You could be heroes

As IT professionals, you may not be aware of the hard work being done on your behalf by market researchers.

Here at Computing, we daily receive press releases containing the latest research into IT workers preferences / habits / spending plans / attitudes / opinion / any other often lame way to try to get coverage in the paper. So we are uniquely positioned to draw all these often-spurious trends together to gain a picture of our readers.

Well, you’d have thought so, anyway.

If you were to rely on the pollsters opinions of the IT profession you could end up with the most dysfunctional and disturbing perceptions imaginable.

Here is the latest example, which comes courtesy of the government-backed training organisation Learndirect.

According to its “hidden skills” survey, 51 per cent of IT professionals have “untapped potential” that their employers fail to take advantage of.

Quite probably true. But let’s see what the pollsters say.

Apparently, IT workers choice of superhero boss would be Bruce Wayne, alter-ego of traumatised crime-fighter Batman. Least favourite supervillain boss would be bat-nemesis The Joker.

Are you already wondering why they bothered?

My favourite part of the research identifies the hidden skills gained through activities out of work.

It seems 29 per cent of you have writing skills – proved by the fact that you do crosswords or have written letters to a local paper.

Next, 24 per cent of you have numeracy skills – which the pollsters know because you are good at Sudoku.

And 22 per cent of you have presentation skills – gleaned from giving a best man’s speech.

I don’t know about you, but I’m wondering what abilities the 71 per cent without writing skills have, or the 76 per cent without numeracy skills. Now that would be interesting research.

And apparently you are a modest bunch too. When asked who you would turn to if you wanted to discuss you hidden skills, 17 per cent said you wouldn’t tell anyone.

If any of you – and I mean even one of you – happen to recognise yourself or your colleagues from this clearly valuable and insightful research, please let me know by commenting on this blog post. Unless of course you are part of the illiterate 71 per cent who might struggle to string a few words together (perhaps you should try a crossword instead?)

Just to round off the in-depth research, it seems 37 per cent of you wish you had the power of mind reading to use at work, followed by 24 per cent who would choose invisibility as your superpower.

Personally, I’d choose an inbuilt personal spam filter for pointless and demeaning surveys.

The art of the rubbish buzzword

Why is the IT industry still so incapable of realising that the negative perceptions that surround it are largely caused by its unceasing use of jargon and rubbish buzzwords?

I realise this is hardly a new topic. There has been plenty of navel-gazing in the past on this recurring theme, but I’m inspired to write about it again thanks to Atos Origin.

The IT services provider has produced a pretty good study of the key trends affecting business and IT over the next few years. It’s called Look Out 2008+, and you can find out more about it here: http://lookout.atosconsulting.com/introduction/welcome-look-out-2008 - it’s well researched and worth a read.

But the stand-out for me was on one of the opening pages of the printed version, where the headline proudly states:

“Why is Look Out different? …because it removes the hype and gives a pragmatic view of the art of the possible.”

No hype – but “the art of the possible” ?

In other words – “We won’t use buzzwords, and to prove it, here’s a naff buzzphrase.”

This sort of jargoneering has always annoyed me no end, as it does so many people in the IT community who find themselves labelled as geeks because whenever those outside the industry read anything about what we do, it is full of all this meaningless drivel.

Sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes IT jargon becomes part of everyday language – the internet, the web, broadband, for example – but mostly it harms the image of the industry.

Is it any wonder the tech sector is struggling to attract new people to help tackle skills shortages if the first thing potential candidates read about working in IT is full of jargon and buzzwords? How is that a way to make this seem like an exciting place to work?

I wish I knew the answer – the IT industry can hardly say it has not been told remorselessly that this is a problem, yet still it cannot do anything to change.

Cutting the hype? The art of the impossible, perhaps.

A thorn among roses

I had an unusual professional experience this week – one that most people who work in IT would recognise in the same circumstances – that of being the only male in a conference room full of about 250 women.

Most technology conferences I attend are hugely male-dominated – a typical but sad reflection of the fact that just 16 per cent of the one million IT professionals in the UK are women, a figure that has been reached after the numbers dropped every year since the turn of the century.

Women in IT is one of those old technology industry perennials that is regularly discussed and investigated – yet for all the effort and initiatives to turn the situation round, still women leave the industry in droves.

My 250-to-one moment came at the Women’s Leadership Summit, a cross-industry event dedicated to showcasing the best in female business leaders from every sector of the UK. I chaired a panel debate looking at the IT industry and discussing the opportunities it presents for all potential workers – but with a particular focus on women.

I was accompanied on stage by six senior female leaders from six of the most influential consumer and business technology companies in the world – BlackBerry-maker RIM, Google, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco and Canon. Their skills and experience encompassed the full range of roles, from management to sales to engineering.

RIM’s European managing director, Charmaine Eggberry, talked about how the rapid growth of the company means it expands its workforce by 20 per cent every three months. RIM could hardly have more female-friendly employment policies – yet Eggberry still struggles to attract women even to apply for jobs. “But I have no problems recruiting men,” she said.

The concensus of opinion was that the biggest barrier to attracting women into IT is the image of the industry – a chicken-and-egg situation whereby the profession is seen as geeky, dull and male-dominated, and as a result it cannot attract a diverse workforce so remains seen as geeky, dull and male-dominated. Yet the senior speakers at this event were anything but – every one an excellent role model for the sort of career that IT can provide to anybody, regardless of gender or age.

I could debate endlessly the subject of women in IT and the reasons we have to reverse the trend, but what I took from the summit was more than simply this ongoing issue.

There was a noticeably different feel to this event, a different atmosphere to the usual male-dominated IT conferences – more open, more collaborative, more relaxed, more positive, and I would even say more inspirational and aspirational.

I walked out of the event smiling – which I suppose could be attributed to being the only bloke in a room full of successful and in some cases fairly wealthy women – but I can’t honestly say I felt the same way walking out of the keynote speech at the SAP conference last month. We simply cannot ignore the positive effect that a more balanced workforce would have on IT.

You would be amazed at the misogyny displayed in some of the letters Computing receives when we write about women in IT – a minority of course, but one the profession could do without.

Computing reporter Janie Davies has been researching the subject for an article in next week’s issue of Computing – I won’t steal her thunder but some of the tales of sexism she has been told are gobsmackingly bad; an embarrassment to every other man in IT.

Technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and the UK IT profession simply has to reflect the diversity of the people that use its products and services – or it will wither. We need 140,000 new entrants into the industry every year for the next five years – and that means significantly more than 16 per cent of those need to be female or the jobs will not be filled and the work will go overseas.

There is no shortage of initiatives to promote women in IT and to encourage women into IT. But there remains a shortage of women who want to work in IT. There is no overnight solution, but a solution must be found.

Goodbye Berlin

As SAP’s latest user conference draws to a close, what should the software giant’s customers and prospects expect over the coming months?

The event was fairly news-lite, with no big announcements from the supplier that would really shake up the market. But it was clear that there are certain messages that your friendly SAP sales rep will be pushing to IT leaders the next time he or she comes to call.

At a strategic level, the phrases you will hear most frequently this year are collaboration, “business networks” and “strategic agility”. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a classic IT marketing buzzword that means very little in the real world of running an IT department. But overall, SAP is predicting that its customers will need to become more flexible, more open, and more connected with their supply chains from customers to staff to suppliers.

The biggest SAP users – the likes of Nokia, Colgate-Palmolive, Rolls-Royce or Kraft Foods – who presented at the conference exist in a global environment with many outsourced functions and a potential for complexity that would cripple a business that does not adequately support critical processes with technology. They rely on close co-operation with suppliers and fast response to customers. They have all adopted the principle of ruthless standardisation for their IT.

For the many thousands of companies that are not operating on such a huge scale, the concepts of flexibility and collaboration will still be recognisable – if a little scary. Opening up the organisation, becoming connected to external partners, and sharing internal information do not come naturally or easily to many companies – but they will be key characteristics of successful businesses in the internet age.

At a technology level, SAP is going for a big push on its latest customer relationship management (CRM) release, SAP CRM 2007.

Insiders at the supplier privately acknowledge that SAP’s previous CRM offering was maybe not as good is it could have been, but with the new product the firm hopes to better compete with Oracle / Siebel, as well as mid-market alternatives such as Microsoft. There seems to be a big internal push on making 2008 a successful year for CRM 2007 – so expect the sales rep to come knocking soon.

This was my fourth Sapphire, but my first for a few years. Overall, I would say this is one of the better IT vendor conferences – purely because SAP is very good at getting high-profile customers to speak about what they are doing and to share their experiences with their peers. Of course, if you want to delve into products and technologies, there’s every opportunity, but as an occasion to learn from IT leaders at some of the world’s top companies, it is a worthwhile way for any IT professional to spend a couple of days.

Oh, and Berlin has some pretty good bars too… 

How to Kraft a successful software upgrade

Yet again the theme of ruthless standardisation has come through strongly in interviewing some of SAP's biggest customers here at Sapphire.

Kraft Foods is one of the very biggest – 12,000 users in Europe, 30,000 more in North America by 2010, Asia Pacific to follow later, and with the software in use since 2001.

Kraft used to have disparate systems in every country in Europe, but was very much an early mover in adopting a single, standard, unmodified version of SAP across the continent.

One of the great benefits of this was realised in October last year. The firm wanted to upgrade to the latest release of SAP to take advantage of new functionality. For most companies, the prospect of a major version upgrade to 12,000 users in many countries would make them shudder. The cost and complexity of such a project is what has historically kept too many organisation stuck on older versions of applications, with a system update taking on all the characteristics of a total re-implementation.

But for Kraft, the decision to standardise paid off – the entire upgraded system was built remotely, offsite, and implemented in just three months.

To add to the achievement, the food giant also chose to change its whole IT infrastructure at the same time – and completed that in the same three month period, working with outsourcer EDS and key supplier IBM.

Kraft senior director, SAP competency centres, Jan Ziskasen, is so laid back now about his standard implementation blueprint for SAP that he was able to be in Berlin this week despite a major part of the US project about to go live this weekend.

How many IT directors would be confident enough in an impending deadline to be happily thousands of miles away on another continent?

Business is properly going mobile - at last

Computing is attending SAP's Sapphire conference to meet and talk to the software giant's customers. We are, as always, far more interested in the real-life business experience of IT leaders - our readers - than the detail of the technology itself.

But for once, I found myself genuinely impressed by a product demonstration today.

SAP has worked with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to integrate its business applications with the BlackBerry user interface and have created a truly seamless connection between the two.

The demo featured the RIM executive who was presenting going into his BlackBerry calendar, finding a meeting with a customer, then at the click of a button bringing up that customer's history from RIM's corporate SAP software.

It is the first time I have seen a real business-focused innovation in the mobile technology world for some time, and an example of the way that business executives will be using their mobile computers - be they BlackBerrys, phones or smartphones - to really keep up with the organisation away from the office.

Email and calendars are the easy and obvious tools for flexible working, but there has been much less progress made by IT vendors in making the mobile properly a part of the core business applications that actually run the company.

SAP and BlackBerry are onto a winning combination - and an example of what will one day be the norm for business.

The customer is king

Day two at Sapphire started with something that SAP is good at – getting high-profile customers to speak at its conferences.

So much of these events is taken up with product-related information – obviously vital for users and prospective users – but even the most enthusiastic delegates would probably admit there is only so much detail you can take.

Hearing from a fellow customer though, is a different matter and is possibly the most valuable aspect of an event like this.

This morning we heard from two of SAP's biggest users.

John Clarke, chief information officer at Nokia, talked about the challenges of producing more than 300 million mobile phones every year in what has become one of the most diverse, demanding and rapidly changing markets in the world.

Clarke talked about the way that Nokia has been transformed in the last 10 years through IT, from a company where technology was holding back the business and causing great difficulties in its manufacturing and distribution, to one recognised as having one of the best supply chains in the world.

Another little snippet I liked was the diversity of the mobile phone market illustrated by the fact that in Africa, Nokia is starting to make handsets with a built-in torch, because African users find that a particularly useful feature to have.

In a recurrence of the theme emerging yesterday, Clarke's presentation highlighted again the benefit of ruthless standardisation – driving a global company through an adherence to a single standard version of its core business application.

That was echoed by the second customer speaker of the day – Paul McGarry, international vice president of global IT for manufacturing giant Colgate-Palmolive.

McGarry said that 99.6 per cent of the company runs on SAP, and highlighted the most important benefit as "taking complexity out of our IT."

While SAP may be pushing its own marketing messages, any delegate spending time listening to their peers here talking about the realities of their day-to-day work will be taking away plenty of food for thought about the reasons why they should be taking a similarly ruthless approach to simplifying and standardising their critical applications.

Footnote – One other interesting common aspect of Clarke and McGarry's presentations was the fact they are both Brits, running global IT operations for two important overseas-based organisations. It reflects well on the quality of IT leadership in the UK – something that all the UK IT profession should take pride in and shout out about a little more.   

The benefits of ruthless standardisation

One of the features of big IT supplier conferences such as SAP's Sapphire is that a theme always emerges that characterises the state of the vendor's customers.

Here in Berlin, the early signs are that the theme is the benefits of standardisation.

For several years, SAP and its main rival Oracle have been preaching to customers of the benefit of rolling out a single, common version of business applications across an organisation, with no – or the absolute minimum – of bespoke changes or additions to the package.

For the vendor, this has always made sense – not only does it hinder the use of other software, but it makes the system easier to support and maintain, especially when upgrading to new releases.

For users, the story has always been a good one – lower costs, easier support, less complexity, enforcement of core processes throughout the business – but the real-life evidence of this taking place has been less apparent.

But now, some of the early adopters have finally gone live, and are here at the conference to share their experiences.

Rolls-Royce chief information officer Jonathan Mitchell presented one such case study.

The aero engine manufacturer completed a global rollout of SAP in September last year, and is already seeing the benefits.

Mitchell discussed a few key lessons learned in the Rolls-Royce project that will be of use to others embarking on a similar initiative:

• Any requests for bespoke development had to be personally approved by him – thereby making only the most essential alterations to the standard product.
• He stressed the importance of testing – the company conducted three separate full dress rehearsals before going live, and one of the fundamental tenets of the project was that testing should never be reduced, only increased, regardless of the effect on delivery timescales.
• To enforce adequate and ongoing user training, Rolls only allows system access to licenced users – and to maintain their licences, users have to attend regular training sessions.
• The quality of your chosen super-users – the business representatives chosen to be the expert users of the system for their area of the organization – is critical to the overall project. Mitchell said the role of the super-user was central to the rollout.

The company is already seeing the benefits of the ruthless standardisation enforced by using a single software package worldwide.

As more organisations share the lessons they have learned, the more we will see smaller companies adopting a similar approach.

Magazine wholesaler Menzies Distribution is an example – the firm has just embarked on a £10m, five-year business transformation project, with a similarly ruthless standardisation based on SAP at its heart.

The growing use of unmodified, packaged software in companies is not necessarily great news if you are an in-house software developer - or perhaps it is if you are looking for an opportunity to develop new skills - but it is very good news for IT leaders looking to remove complexity from their operations and use IT to drive change and innovation across the business.

How to not delay a new software product release

Last month, SAP announced that it had delayed the release of Business ByDesign, the supplier's long-awaited software-as-a-service offering for small and medium sized businesses, after weak first-quarter financial results.

But during today's press conference here at Sapphire 2008 in Berlin, SAP co-chief executive Leo Apotheker today put the record straight, in what must be a strong candidate for the most innovative explanation for delays to a major product release by any vendor.

Apparently, Business ByDesign now has an "adjusted" rollout. In particular, SAP made a decision a while ago to accelerate the development of the product and so put extra investment into the project.

Now, all that has happened is that acceleration has been taken away, and Business ByDesign is still firmly on track to meet the delivery schedule that existed before the acceleration was put in place.

So, remember that – not delayed, merely not being accelerated any longer.

The Rough Guide to attending IT supplier conferences

Among the 15,000 or so delegates at Sapphire 2008 there are only about 600 lucky people from the UK who, as customers or prospective customers of software giant SAP, get to attend the annual user conference hosted by the German firm – this year on home ground in Berlin.

So, if you aren't one of those lucky 600, here is Computing's guide to what you are missing out on – and given that most major IT supplier conferences run very much to the same themes, Sapphire acts here purely as a case study of what you can expect from any other similar event from whatever vendors you use.

Getting there

Book early and check in online – every flight to the destination city will be packed on the day you would like to travel. This is not because everyone on board is going to the same conference as you, it is simply an irrefutable fact of IT supplier conference travel. Leave it too late and the best flights are gone, leaving you, in this case, to wake up at 6am on a Sunday morning to make it to trusty Terminal Five for a 9am plane.

As technology experts you will, of course, also practice what you preach and check in online in advance. Unless, of course, you are the friendly PR manager from the vendor who found out on arrival at Heathrow that the flight was overbooked. She was the lucky one though – squeezed into the last seat in business class with 10 minutes to spare. Unlike the reporter from, erm, one of Computing's rivals, who enjoyed T5 for an extra couple of hours after being bumped to the next flight.

Registration

Always, always register for the event in advance. Unlike the journalist from Ireland who, quite reasonably, assumed his local PR liaison had done so on his behalf (that's generally the way it works when you're a journalist – PRs come in very handy sometimes). You can therefore guess why it is important to make sure you are registered in advance, especially if you would like a hotel room while you're there.

Don't leave it to the morning of the first day to get your conference pass and obligatory free backpack - unless you want to queue with 14,999 others for an hour or so.

Check out the corporate colours of the vendor in advance. At SAP, the garish yellow lanyard hanging round your neck for the duration of your time at the event may just clash with your outfit.

And don't put anything remotely valuable or useful in your conference backpack. It only takes two or more people to stop at any stand or presentation in the exhibition hall to find a small pile of completely identical bags on the floor, most of which will be picked up by a different person to the one who placed it there.

The venue - orientation

The UK is distinguished by its lack of the sort of mammoth conference venues required to host major vendor get-togethers such as Sapphire. Most big European cities have them, as does every US city. You think the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham is big? It would fit several times over into these places.

The venue maps however, have rarely been designed by anyone that has actually been to the venue, but they look very pretty and geometric. Spend time studying them. (That sentence should have been prefixed with "You will have to…")

Nightlife

One rule: Remember to take off your garish yellow lanyard and conference pass before you go out for the evening, or become the target of sniggers all night from passers by and fellow delegates as your badge announce your name and company to the locals everywhere you go. There's always one.

Remember also the next morning to bring your garish yellow lanyard and conference pass with you when you leave your hotel room, so you don't have to run back and get it and keep all your colleagues waiting in the hotel lobby (guilty as charged, m'lud).

At the conference

If you come in a group, make sure all your colleagues have prepared their Buzzword Bingo cards before the opening keynote presentation by the IT vendor chief executive.

The winner today would be anyone who picked the following:

• Adaptive
• Enabling
• Business model innovation
• Collaboration
• Strategic agility (a worry for those who are only just coming to terms with the fact their business is meant to be "agile", I'm afraid we've already moved on to "strategic agility").
• And my personal favourite so far at Sapphire – closed loop business performance optimisation.

But particular credit must go to SAP co-chief executive Leo Apotheker who, during the post-keynote press conference (see below) managed to get "end to end", "leverage", "excellence", best in class" and "solutions" all into one sentence. I'd like to think he did it for a bet, but sadly I doubt that to be the case. 

Be prepared also for the product demo during the keynote – always delivered by The Wittiest Person In The Company.

Be also prepared, as delegates should have been today, for the eventuality that the product demo may, disturbingly, turn out to be more interesting than the speech itself.

Here also is a special warning for UK conference delegates – if you go to a US vendor event, especially if it is hosted in their home town, you may be expected to contribute to audience participation at the start of a keynote presentation. Americans love it, Brits just cringe with embarrassment.

In one memorable case in my experience, you may also find the US vendor executive thanking you, God, his work colleagues, and his wife and children (all by name) for giving him the opportunity to present to you and to be part of this great company.

The chief executives

At Sapphire, delegates are spoilt – here we have two co-chief executives to hear from, instead of the usual one. At Oracle events you come close, as Larry Ellison and his ego typically present together.

Chief executives of most IT companies have a common trait – the ability to speak for a very long time without actually saying anything. If a scientist could capture and recycle the hot air generated by IT vendor chief executives around the world, it could neutralise all the carbon emissions produced by flying 15,000 delegates to their conferences.

The press conference

And finally, to a section that would not be relevant for most delegates to prepare for the conference, but from a journalist's perspective is a critical part of the show.

Essential features of the press conference include:

• The planted question from a friendly local journalist that allows the chief executive(s) to explain what a great company they run. This is especially noticeable if the vendor is from the US and is hosting the show in their home country / town.
• The question supposedly "submitted on the web" that allows the chief executive(s) to outline a key part of the strategy that nobody else would ask about.
• The journalist from a small country who asks the global chief executive(s) about their plans for his country. Don't bother – they haven't even heard of the country.
• The incredibly technical question, often from someone who introduces themselves as "a blogger" that no vendor chief executive (no matter how many of them you have) is every likely to be able to answer. (Tip to chief executives – always have a chief technology officer standing by just in case – SAP did, it worked).
• The rush from the conference room to the limited number of tables / power points / PCs afterwards to be the first to get online and file a story.

It is also worth mentioning here another feature of the journalist's role at these events – the press room will always be at the furthest possible point away from where all the action is taking place at the conference (literally, in some cases at the gigantic US conference venues, perhaps 10 minutes walk away). This is done, presumably, to minimise the damage journalists can do by mingling with real conference delegates.

And so, to Sapphire 2008 and the real business of what the world's largest and most successful business application software supplier is up to...