subsidiary or regional office of a non US company receives the order, they may be forbidden from disclosing anything about it to the rest of the organisation.

Concern 3: Potential for abuse of Patriot Act powers by authorities

CleverWorkArounds short answer:

Yes this is true and it has happened already.

CleverWorkArounds long answer:

Since the Patriot Act came into place, there was a significant marked increase in the FBI’s use of National Security Letters. According to this New York Times article, there were 143,000 requests  between 2003 to 2005. Furthermore, according to a report from the Justice Department’s Inspector General in March 2007, as reported by CNN, the FBI was guilty of “serious misuse” of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act. I quote:

The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes or obtained information they weren’t supposed to. As many as 22% of national security letters were not recorded, the audit said. “We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI’s national security letter authorities,” Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report.

The Liberty and Security Coalition went into further detail on this. In a 2009 article, they list some of the specific examples of FBI abuses:

• – FBI issued NSLs when it had not opened the investigation that is a predicate for issuing an NSL;
• – FBI used “exigent letters” not authorized by law to quickly obtain information without ever issuing the NSL that it promised to issue to cover the request;
• – FBI used NSLs to obtain personal information about people two or three steps removed from the subject of the investigation;
• – FBI has used a single NSL to obtain records about thousands of individuals; and
• – FBI retains almost indefinitely the information it obtains with an NSL, even after it determines that the subject of the NSL is not suspected of any crime and is not of any continuing intelligence interest, and it makes the information widely available to thousands of people in law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Concern 4: Impacted cloud providers cannot guarantee continuity of service during investigations

CleverWorkArounds short answer:

Yes this is dead-set true and it has happened already.

CleverWorkArounds long answer:

An oft-overlooked side effect of all of this is that other organisations can be adversely affected. One aspect of cloud computing scalability that we talked about in part 1 is that of multitenancy. Now consider a raid on a datacenter. If cloud services are shared between many tenants, innocent tenants who had nothing whatsoever to do with the investigation can potentially be taken offline. Furthermore, the hosting provider may be gagged from explaining to these affected parties what is going on. Ouch!

An example of this happening was reported in the New York TImes in mid 2011 and concerned Curbed Network, a New York blog publisher. Curbed, along with some other companies, had their service disrupted after an F.B.I. raid on their cloud providers datacenter. They were taken down for 24 hours because the F.B.I.’s raid on the hosting provider seized three enclosures which, unfortunately enough, included the gear they ran on.

Ouch! Is there any coming back?

As I write this post, I wonder how many readers are surprised and dismayed by my four risk areas. The little security guy in me says If you are then that’s good! It means I have made you more aware than you were previously which is a good thing. I also wonder if some readers by now are thinking to themselves that their paranoid server huggers are right?

To decide this, let’s now examine some of the the counter-arguments of the Patriot Act issue.

Rebuttal 1: This is nothing new – Patriot Act is just amendments to pre-existing laws

One common rebuttal is that the Patriot Act legislation did not fundamentally alter the right of the government to access data. This line of argument was presented in August 2011 by Microsoft legal counsel Jeff Bullwinkel in Microsoft Australia’s GovTech blog. After all, it was reasoned, the areas frequently cited for concern (NSL’s and Section 215/FISA orders) were already there to begin with. Quoting from the article:

In fact, U.S. courts have long held that a company with a presence in the United States is obligated to respond to a valid demand by the U.S. government for information – regardless of the physical location of the information – so long as the company retains custody or control over the data. The seminal court decision in this area is United States v. Bank of Nova Scotia, 740 F.2d 817 (11th Cir. 1984) (requiring a U.S. branch of a Canadian bank to produce documents held in the Cayman Islands for use in U.S. criminal proceedings)

So while the Patriot Act might have made it easier in some cases for the U.S. government to gain access to certain end-user data, the right was always there. Again quoting from Bullwinkel:

The Patriot Act, for example, enabled the U.S. government to use a single search warrant obtained from a federal judge to order disclosure of data held by communications providers in multiple states within the U.S., instead of having to seek separate search warrants (from separate judges) for providers that are located in different states. This streamlined the process for U.S. government searches in certain cases, but it did not change the underlying right of the government to access the data under applicable laws and prior court decisions.

Rebuttal 2: Section 215’s are not often used and there are significant limitations on the data you can get using an NSL.

Interestingly, it appears that the more powerful section 215 orders have not been used that often in practice. The best article to read to understand the detail is one by Alex Lakatos. According to him, less than 100 applications for section 215 orders were made in 2010. He says:

In 2010, the US government made only 96 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts for FISA Orders granting access to business records. There are several reasons why the FBI may be reluctant to use FISA Orders: public outcry; internal FBI politics necessary to obtain approval to seek FISA Orders; and, the availability of other, less controversial mechanisms, with greater due process protections, to seek data that the FBI wants to access. As a result, this Patriot Act tool poses little risk for cloud users.

So while section 215 orders seem less used, NSL’s seem to be used a dime a dozen – which I suppose is understandable since you don’t have to deal with a pesky judge and all that annoying due process. But the downside of NSL’s from a law enforcement point of view is that the the sort of data accessible via the NSL is somewhat limited. Again quoting from Lakatos (with emphasis mine):

While the use of NSLs is not uncommon, the types of data that US authorities can gather from cloud service providers via an NSL is limited. In particular, the FBI cannot properly insist via a NSL that Internet service providers share the content of communications or other underlying data. Rather [.] the statutory provisions authorizing NSLs allow the FBI to obtain “envelope” information from Internet service providers. Indeed, the information that is specifically listed in the relevant statute is limited to a customer’s name, address, and length of service.

The key point is that the FBI has no right to content via an NSL. This fact may not stop the FBI from having a try at getting that data anyway, but it seems that savvy service providers are starting to wise up to exactly what information an NSL applies to. This final quote from the Lakato article summarises the point nicely and at the same time, offers cloud providers a strategy to mitigate the risk to their customers.

The FBI often seeks more, such as who sent and received emails and what websites customers visited. But, more recently, many service providers receiving NSLs have limited the information they give to customers’ names, addresses, length of service and phone billing records. “Beginning in late 2009, certain electronic communications service providers no longer honored” more expansive requests, FBI officials wrote in August 2011, in response to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Although cloud users should expect their service providers that have a US presence to comply with US law, users also can reasonably ask that their cloud service providers limit what they share in response to an NSL to the minimum required by law. If cloud service providers do so, then their customers’ data should typically face only minimal exposure due to NSLs.

Rebuttal 3: Too much focus on cloud data – there are other significant areas of concern

This one for me is a perverse slam-dunk counter argument that puts the FUD defence of a server hugger back in its box. The reason it is perverse is that it opens up the debate that for some server huggers, may mean that they are already exposed to the risks they are raising. You see, the thing to always bear in mind is that the Patriot Act applies to data, not just the cloud. This means that data, in any shape or form is susceptible in some circumstances if a service provider exercises some degree of control over it. When you consider all the applicable companies that I listed earlier in the discussion like IBM, Accenture, McAfee, EMC, RIM and Apple, you then start to think about the other services where this notion of “control” might come into play.

What about if you have outsourced your IT services and management to IBM, HP or Accenture? Are they running your datacentres? Are your executives using Blackberry services? Are you using an outsourced email spam and virus scanning filter supplied by a security firm like McAfee? Using federated instant messaging? Performing B2B transactions with a US based company?

When you start to think about all of the other potential touch-points where control over data is exercised by a service provider, things start to look quite disturbing. We previously established that pretty much any organisation with a US interest (whether US owned or not), falls under Patriot Act jurisdiction and may be gagged from disclosing anything. So sure. . .cloud applications are a potential risk, but it may well be that any one of these companies providing services regarded as “non cloud” might receive an NSL or section 215 order with a gag provision, ordering them to hand over some data in their control. In the case of an outsourced IT provider, how can you be sure that the data is not straight out of your very own datacenter?

Rebuttal 4: Most other countries have similar laws

It also turns out that many other jurisdictions have similar types of laws. Canada, the UK, most countries in the EU, Japan and Australia are some good examples. If you want to dig into this, examine Clive Gringa’s article on the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) and an article published by the global law firm Linklaters (a SharePoint site incidentally), on the legislation of several EU countries.

In the UK, RIPA governs the prevention and detection of acts of terrorism, serious crime and “other national security interests”. It is available to security services, police forces and authorities who investigate and detect these offenses. The act regulates interception of the content of communications as well as envelope information (who, where and when). France has a bunch of acts which I won’t bore you too much with, but after 911, they instituted act 2001-1062 of 15 November 2001 which strengthens the powers of French law enforcement agencies. Now agencies can order anyone to provide them with data relevant to an inquiry and furthermore, the data may relate to a person other than the one being subject to the disclosure order.

The Linklaters article covers Spain and Belgium too and the laws are similar in intent and power. They specifically cite a case study in Belgium where the shoe was very much on the other foot. US company Yahoo was fined for not co-operating with Belgian authorities.

The court considered that Yahoo! was an electronic communication services provider (ESP) within the meaning of the Belgian Code of Criminal Procedure and that the obligation to cooperate with the public prosecutor applied to all ESPs which operate or are found to operate on Belgian territory, regardless of whether or not they are actually established in Belgium

I could go on citing countries and legal cases but I think the point is clear enough.

Rebuttal 5: Many countries co-operate with US law enforcement under treaties

So if the previous rebuttal argument that other countries have similar regimes in place is not convincing enough, consider this one. Lets assume that data is hosted by a major cloud services provider with absolutely zero presence in, or contacts with, the United States. There is still a possibility that this information may still be accessible to the U.S. government if needed in connection with a criminal case. The means by which this can happen is via international treaties relation to legal assistance. These are called Mutual Assistance Legal Treaties (MLAT).

As an example, US and Australia have had a longstanding bilateral arrangement. This provides for law enforcement cooperation between the two countries and under this arrangement, either government can potentially gain access to data located within the territory of the other. To give you an idea of what such a treaty might look like consider the scope of the Australia-US one. The scope of assistance is wide and I have emphasised the more relevant ones:

• (a) taking the testimony or statements of persons;
• (b) providing documents, records, and other articles of evidence;
• (c) serving documents;
• (d) locating or identifying persons;
• (e) transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes;
• (f) executing requests for searches and seizures and for restitution;
• (g) immobilizing instrumentalities and proceeds of crime;
• (h) assisting in proceedings related to forfeiture or confiscation; and
• (i) any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the Requested State.

For what its worth, if you are interested in the boundaries and limitations of the treaty, it states that the “Central Authority of the Requested State may deny assistance if”:

• (a) the request relates to a political offense;
• (b) the request relates to an offense under military law which would not be an offense under ordinary criminal law; or
• (c) the execution of the request would prejudice the security or essential interests of the Requested State.

Interesting huh? Even if you host in a completely independent country, better check the treaties they have in place with other countries.

Rebuttal 6: Other countries are adjusting their laws to reduce the impact

The final rebuttal to the whole Patriot Act argument that I will cover is that things are moving fast and countries are moving to mitigate the issue regardless of the points and counterpoints that I have presented here. Once again I will refer to an article from Alex Lakatos, who provides a good example. Lakatos writes that the EU may re-write their laws to ensure that it would be illegal for the US to invoke the Patriot Act in certain circumstances.

It is anticipated, however, that at the World Economic Forum in January 2012, the European Commission will announce legislation to repeal the existing EU data protection directive and replace it with more a robust framework. The new legislation might, among other things, replace EU/US Safe Harbor regulations with a new approach that would make it illegal for the US government to invoke the Patriot Act on a cloud-based or data processing company in efforts to acquire data held in the European Union. The Member States’ data protection agency with authority over the company’s European headquarters would have to agree to the data transfer.

Now Lakatos cautions that this change may take a while before it actually turns into law, but nevertheless is something that should be monitored by cloud providers and cloud consumers alike.

Conclusion

So what do you think? Are you enlightened and empowered or confused and jaded?

I think that the Patriot Act issue is obviously a complex one that is not well served by arguments based on fear, uncertainty and doubt. The risks are real and there are precedents that demonstrate those risks. Scarily, it doesn’t make much digging to realise that those risks are more widespread than one might initially consider. Thus, if you are going to play the Patriot Act card for FUD reasons, or if you are making a genuine effort to mitigate the risks, you need to look at all of the touch points where service provider might exercise a degree of control. They may not be where you think they are.

In saying all of this, I think this examination highlights some strategy that can be employed by cloud providers and cloud consumers alike. Firstly, If I were a cloud provider, I would state my policy about how much data will be given when confronted by an NSL (since that has clear limitations). Many providers may already do this, so to turn it around to the customer, it is incumbent on cloud consumers to confirm with the providers as to where they stand. I don’t know if there is that much value in asking a cloud provider if they are exempt from the reach of the Patriot Act. Maybe its better to assume they are affected and instead, ask them how they intend to mitigate their customers downlevel risks.

Another obvious strategy for organisations is to encrypt data before it is stored on cloud infrastructure. While that is likely not going to be an option in a software as a service model like Office 365, it is certainly an option in the infrastructure and platform as a service models like Amazon and Azure. That would reduce the impact of a Section 215 Order being executed as the cloud provider is unlikely going to have the ability to decrypt the data.

Finally (and to sound like a broken record), a little information management governance would not go astray here. Organisations need to understand what data is appropriate for what range of cloud services. This is security 101 folks and if you are prudent in this area, cloud shouldn’t necessarily be big and scary.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

www.sevensigma.com.au

p.s Now do not for a second think this article is exhaustive as this stuff moves fast. So always do your research and do not rely on an article on some guys blog that may be out of date before you know it.

“That’s only 10%…”

One of my mentors who is mentioned in the book I wrote with Kailash (Darryl) is a veteran project manager in the construction and engineering industry. He has been working as a project manager more than 30 years, is a fellow of the Institute of Engineers and marks exams at the local university for those studying a Masters Degree in Project Management. His depth of knowledge and experience is abundantly clear when you start working with him and I have learned more about collaborative project delivery from him than anyone else.

Recently I was talking with him and he said something really interesting. He was telling some stories from the early days of alliancing based project delivery in Australia (alliancing is a highly interesting collaborative project governance approach that we devote a chapter to in our book). He stated that alliancing at its core is the application of good project management practice. Now I know Darryl pretty well and knew what he meant by that, but commented to him that when you say the word “project management practice,” some would associate that statement with (among other things) a well-developed Gantt chart listing activities with names, tasks and times.

His reply was unsurprising: “at best that’s only 1/10th of what project management is really about.”

Clearly Darryl has a much deeper and holistic view of what project management is than many other practitioners I’ve worked with. Darryl argues that those who criticise project management are actually criticising a small subset of the discipline, based on their less than complete view of what the discipline entails. Thus by definition, the remedies they propose are misinformed or solve a problem that has already been solved.

Whether you agree with Darryl or not, there is a pattern here that occurs continually in organisation-land. Fanboys of a particular methodology, framework model or practice (me included) will waste no time dumping on whatever they have grown to dislike and swear that their “new approach” addresses the gaps. Those with a more holistic view like Darryl might argue that crusaders aren’t really inventing anything new and that if a gap exists, it’s a gap in the knowledge of those doing the criticising.

As Ambrose Bierce said, “There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of things we don’t know.”

From project management to systems thinking…

Now with that in mind, here’s a little anecdote. A few weeks back I joined a Design Thinking group on LinkedIn. I had read about Design Thinking during its hype phase a couple of years ago and my immediate thought was “Isn’t this just systems thinking reinvented?” You see, I more or less identify myself as a bit of a pragmatic systems thinker, in that I like to broaden a discussion, but I also actually get shit done. So I was curious to understand how design thinkers see themselves as different from systems thinkers.

I followed several threads on the LinkedIn group as the question had been discussed a few times. Unfortunately, no-one could really put their finger on the difference. Eventually I found a recent paper by Pourdehnad, Wexler and Wilson which went into some detail on the two disciplines and offered some distinctions. I won’t bother you with the content, except to say it was a good read, and left me with the following choices about my understanding of systems and design thinking:

• That my understanding of systems thinking is wrong and I am in fact a design thinker after all
• That I am indeed a systems thinker and design thinking is just systems thinking with a pragmatic bent

Of course being a biased human, I naturally believe the latter point is more correct.

From systems to #stoos

Like the Snowbird retreat that spawned the agile manifesto, the recent stoos movement has emerged from a group of individuals who came together to discuss problems they perceive in existing management structures and paradigms. Now this would have been an exhilarating and inspiring event to be at – a bunch of diverse people finding emergent new understandings of organisations and how they ought to be run. Much tacit learning would have occurred.

But a problem is that one has to have been there to truly experience it. Any published output from this gathering cannot convey the vibe and learning (the tacit punch) that one would get from experiencing the event in the flesh. This is the effect of codifying knowledge into the written form. Both myself and Kailash were fully cognisant of this when we read the material on the stoos website and knew that for us, some of it would cover old ground. Nevertheless, my instinctive first reaction to what I read was “I bet someone will complain that this is just design thinking reinvented.”

Guess what… a short time later that’s exactly what happened too. Someone tweeted that very assertion! Presumably this opinion was offered by a self-identified design thinker who felt that the stoos crowd was reinventing the wheel that design thinkers had so painstakingly put together. My immediate urge was to be a smartarse and send back a tweet telling this person that design thinking is just pragmatic systems thinking anyway so he was just as guilty as the #stoos crowd. I then realised I might be found guilty of the same thing and someone might inform me of some “deeper knowing” than systems thinking. Nevertheless I couldn’t resist and made a tweet to that effect.

The decay (or remarkable recurrence) of knowledge…

(At this point I discussed this topic with Kailash and have looped him into the conversation)

Both of us see a pattern of a narrow focus or plain misinterpretation of what has come before. As a result, it seems there is a tendency to reinvent the wheel and slap a new label on claiming it to be unique or profound. We wonder therefore, how much of the ideas of new groups or movements are truly new.

Any corpus of knowledge is a bunch of memes – “ideas, behaviours or styles that spread from person to person within a culture.” Indeed, entire disciplines such as project management can be viewed as a bunch of memes that have been codified into a body of knowledge. Some memes are “sticky,” in that they are more readily retained and communicated, while others get left behind. However, stickiness is no guarantee of rightness. Two examples of such memes that we covered in our book are the waterfall methodology and the PERT scheduling technique Though both have murky origins and are of questionable utility, they are considered to be stock standard in the PM world, at least in certain circles. While it would take us too far afield to recount the story here (and we would rather you read our book  ) the point is that some techniques are widely taught and used despite being deeply flawed. Clearly the waterfall meme had strong evolutionary characteristics of survival while the story of its rather nuanced beginnings have been lost until recently.

A person indoctrinated in a standard business school curriculum sees real-life situations through the lens of the models (or memes!) he or she is familiar with. To paraphrase a well-known saying – if one is familiar only with a hammer, every problem appears as a nail. Sometime (not often enough!) the wielder of the metaphorical hammer eventually realises that not all problems yield to hammering. In other words, the models they used to inform their actions were incomplete, or even incorrect. They then cast about for something new and thus begin a quest for a new understanding. In the present day world one doesn’t have to search too hard because there are several convenient corpuses of knowledge to choose from. Each supply ready-made models of reality that make more sense than the last and as an added bonus, one can even get a certification to prove that one has studied it.

However, as demonstrated above with the realisation that not all problems yield to hammering, reality can truly be grasped only through experience, not models. It is experience that highlights the difference between the real-world and the simplistic one that is captured in models. Reality consists of complex, messy situations and any attempt to capture reality through concepts and models will always be incomplete. In the light of this it is easy to see why old knowledge is continually rediscovered, albeit in a different form. Since models attempt to grasp the ungraspable, they will all contain many similarities but will also have some differences. The stoos movement, design thinking and systems thinking are rooted in the same reality, so their similarities should not be surprising.

Coming back to Darryl – his view of project management with 30 years experience includes a whole bunch of memes and models, that for whatever reason, tend to be less sticky than the ones we all know so well. Why certain memes are less successful than others in being replicated from person to person is interesting in its own right and has been discussed at length in our book. For now, we’ll just say that those who come up with new labels to reflect their new understandings are paradoxically wise and narrow minded at the same time. They are wise in that they are seeking better models to understand the reality they encounter, but at the same time likely trashing some worthwhile ones too. Reality is multifaceted and cannot be captured in any particular model, so the finders of a new truth should take care that they do not get carried away by their own hyperbole.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee (with Kailash Awati)

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hi all

Just a quick note to mention that I’m off travelling again, this time swapping 39 degree Celsius summer weather of Perth for somewhere between –6 to 5 degrees of Canada. I’ll be spending a week in Canada running two classes – one public and one private. The first class is a public SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class running in Vancouver. MVP Michal Pisarek of SharePointAnalystHQ fame will be there and it should be a terrific two days of learning how to think a little differently to govern SharePoint strategy and deployment. You will learn a bunch of new skills, techniques and perspectives. Best of all, the skills learnt are applicable for many other types of complex projects.

The class flyer is here: http://www.sevensigma.com.au/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/02/SPIA.pdf

The registration site is here: http://spiavancouver.eventbrite.com/

In terms of course coverage and content it is worth noting the research performed by the Eventful group (who run the Share conferences). According to them, the hot topic areas for SharePoint are governance, user adoption, change management, information architecture and user empowerment. These sort of topics are the sort where plenty of people tell you what the issues are, but are typically lighter on what to do about them. This class covers why this is, as well as dealing with all of these areas and presents detailed strategies, tools and methods to address them. Furthermore, aside from the 500+ page manual of meaty governance goodness, as a take home, we supply a CD for attendees with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator and sample mind maps of Information Architecture.

At last count there were 5 places left for the Vancouver class, so if you have been pondering if it is a worthwhile class, check out some of the feedback from the class web site. Also, if you know anybody who might be interested in attending, please pass the course flyer and registration site details to them. We always end up with people who tell us “Ah – if only I knew about the class!!”

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hi all

Welcome to my fifth post that delves into the irrational world of cloud computing. After examining the not-so-obvious aspects of Microsoft, Amazon and the industry more broadly, its time to shift focus a little. Now the appeal of the cloud really depends on your perspective. To me, there are three basic motivations for getting in on the act…

1. I can make a buck
2. I can save a buck
3. I can save a buck (and while I am at it, escape my pain-in-the-ass IT department)

If you haven’t guessed it, this post will examine #3, and look at what the cloud means for the the perennial issue of the IT department and business disconnect. I recently read an article over at CIO magazine where they coined the term “Server Huggers” to describe the phenomenon I am about to describe. So to set the flavour for this discussion, let me tell you about the biggest secret in organisational life…

We all have an identity crisis (so get over it).

In organizations, there are roles that I would call transactional (i.e. governed by process and clear KPI’s) and those that are knowledge-based (governed by gut feel and insight). Whilst most roles actually entail both of these elements, most of us in SharePoint land are the latter. In fact we actually spend a lot of time in meeting rooms “strategizing” the solutions that our more transactionally focused colleagues will be using to meet their KPI’s. Beyond SharePoint, this also applies to Business Analysts, Information Architects, Enterprise Architects, Project Managers and pretty much anyone with the word “senior”, “architect”, “analyst”  or “strategic” in their job title.

But there is a big, fat, elephant in the “strategizing room” of certain knowledge worker roles that is at the root of some irrational organisational behaviour. Many of us are suffering a role-based identity crisis. To explain this, lets pick a straw-man example of one of the most conflicted roles of all right now: Information Architects.

One challenge with the craft of IA is pace of change, since IA today looks very different from its library and taxonomic roots. Undoubtedly, it will look very different ten years from now too as it gets assailed from various other roles and perspectives, each believing their version of rightness is more right. Consider this slightly abridged quote from Joshua Porter:

Worse, the term “information architecture” has over time come to encompass, as suggested by its principal promoters, nearly every facet of not just web design, but Design itself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the latest update of Rosenfeld and Morville’s O’Reilly title, where the definition has become so expansive that there is now little left that isn’t information architecture […] In addition, the authors can’t seem to make up their minds about what IA actually is […] (a similar affliction pervades the SIGIA mailing list, which has become infamous for never-ending definition battles.) This is not just academic waffling, but evidence of a term too broadly defined. Many disciplines often reach out beyond their initial borders, after catching on and gaining converts, but IA is going to the extreme. One technologist and designer I know even referred to this ever-growing set of definitions as the “IA land-grab”, referring to the tendency that all things Design are being redefined as IA.

You can tell when a role is suffering an identity crisis rather easily too. It is when people with the current role start to muse that the title no longer reflects what they do and call for new roles to better reflect the environment they find themselves in. Evidence for this exists further in Porter’s post. Check out the line I marked with bold below:

In addition, this shift is already happening to information architects, who, recognizing that information is only a byproduct of activity, increasingly adopt a different job title. Most are moving toward something in the realm of “user experience”, which is probably a good thing because it has the rigor of focusing on the user’s actual experience. Also, this as an inevitable move, given that most IAs are concerned about designing great things. IA Scott Weisbrod, sees this happening too: “People who once identified themselves as Information Architects are now looking for more meaningful expressions to describe what they do – whether it’s interaction architect or experience designer”

So while I used the example of Information Architects as an example of how pace of change causes an identity crisis, the advent of the cloud doesn’t actually cause too many IA’s (or whatever they choose to call themselves) to lose too much sleep. But there are other knowledge-worker roles that have not really felt the effects of change in the same way as their IA cousins. In fact, for the better part of twenty years one group have actually benefited greatly from pace of change. Only now is the ground under their feet starting to shift, and the resulting behaviours are starting to reflect the emergence of an identity crisis that some would say is long overdue.

IT Departments and the cloud

At a SharePoint Saturday in 2011, I was on a panel and we were asked by an attendee what effect Office 365 and other cloud based solutions might have on a traditional IT infrastructure role. This person asking was an infrastructure guy and his question was essentially around how his role might change as cloud solutions becomes more and more mainstream. Of course, all of the SharePoint nerds on the panel didn’t want to touch that question with a bargepole and all heads turned to me since apparently I am “the business guy”. My reply was that he was sensing a change – commoditisation of certain aspects of IT roles. Did that mean he was going to lose his job? Unlikely, but nevertheless when  change is upon us, many of us tend to place more value on what we will lose compared to what we will gain. Our defence mechanisms kick in.

But lets take this a little further: The average tech guy comes in two main personas. The first is the tech-cowboy who documents nothing, half completes projects then loses interest, is oblivious to how much they are in over their head and generally gives IT a bad name. They usually have a lot of intellectual intelligence (IQ), but not so much emotional intelligence (EQ). Ben Curry once referred to this group as “dumb smart guys.” The second persona is the conspiracy theorist who had to clean up after such a cowboy. This person usually has more skills and knowledge than the first guy, writes documentation and generally keeps things running well. Unfortunately, they also can give IT a bad name. This is because, after having to pick up the pieces of something not of their doing, they tend to develop a mother hen reflex based on a pathological fear of being paged at 9pm to come in and recover something they had no part in causing. The aforementioned cowboys rarely last the distance and therefore over time, IT departments begin to act as risk minimisers, rather than business enablers.

Now IT departments will never see it this way of course, instead believing that they enable the business because of their risk minimisation. Having spent 20 years being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, security-type IT guy, I totally get why this happens as I was the living embodiment of this attitude for a long time. Technology is getting insanely complex while users innate ability to do some really risky and dumb is increasing. Obviously, such risk needs to be managed and accordingly, a common characteristic of such an IT department is the word “no” to pretty much any question that involves introducing something new (banning iPads or espousing the evils of DropBox are the best examples I can think of right now). When I wrote about this issue in the context of SharePoint user adoption back in 2008, I had this to say:

The mother hen reflex should be understood and not ridiculed, as it is often the user’s past actions that has created the reflex. But once ingrained, the reflex can start to stifle productivity in many different ways. For example, for an employee not being able to operate at full efficiency because they are waiting 2 days for a helpdesk request to be actioned is simply not smart business. Worse still, a vicious circle emerges. Frustrated with a lack of response, the user will take matters into their own hands to improve their efficiency. But this simply plays into the hands of the mother hen reflex and for IT this reinforces the reason why such controls are needed. You just can’t trust those dog-gone users! More controls required!

The long term legacy of increasing technical complexity and risk is that IT departments become slow-moving and find it difficult to react to pace of change. Witness the number of organisations still running parts of their business on Office 2003, IE6 and Windows XP. The rest of the organisation starts to resent using old tools and the imposition of process and structure for no tangible gain. The IT department develops a reputation of being difficult to deal with and taking ages to get anything done. This disconnect begins to fester, and little by little both IT and “the business” develop a rose-tinged view of themselves (which is known as groupthink) and a misguided perception of the other.

At the end of the day though, irrespective of logic or who has the moral high ground in the debate, an IT department with a poor reputation will eventually lose. This is because IT is no longer seen as a business enabler, but as a cost-center. Just as organisations did with the IT outsourcing fad over the last decade, organisational decision makers will read CIO magazine articles about server huggers look longingly to the cloud, as applications become more sophisticated and more and more traditional vendors move into the space, thus legitimising it. IT will be viewed, however unfairly, as a burden where the cost is not worth the value realised. All the while, to conservative IT, the cloud represents some of their worst fears realised. Risk! risk! risk! Then the vicious circle of the mother-hen reflex will continue because rogue cloud applications will be commissioned without IT knowledge or approval. Now we are back to the bad old days of rogue MSAccess or SharePoint deployments that drives the call for control based governance in the first place!

<nerd interlude>

Now to the nerds reading this post who find it incredibly frustrating that their organisation will happily pump money into some cloud-based flight of fancy, but whine when you want to upgrade the network, I want you to take take note of this paragraph as it is really (really) important! I will tell you the simple reason why people are more willing to spend more money on fluffy marketing than IT. In the eyes of a manager who needs to make a profit, sponsoring a conference or making the reception area look nice is seen as revenue generating. Those who sign the cheques do not like to spend capital on stuff unless they can see that it directly contributes to revenue generation! Accordingly, a bunch of servers (and for that matter, a server room) are often not considered expenditure that generates revenue but are instead considered overhead! Overhead is something that any smart organisation strives to reduce to remain competitive. The moral of the story? Stop arguing cloud vs. internal on what direct costs are incurred because people will not care! You would do much better to demonstrate to your decision makers that IT is not an overhead. Depending on how strong your mother hen reflex is and how long it has been in place, that might be an uphill battle.

</nerd interlude>

Defence mechanisms…

Like the poor old Information Architect, the rules of the game are changing for IT with regards to cloud solutions. I am not sure how it will play out, but I am already starting to see the defence mechanisms kicking in. There was a CIO interviewed in the “Server Huggers” article that I referred to earlier (Scott Martin) who was hugely pro-cloud. He suggested that many CIO’s are seeing cloud solutions as a threat to the empire they have built:

I feel like a lot of CIOs are in the process of a kind of empire building.  IT empire builders believe that maintaining in-house services helps justify their importance to the company. Those kinds of things are really irrational and not in the best interest of the company […] there are CEO’s who don’t know anything about technology, so their trusted advisor is the guy trying to protect his job.

A client of mine in Sydney told me he enquired to his IT department about the use of hosted SharePoint for a multi-organisational project and the reply back was a giant “hell no,” based primarily on fear, uncertainty and doubt. With IT, such FUD is always cloaked in areas of quite genuine risk. There *are* many core questions that we must ask cloud vendors when taking the plunge because to not do so would be remiss (I will end this post with some of those questions). But the key issue is whether the real underlying reason behind those questions is to shut down the debate or to genuinely understand the risks and implications of moving to the cloud.

How can you tell an IT department is likely using a FUD defence? Actually, it is pretty easily because conservative IT is very predictable – they will likely try and hit you with what they think is their slam-dunk counter argument first up. Therefore, they will attempt to bury the discussion with the US Patriot Act Issue. I’ve come across this issue and and Mark Miller at FPWeb mentioned to me that this comes up all the time when they talk about SharePoint hosting to clients. (I am going to cover the Patriot Act issue in the next post because it warrants a dedicated post).

If the Patriot Act argument fails to dent unbridled cloud enthusiasm, the next layer of defence is to highlight cloud based security (identity, authentication and compliance) as well as downtime risk, citing examples such as the September outage of Office 365, SalesForce.com’s well publicized outages, the Amazon outage that took out Twitter, Reddit, Foursquare, Turntable.fm, Netflix and many, many others. The fact that many IT departments do not actually have the level of governance and assurance of their systems that they aspire to will be conveniently overlooked. 

Failing that, the last line of defence is to call into question the commercial viability of cloud providers. We talked about the issues facing the smaller players in the last post, but It is not just them. What if the provider decides to change direction and discontinue a service? Google will likely be cited, since it has a habit of axing cloud based services that don’t reach enough critical mass (the most recent casualty is Google health being retired as I write this).  The risk of a cloud provider going out of business or withdrawing a service is a much more serious risk than when a software supplier fails. At least when its on premise you still have the application running and can use it.

Every FUD defence is based on truth…

Now as I stated above, all of the concerns listed above are genuine things to consider before embarking on a cloud strategy. Prudent business managers and CIOs must weigh the pros and cons of cloud offering before rushing into a deployment that may not be appropriate for their organisation. Equally though, its important to be able to see through a FUD defence when its presented. The easiest way to do this is do some of your own investigations first.

To that end, you can save yourself a heap of time by checking out the work of Richard Harbridge. Richard did a terrific cloud talk at the most recent Share 2011 conference. You can view his slide deck here and I recommend really going through slides 48-81. He has provided a really comprehensive summary of considerations and questions to ask. Among other things, he offered a list of questions that any organisation should be asking providers of cloud services. I have listed some of them below and encourage you to check out his slide deck as it is really comprehensive and covers way more than what I have covered here.

Security	Storage	Identity & Access
Who will have access to my data? Do I have full ownership of my data? What type of employee / contractor screening you do, before you hire them? How do you detect if an application is being attacked (hacked), and how is that reported to me and my employees? How do you govern administrator access to the service? What firewalls and anti-virus technology are in place?	What controls do you have in place to ensure safety for my data while it is stored in your environment? What happens to my data if I cancel my service? Can I archive environments? Will my data be replicated to any other datacenters around the world (If yes, then which ones)?	Do you offer single sign-on for your services? Active directory integration? Do all of my users have to rely on solely web based tools? Can users work offline? Do you offer a way for me to run your application locally and how quickly I can revert to the local installation? Do you offer on-premise, web-based, or mixed environments?
Reliability & Support	Performance
What is your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity strategy? What is the retention period and recovery granularity? Is your Cloud Computing service compliant with [insert compliance regime here]? What measures do you provide to assist compliance and minimize legal risk? What types of support do you offer? How do you ensure we are not affected by upgrades to the service? What are your SLAs and how do you compensate when it is not met?	How fast is the local network? What is the storage architecture? How many locations do you have and how are they connected? Have you published any benchmark scores for your infrastructure? What happens when there is over subscription? How can I ensure CPU and memory are guaranteed?

Conclusion and looking forward…

For some organisations, the lure of cloud solutions is very seductive. From a revenue perspective, it saves a lot of capital expenditure. From a time perspective, it can be deployed very quickly and and from a maintenance perspective, takes the burden away from IT. Sounds like a winner when put that way. But the real issue is that the changing cloud paradigm potentially impacts the wellbeing of some IT professionals and IT departments because it calls into question certain patterns and practices within established roles. It also represents a loss of control and as I said earlier, people often place a higher value on what they will lose compared to what they will gain.

Irrespective of this, whether you are a new age cloud loving CIO or a server hugger, any decision to move to the cloud should be about real business outcomes. Don’t blindly accept what the sales guy tells you. Understand the risks as well as the benefits. Leverage the work Richard has done and ask the cloud providers the hard questions. Look for real world stories (like my second and third articles in this series) which illustrate where the services have let people down.

For some, cloud will be very successful. For others, the gap between expectations and reality will come with a thud.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hi

Those of you who get an RSS feed of this blog might have noticed it was busy over last week. This is because I pushed out 4 blog posts that showed my analysis using IBIS of a detailed linear discussion on LinkedIn. To save people getting lost in the analysis, I thought I’d quickly post a bit of an executive summary from the exercise.

To set context, Issue Mapping is a technique of visually capturing rationale. It is graphically represented using a simple, but powerful, visual structure called IBIS (Issue Based Information System). IBIS allows all elements and rationale of a conversation to be captured in a manner that can be easily reflected upon. Unlike prose, which is linear, the advantage of visually representing argument structure is it helps people to form a better mental model of the nature of a problem or issue. Even better, when captured this way, makes it significantly easier to identify emergent themes or key aspects to an issue.

You can find out all about IBIS and Dialogue Mapping in my new book, at the Cognexus site or the other articles on my blog.

The challenge…

On the Intranet Professionals group on LinkedIn recently, the following question was asked:

What are the main three reasons users cannot find the content they were looking for on intranet?

In all, there were more than 60 responses from various people with some really valuable input. I decided that it might be an interesting experiment to capture this discussion using the IBIS notion to see if it makes it easier for people to understand the depth of the issue/discussion and reach a synthesis of root causes.

I wrote 4 posts, each building on the last, until I had covered the full conversation. For each post, I supplied an analysis of how I created the IBIS map and then exported the maps themselves. You can follow those below:

Part 1 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/15/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-in-ibis-synthesispart-1/
Part 2 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/15/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-2/
Part 3 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/16/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-3/
Part 4 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/16/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-4/

Final map: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/maps/findstuffpart4/Linkedin_Discussion__192168031326631637693.html

For what its worth, the summary of themes from the discussion was that there were 5 main reasons for users not finding what they are looking for on the intranet.

1. Poor information architecture
2. Issues with the content itself
3. People and change aspects
4. Inadequate governance
5. Lack of user-centred design

Within these areas or “meta-themes” there were varied sub issues. These are captured in the table below.

Poor information architecture	Issues with content	People and change aspects	Inadequate governance	Lack of user-centred design
Vocabulary and labelling issues · Inconsistent vocabulary and acronyms · Not using the vocabulary of users · Documents have no naming convention Poor navigation Lack of metadata · Tagging does not come naturally to employees Poor structure of data · Organisation structure focus instead of user task focussed · The intranet’s lazy over-reliance on search	Old content not deleted Too much information of little value Duplicate or “near duplicate” content Information does not exist or an unrecognisable form	People with different backgrounds, language, education and bias’ all creating content Too much “hard drive” thinking People not knowing what they want Lack of motivation for contributors to make information easier to use Google inspired inflated expectations on search functionality on intranet Adopting social media from a hype driven motivation	Lack of governance/training around metadata and tagging Not regularly reviewing search analytics Poor and/or low cost search engine is deployed Search engine is not set up properly or used to full potential Lack of “before the fact” coordination with business communications and training Comms and intranet don’t listen and learn from all levels of the business. Ambiguous, under-resourced or misplaced Intranet ownership The wrong content is being managed There are easier alternatives available	Content is structured according to the view of the owners rather than the audience Not accounting for two types of visitors… task-driven and browse-based No social aspects to search Not making the search box available enough A failure to offer an entry level view Not accounting for people who do not know what they are looking for versus those who do Not soliciting feedback from a user on a failed search about what was being looked for

So now you have seen the final output, be sure to visit the maps and analysis and read about the journey on how this table emerged. One thing is for sure, it sure took me a hell of a lot longer to write about it than to actually do it!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hi all

This is the second post in a quick series that attempts to use IBIS to analyse an online discussion. Strange as it may sound, but I believe that issue mapping and IBIS is one of the most pure forms of information architecture you can do. This is because a mapper, you are creating a navigable mental model of speech as it is uttered live. This post is semi representative of this. I am creating an IBIS based issue map, but I’m not interacting live with participants. nevertheless, imagine if you will, you sitting in a room with a group of stakeholders answering the question on why users cannot find what they are looking for on the intranet. Can you see its utility in creating shared understanding of a multifaceted issue?

Where we left off…

We finished the previous discussion with a summary map that identified several reasons why it is hard to find information on intranets. In this post we will continue our examination of this topic. What you will notice in this post is that the number of nodes that I capture are significantly less than in part 1. This is because some topics start to become saturated and people’s contributions are the same as what is already captured. In Part 1, I captured 55 nodes from the first 11 replies to the question. In this post, I capture an additional 33 nodes from the next 15 replies.

So without further adieu, lets get into it!

Suzanne Thornley • Just another few to add (sorry 5 not 3 :-):
1. Search engine is not set up correctly or used to full potential
2. Old content is not deleted and therefore too many results/documents returned
3. Documents have no naming convention and therefore it is impossible to clearly identify what they are and if they are current.
4. Not just a lack of metadata but also a lack of governance/training around metadata/meta tagging so that less relevant content may surface because the tagging and metadata is better.
5. Poor and/or low cost search engine is deployed in the mistaken belief that users will be happy/capable of finding content by navigating through a complex intranet structure.

Suzanne offered 5 additional ideas to the original map from where we last left off. She was also straight to the point too, which always makes a mappers job of expressing it in IBIS easier. You might notice that I reversed “Old content is not deleted and therefore too many results/documents returned” in the resulting map. This is because I felt that old content not being deleted was one of a number arguments supporting why too many results are returned.

My first map refactor

With the addition of Suzanne’s contributions, I felt that it was a good time to take stock and adjust the map. First up, I felt that a lot of topics were starting to revolve around the notion of information architecture, governance and user experience design. So I grouped the themes of vocabulary, lack of metadata, excessive results and issues around structure of data as part of a meta theme of “information architecture”. I similarly grouped a bunch of answers into “governance” and “user experience design”. These for me, seemed to be the three meta-themes that were emerging so far…

For the trainspotters, Suzanne’s comment about document naming conventions was added to the “Vocabulary and labelling issues” sub-map. You can’t see it here because I collapsed the detailed so you can see the full picture of themes as they are at this point.

Patrik Bergman • Several of you mention the importance of adding good metadata. Since this doesn’t come natural to all employees, and the wording they use can differ – how do you establish a baseline for all regarding how to use metadata consistently? I have seen this in a KM product from Layer 2 for example, but it can of course be managed without this too, but maybe to a higher cost, or?

Patrick’s comment was a little hard to map. I captured his point that metadata does not come natural to employees as a pro, supporting the idea that lack of metadata is an example of poor information architecture. The other points I opted to leave off, because they were not really related to the core question on why people can’t find stuff on the intranet.

Luc de Ruijter • @Patrik. Metadata are crucial. I’ve been using them since 2005 (Tridion at that time).You can build a lot of functionality with it. And it requires standardisation. If everyone adds his own meta, this will not enable you to create solutions. You can standardize anything in any CMS. So use your CMS to include metadata. If you have a DMS the same applies. (DMS are a more logical tool for intranets, as most enterprise content exists as documenst. Software such as LiveLink can facilitate adding meta in the save as process. You just have to tick some fields before you can save a document on to the intranet.)
@Suzanne. There’s been a lot of buzz about governance. You don’t need governance over meta, you just need a sound metastructure (and a dept of function to manage it – such as library of information management). Basically a lot of ‘governance’ can be automated instead of being discussed all the time :-).

Like Patricks comment, much of what Luc said here wasn’t really related to the question at hand or has been captured already. But I did acknowledge his contribution to the governance debate, and he specifically argued against Suzanne’s point about lack of governance around metadata tagging.

Next we have a series of answers, but you will notice that most of the points are re-iterating points that have already been made.

Patrik Bergman • Thanks Luc. It seems SharePoint gives us some basic metadata handling, but perhaps we need something strong in addition to SharePoint later.

Simon Evans • My top three?
1) The information being searched does not actually exist or exists only in an unrecognisable form and therefore cannot be found!
2) As Karen says above, info is organised by departmental function rather than focussed on end to end business process.
3) Lack of metadata as above

Mahmood Ahmad • @Simon evan. I want to also add Poor Information Structure in the list. Therefore Information Management should be an important factor.

Luc de Ruijter • @Patrik. Sharepoint 2010 is the first version that does something with it. Ms is a bit slow in pushing the possibilities with it.
@Simon @Mahmood Let’s say that information structure is the foundation for an intranet (or any website), and that a lack of metadata is only a symptom of a bad foundation?

Patrik Bergman • Good thing we use the 2010 version then 😀 I will see how good it handles it, and see if we need additional software.

Erin Dammen • I believe 1) lack of robust metadata, resulting in poor search results; 2) structure is not tailored to the way the user thinks; 3) lack of motivation on the part of contributors to make their information easy to use (we have a big problem with people just PDFing EVERYTHING instead of posting HTML pages.) I like that in SP 2010, users have the power to add their own keywords and flag pages as "I like it." Let your community do some of the legwork, I think it helps!

Simon’s first point that the information searched may not exist or may not be in the right format was new, so that was captured under governance. (After all, its hard to architect information when its not there!).

I also added Erin’s third point about lack of motivation on the part of contributors. I mulled over this and decided it was a new theme, so I added it to the root question, rather than trying to make it fit into information architecture, governance or user experience design. I also captured her point on letting the community do the legwork through user tagging (known as folksonomy).

Luc de Ruijter • @all. The list of root causes remains small. This is not surprising (it would be really worrying if the list of causes would be a long list). And it is good to learn that we encounter the same (few but not so easy to solve) issues.
Still, in our line of work these root causes lack overall attention. What could be the reason for that? 🙂
@Erin Motivation is not the issue, I think; and facilitation is. If it is easier to PDF everything, than everyone will do so. And apparently everyone has the tools to do so. (If you don’t want people to PDF stuff, don’t offer them the quick fix.)
If another method of sharing documents is easier, then people will migrate. How easy is it to find PDF’s through search? How easy is it to add metadata to PDF’s? And are colleagues explained why consistent(!) meta is so relevant? Can employees add their own meta keywords? How do you maintain the quality and integrity of your keywords?
Of course it depends on your professional usergroup whether professionals will use "I like" buttons. Its a bit on the Facebook consumer edge if you’d ask me. Very en vogue perhaps, but in my view not so business ‘like’.

Luc, who is playing the devils advocate role as this discussion progresses, provides three counter arguments to Erin’s argument around user motivation. They are all captured as con’s.

Steven Osborne • 1) Its not there and never was
2) Its there but inactive so can no longer be accessed
3) Its not where someone thought it would be or should be or its not called what they thought it was called or should be called.

Marcus Hamilton-Mills • 1) The main navigation is poor
2) The content is titled poorly (e.g internal branding, uncommon wording, not easy to differentiate from other content etc.)
3) Search can’t find it due to poor meta data

patrick c walsh • 1) Navigation breaks down because there’s too much stuff
2) There’s too much crap content hidden away because there’s just too much stuff
and
3) er…there’s just too much stuff

Mark Smith • 1. Poor navigation, information architecture and content sign-posting
2. Lack of content governance, meta-data and inconsistent taxonomy, resulting in poor search capability.
3. The content they are trying to find is out of date, cannot be trusted or isn’t even available on the intranet

Luc de Ruijter • @Steven Had a bit of a laugh there
@all Am I right in making the connection between
– the huge amount of content is an issue
– that internal branding causes confusion (in labeling and titles).
and
the fact that – in most cases – these causes can be back tracked to the owners of intranet, the comms department? They produce most content clutter.
Or am I too quick in drawing that conclusion?

Now the conversation is really starting to saturate. Most of the contributions above are captured already in the map as it is, so I only added two nodes: Patrick’s point about navigation (an information architecture issue) and too much information.

Where are we at now?

We will end part 2 with a summary below. Like the first post, you can click here to see the maps exported in more detail. In part 3, the conversation got richer again, so the maps will change once again.

Until then, thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi all

Welcome to the fourth post about the adaptive change that cloud computing is going to have on practitioners, paradigms and organisations. The previous two posts took a look at some of the dodgier side of two of the industries biggest players, Microsoft and Amazon. While I have highlighted some dumb issues with both, I nevertheless have to acknowledge their resourcing, scalability, and ability to execute. On that point of ability to execute, in this post we are going to expand a little towards the cloud industry more broadly and the inevitable consolidation that is, and will continue to take place.

Now to set the scene, a lot of people know that in the early twentieth century, there were a lot of US car manufacturers. I wonder if you can take a guess at the number of defunct car manufacturers there have been before and after that time.

…Fifty?

…One Hundred?

Not even close…

What if I told you that there were over 1700!

Here is another interesting stat. The table below shows the years where manufacturers went bankrupt or ceased operations. Below that I have put the average shelf life of each company for that decade.

Year	1870’s	1880’s	1890’s	1900’s	1910’s	1920’s	1930’s	1940’s	1950’s	1960’s	1970’s	1980’s	1990’s	2000’s	2010’s
# defunct	4	2	5	88	660	610	276	42	13	33	11	5	5	3	5
avg years in operation	5	1	1	3	3	4	5	7	14	10	19	37	16	49	42

Now, you would expect that the bulk of closures would be depression era, but note that the depression did not start until the late 1920’s and during the boom times that preceded it, 660 manufactures went to the wall – a worse result!

The pattern of consolidation

What I think the above table shows is the classic pattern of industry consolidation after an initial phase of innovation and expansion, where over time, the many are gobbled by the few. As the number of players consolidate, those who remain grow bigger, with more resources and economies of scale. This in turn creates barriers to entry for new participants. Accordingly, the rate of attrition slows down, but that is more due to the fact that there are fewer players in the industry. Those that are left continue to fight their battles, but now those battles take longer. Nevertheless, as time goes on, the number of players consolidate further.

If we applied a cloud/web hosting paradigm to the above table, I would equate the dotcom bust of 2000 with the depression era of the 1920’s and 1930’s. I actually think with cloud computing, we are in the 1960’s and on right now. The largest of the large players have how made big bets on the cloud and have entered the market in a big, big way. For more than a decade, other companies hosted Microsoft technology, with Microsoft showing little interest beyond selling licenses via them. Now Microsoft themselves are also the hosting provider. Does that mean most the hosting providers will have the fate of Netscape? Or will they manage to survive the dance with Goliath like Citrix or VMWare have?

For those who are not Microsoft or Amazon…

Imagine you have been hosting SharePoint solutions for a number of years. Depending on your size, you probably own racks or a cage in some-one else’s data centre, or you own a small data centre yourself. You have some high end VMWare gear to underpin your hosting offerings and you do both managed SharePoint (i.e. offer a basic site collection subscription with no custom stuff – ala Office 365) and you offer dedicated virtual machines for those who want more control (ala Amazon). You have dutifully paid your service provider licensing to Microsoft, have IT engineers on staff, some SharePoint specialists, a helpdesk and some dodgy sales guys – all standard stuff and life is good. You had a crack at implementing SharePoint multi tenancy, but found it all a bit too fiddly and complex.

Then Amazon comes along and shakes things up with their IaaS offerings. They are cost competitive, have more data centres in more regions, a higher capacity, more fault tolerance, a wider variety of services and can scale more than you can. Their ability to execute in terms of offering new services is impossible to keep up with. In short, they slowly but relentlessly take a chunk of the market and continue to grow. So, you naturally counter by pushing the legitimate line that you specialise in SharePoint, and as a result customers are in much more trusted hands than Amazon, when investing on such a complex tool as SharePoint.

But suddenly the game changes again. The very vendor who you provide cloud-based SharePoint services for, now bundles it with Exchange, Lync and offers Active Directory integration (yeah, yeah, I know there was BPOS but no-one actually heard of that). Suddenly the argument that you are a safer option than Amazon is shot down by the fact that Microsoft themselves now offer what you do. So whose hands are safer? The small hosting provider with limited resources or the multinational with billions of dollars in the bank who develops the product? Furthermore, given Microsoft’s advantage in being able to mobilise its knowledge resources with deep product knowledge, they have a richer managed service offering than you can offer (i.e. they offer multi tenancy :).

This puts you in a bit of a bind as you are getting assailed at both ends. Amazon trumps you in the capabilities at the IaaS end and is encroaching in your space and Microsoft is assailing the SaaS end. How does a small fish survive in a pond with the big ones? In my opinion, the mid-tier SharePoint cloud providers will have to reinvent themselves.

The adaptive change…

So for the mid-tier SharePoint cloud provider grappling with the fact that their play area is reduced because of the big kids encroaching, there is only one option. They have to be really, really good in areas the big kids are not good at. In SharePoint terms, this means they have to go to places many don’t really want to go: they need to bolster their support offerings and move up the SharePoint stack.

You see, traditionally a SharePoint hosting provider tends to take two approaches. They provide a managed service where the customer cannot mess with it too much (i.e. Site collection admin access only). For those who need more than that, they will offer a virtual machine and wipe their hands of any maintenance or governance, beyond ensuring that  the infrastructure is fast and backed up. Until now, cloud providers could get away with this and the reason they take this approach should be obvious to anyone who has implemented SharePoint. If you don’t maintain operational governance controls, things can rapidly get out of hand. Who wants to deal with all that “people crap”? Besides, that’s a different skill set to typical skills required to run and maintain cloud services at the infrastructure layer.

So some cloud providers will kick and scream about this, and delude themselves into thinking that hosting and cloud services are their core business. For those who think this, I have news for you. The big boys think these are their core business too and they are going to do it better than you. This is now commodity stuff and a by-product of commoditisation is that many SharePoint consultancies are now cloud providers anyway! They sign up to Microsoft or Amazon and are able to provide a highly scalable SharePoint cloud service with all the value added services further up the SharePoint stack. In short, they combine their SharePoint expertise with Microsoft/Amazon’s scale.

Now on the issue of support, Amazon has no specific SharePoint skills and they never will. They are first and foremost a compelling IaaS offering. Microsoft’s support? … go and re-read part 2 if you want to see that. It seems that no matter the big multinational, level 1 tech support is always level 1 tech support.

So what strategies can a mid-tier provider take to stay competitive in this rapidly commoditising space. I think one is to go premium and go niche.

• Provide brilliant support. If I call you, day or night, I expect to speak to a SharePoint person straight away. I want to get to know them on a first name basis and I do not want to fight the defence mechanism of the support hierarchy.
• Partner with SharePoint consultancies or acquire consulting resources. The latter allows you to do some vertical integration yourself and broaden your market and offerings. A potential KPI for any SharePoint cloud provider should be that no support person ever says “sorry that’s outside the scope of what we offer.”
• Develop skills in the tools and systems that surround SharePoint or invest in SharePoint areas where skills are lacking. Examples include Project Server, PerformancePoint, integration with GIS, Records management and ERP systems. Not only will you develop competencies that few others have, but you can target particular vertical market segments who use these tools.
• (Controversial?) Dump your infrastructure and use Amazon in conjunction with another IaaS provider. You just can’t compete with their scale and price point. If you use them you will likely save costs, when combined with a second provider you can play the resiliency card and best of all … you can offer VPC 🙂

Conclusion

In the last two posts we looked at some of the areas where both Microsoft and Amazon sometimes struggle to come to grips with the SharePoint cloud paradigm. In this post, we took a look at other cloud providers having to come to grips with the SharePoint cloud paradigm of having to compete with these two giants, who are clearly looking to eke out as much value as they can from the cloud pie. Whether you agree with my suggested strategy (Rackspace appears to), the pattern of the auto industry serves as an interesting parallel to the cloud computing marketplace. Is the relentless consolidation a good thing? Probably not in the long term (we will tackle that issue in the last post in this series). In the next post, we are going to shift our focus away from the cloud providers themselves, and turn our gaze to the internal IT departments – who until now, have had it pretty good. As you will see, a big chunk of the irrational side of cloud computing comes from this area.

 

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au