I recently posted a blog regarding IT Governance policy choices titled Managing an Intrapreneur; Command & Control or Harness & Leverage? Those familiar with the challenges faced by corporations who are dealing with the Consumerization of IT and the War for Talent recognize that discussions on this topic are often quite polarized. As with most business opportunities the best results come from having an in-depth knowledge of the existing situation, a qualified evaluation of where you want to be and a detailed but flexible plan of how to get there which takes into account the interests of all stakeholders.

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Managing an Intrapreneur; Command & Control or Harness & Leverage?

The simultaneous rise of two global mega-trends, Consumerization of IT and The War for Talent, have had an enormous effect on human society in general and continue to challenge corporate IT and HR departments within the global enterprise. Whether one perceives these trends as a threat or an opportunity one thing is for sure; they are here to stay. So what makes most sense in terms of dealing with these trends within the global enterprise? Strict restrictive policies or empowerment within the boundaries of corporate governance?

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In the Software as a Services (SaaS) world, we are currently in a phase that I like to call the ‘pre-Cloud computing’ era. It has been referred to some writers as blue sky computing. The shear breadth of cloud services out there is simply staggering. You can do anything online with a service that used to be the domain of the super computers when some of us were still studying, like video editing, and you can play games that used to be available only on dedicated game consoles. But these services are often offered in a totally stand-alone fashion. Little disconnected clouds in the blue sky that is pretty, but they cannot produce rain. Stand-alone cloud services are useful on their own, but fall short of a real seamless cloud-only experience.

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More and more people have smartphones; some studies suggesting around 40% of the Dutch population (and for example 27% in the USA). These phones are often bought in combination with a 2 year subscription that includes a voice and sms text bundle and which subsidizes the price of the device itself. And for a nominal fee per month, the subscription includes unlimited, fast internet access. Some internet providers have a fair use clause in the contract which allows them to restrict someone’s access speed after they have been deemed to use more than their fair share of the total internet bandwidth.

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Ezwim recently implemented SAML based Federated SSO. Most people will hardly notice the short description of this implementation in our release document. The ones that read it will probably just frown and think it is not relevant to them. But it is a very exciting development for me. And I have gained a couple of extra gray hair in the process of implementing it!

Here is a little comparison between trust in the good ol’ days & the way trust works today, just so we have some real world concepts to hang our thoughts on:
When my grandparents still had a farm & grandpa went to the bank, the bank manager would know grandpa & therefore he was allowed to do business. Trust was based on well established knowledge.

Today, I carry an identity card with me in my wallet. When I go to the bank or hospital, they look at my ID card to determine who I am. They don’t trust me because of any knowledge about me; they trust the organization that issued me with the card.

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When people ask my mom what I do for a living, she normally answers with something along the lines of “works with computers”. I honestly don’t know how I am going to explain to her what this blog is about.

I attended the Cloud Forum 2010 conference today. Now, the conference is largely aimed at the end users and their IT management who are the ones that are being sold the benefits of “moving to the cloud“. And by elimination, WE are therefore either the service provider they move from or the ones that they would be moving to! What I am often reading about & are trying to learn is this – as a SaaS provider, how do we stay ahead of this move. Should we be a cloud based service provider at all?

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Canalysis reports an impressive growth of the worldwide smart phone market, the market grew an impressive 95% over the same quarter a year ago to 80.9 million shipped units. Although Nokia retains the leadership position with a 33% share of the market, Apple achieved a 17% share worldwide. According to Canalysis vendors will face rising price pressure in 2011 as the growth increasingly comes from the mid-range of the market.

While the smart phone market growth has so far mainly been driven by the high-end segment, the market is now reaching a tipping point where the mid-level makes up a growing proportion of that growth. Smart phones are becoming the standard!

In the past weeks two TEM acquisitions took place. Vodafone announced the acquisition of two telecom expense management companies: TnT Expense Management and Quickcomm. Later that week TMT Ventures announced the acquisition of Ezwim.  

The specifics of the Vodafone deal were not announced. Combined, Gartner estimates that the two acquired TEM companies generate under US$25M in revenue. Based on the estimated 2009 revenue of the acquired companies, their trended growth over the past 36 months as well as considering comparable TEM acquisitions; Gartner estimates that the two companies were likely acquired by Vodafone for less than US$40 million. TnT has appx 85, and Quickcomm 35 staff.

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Smartphones are very common in today’s enterprise; Strategy analytics claims that over 90% of organizations now have employees using smartphones within their organizations. Depending on the size of the organization, this can cover tens of thousands of individuals. Gartner even claims that by 2013 the mobile phone will overtake PCs as the most common web access device worldwide.

Increased productivity, improved efficiency and response times are some of the important benefits of wireless solutions. But to ensure cost control and security a formal mobility policy is crucial for any organization.

To ensure that policies will be effective, consider the following tips:

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Findings of a survey released by FCC indicate that 30 million Americans have experienced the shock of unexpected increases in their monthly phone bill. “Bill shock” is defined as an unexpected increase in a monthly bill not caused by a change in a service plan.

Shocking results!

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