Top ten non-IT ripples that changed IT

INDIA: Edward Lorenz must have had a good eye vision. He could see what many ophthalmologists might fail to see. A small flutter of a butterfly weeks before in a remote island tucked somewhere in a far off ocean can cause a storm in a city miles away.

Butterflies confront CIOs often, and at more places than just their stomachs during a CEO meeting. They can impact their Budget decisions and the way they plan and organize their IT environments.

Talking of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the IT world has not been without its share of experiences either.

Things that are seemingly alien or not directly connected sometimes have a profound and continuing impact on the very way IT is bought, consumed or managed.

A small change at a place in a deterministic nonlinear system has probably resulted in large differences to a later state called IT spending in past few years in this universe as well.

Before we meet some of these winged species, a quick jog at how IT spends look like today - where and how much.

But what might be really interesting to note first is that, at one point Gartner did revise its global IT spending forecast for 2012 from 4.6 per cent to 3.7 per cent owing to factors like global economic slowdown, the Eurozone crisis and floods in Thailand. Ripple effects happen after all, as we are about to argue.

Taking a leaf from Gartner's prognosis, one can assume that worldwide enterprise IT spending can touch $2.679 trillion in 2013, a 2.5 per cent increase of projected 2012 spending of $2.603 trillion.

With 1.2 billion people on social networks, 20 per cent of the world's population, social computing is in its next phase as has been added in the forecast.

It has been strongly advised that IT leaders must immediately incorporate social software capabilities throughout their enterprise systems.

Another big shift would be that of mobility wherein by 2016, 900 million media tablets will be purchased - one for every eight people on earth. By 2014, the installed base of devices based on lightweight mobile operating systems, such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows 8 will exceed the total installed base of all PC-based systems.

Also, by 2014, private app stores might be deployed by 60 per cent of IT organizations, and more than that the applications themselves will be redesigned - they will become context-enabled, understanding the user's intent automatically.

Another survey by a media firm pointed to an average growth of desktop management budgets at 13.6 per cent in 2012, and application management and governance systems showing average increases of 11.8 per cent and 10.8 per cent, respectively.

Mobility and wireless infrastructure displayed acceleration too. Many organizations (91 per cent) were found expecting to spend on mobile devices in 2012, while wireless equipment expenditures beeped an average year-on-year budget growth of 14.4 per cent.

Also worth noting - Mobile apps accounted for an average of nine per cent of business-application spending in large enterprises and similar up ticks were spotted in areas like rights management or identity management.

There's more that is running in the undercurrents if IT spends - from telepresence to work-from-home systems to super-powerful clusters, there are so many ripples that have triggered silent but huge waves.

A look at some oft-noted butterflies now to understand some hurricanes:

1. Congestion on urban roads

Monday is the most depressing word for many of us. It's not hard to guess why.

Being stuck in traffic for hours and crawling like snails in a jet age makes our working commute a funny paradox.

An IBM 2011 Commuter Pain Index iterates the agony of our city lives. Turns out that the daily commute in some of the world's most developed cities is longer and more gruelling than ever before, reflecting the failure of transportation infrastructure to keep pace with the booming economic activity, according to a IBM's first global Commuter Pain study.

As per this survey of 8,042 drivers in 20 cities, covering issues like the duration of their longest commute, their best and worst roadways and how gas prices affect their choices; one finds out how Indian cities like Delhi are climbing these ranks fast.

Close at the heels of cities like Beijing, Mexico City and Johannesburg, in this global poll of the worst driving commutes in the world New Delhi also came among the top 10. What more, a good majority of respondents pointed that traffic has worsened in the last three years.

IBM surveys have also shown how 65 per cent people who drive to their offices are completely stressed and have little time for their family. At the same time, some 29 per cent of the people shared that traffic jams were adversely impacting their performance at work or school. 

What could this growing malaise have meant for CIOs, except changing his radio station or routes to or hours of work? A lot more as we guess in the next part.

2. Congestion in urban skies

A research by Jones Lang LaSalle shows that the rates of urbanization in India are moving at an unprecedented speed, from 28.0 per cent in 2001 to 31.0 per cent in 2011.

India has been pointed for the highest urban population rate among BRIC nations in United Nations too. That could mean a number as huge as 843 million dwelling in Indian cities by 2050.

The way rentals have been hitting new skylines is not a surprise any more. Commercial office spaces have grown expensive and so have business budget headaches. 

And if you thought a plunging rupee or a pilot going on strike does not matter to a CIO apart from his morning newspaper time, it's not so.

The American Express Business Travel Monitor had noted in its last tracking the influence of rising oil prices and economic growth in the region are too strong to keep prices steady.  Airfares within the region were up three per cent in the second quarter of 2011 alone

Air travel has continued to become acutely expensive, with this year witnessing sharp spikes. Whether the government increases service taxes or an ailing airline squeezes down capacity, or air fares rise in line with demand; the result is a really costly air travel bill.

That's it!

May be not.

Till Time travel becomes commonplace, new technologies keep growing to address urban issues.

When a company does not want to foot such burgeoning bills or it wants an alternative to opening a new branch or travel clogged kilometers that are wasting precious executive time, it often turns towards the IT department for some down-to-earth answers.

That's where a CIO started thinking of words like video-conferencing or in connecting in other forms -Telepresence.

Not surprising then that the enterprise-grade telepresence market is slated to boom, with spending hitting $1.1bn in 2016, growing with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.5 per cent from 2011 to 2016, as per Ovum.

According to the latest IDC Worldwide Enterprise Videoconferencing and Telepresence Qview report, worldwide revenue totaled $564 million.

CIOs are not at the familiarity cusp for this breed of communication any more, the talk has moved to words like multicodec or immersive telepresence.

The video conferencing market is now embracing more trends like mobility, cloud computing and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) drive a shift toward software-based solutions and greater integration of video into unified communications (UC) offerings.

May be there's no correlation between an exhausting commute or an expensive ticket and an investment in a conference solution. But life and work has not always been about statistics. Time for another cattywampus then.

4. Disaster rolls on

Disasters keep striking the world. The forms may change, from earthquakes to tsunamis to hurricanes, but their effect stays rampant and builds up in unthought-of ways.

Unfortunately for the CIO there's nothing like a Force Majeure clause here.

According to ADRC numbers, as per EM-DAT, 196 natural disasters occurred in 2011 worldwide, killing about 28,800 people and affecting over 85 million people. The estimated amount of economic damage came close to $290 billion.

Now the year 2011 alone saw two large-scale disasters in Asia; the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan and flood in Thailand, which claimed 20,319 and 813 lives, affected over 400,000 and 9,500,000 people while bringing about economic damage worth $210 billion and $40 billion respectively.

Incidentally, in terms of region wise comparisons, Asia is the highest in the indices of disaster occurrences and number of people affected, and economic damage, and accounted 44.4 per cent, occurrences; number of people killed, 82.0 per cent; number of affected people, 94.0 per cent; and amount of economic damage, 88.7 per cent.

What the Asian Disaster Reduction Center (ADRC) Natural Disasters Data Book 2011 shows is just the surface for tech-watchers.

Floods in South East Asia or Japan's catastrophic earthquakes and tsunami, there has been an unprecedented effect on the tech industry, with no global OEMs expected to receive 100 per cent of the HDDs they require, as an analysis states.

But the effect spreads on.

In form of mote spends on DR measures or Disaster Recovery solutions.

Back in 2002, KPMG found that 79 per cent of those surveyed did not have a documented and tested Business Continuity Management (BCM) plan in place.

The statistics revealed a significant gap between an organization recognizing the need and the actual implementation of business continuity measures in various organizations, at a time when the world has recently witnessed the day called Sept 11.

Of the organisations surveyed, 71 per cent were found to be operating in a 24x7 business environment, which meant a high uptime commitment that can only be addressed through comprehensive BCM initiatives, the report said.

As it also added, some 44 per cent of the respondents experienced some kind of business disruptions in the last two years.

Towards 2009, the scenario did change.

As a Symantec survey augured, about 67 per cent of Indian Organizations were prompted by virus attacks to create a disaster recovery strategy plan. DR drivers like cost of downtime, IT's increasing role as a more critical business function, fear of data loss, customer loyalty damage and how virtualization changes organizations' approach to DR accentuated the need.

Not only that, the CIO level involvement part was also found to be dramatically rising. Involvement going up from 23 per cent of DR committees in 2008, to 72 per cent of DR committees in 2009.

his is pointed out as per an Applied Research conducted survey in June 2009 that had 1,650 worldwide responses, including 75 in India for organizations with at least 5,000 employees worldwide. It focused on DR plans and enterprise IT involved with DR management.

By the time we hit 2011, things changed further.

According to storage company CommVault's IT Storage Spending Survey, managing data growth (i.e., data reduction) has come up as the top budget priority for 2011, followed by network and equipment, disaster recovery, applications/software and data back-up and recovery.

5. Remote Control buttons

By 2013, as IDC projected that 75.5 per cent of the U.S. workforce - or 119.7 million workers - will be working remotely to some extent or other.

It is reckoned that by 2013, Asia Pacific will have 734.5 million mobile workers.

According to WorldatWork, a global human resources association tabs off and on, the telecommuting trend has grown despite mixed levels of reactions, between most loved and most loathed among corporates.

But the trend has continued to take root, with technology abetting it through high-speed Internet connections and sophisticated hand-held PDA devices. The next segment extends these shoots.

6. Generation gaps

The new workforce throws up new challenges - a high degree of diversity, a much tougher-to-wean-off comfort with gadgets at a young age, an immersive online lifestyle, and a non-negotiable expectation of more flexibility.

As tools become increasingly pervasive and affordable, while traditional nine-to-five work patterns are crushed for the young generation; things change a lot in the CIO corner room.

Not only today's workforce shows an inclination of being technology-savvy, as experts say - Work has become something you do, not a place you go to.

Flexibility is no more a luxury but a hygiene factor now.

This has translated into a very well known word in tech circles today - BYOD. What some call ‘consumerisation of IT', has panned out new demand for applications and security budgets on the CIO side.

A 2011 report from enterprise mobility provider iPass highlighted that workers who used their mobile devices for both personal and business purposes put in more work hours than those who did not.  Even if many bosses don't enjoy seeing workers browsing Facebook while on the company dime, Altimeter Group found many pieces how enterprise social networking can do a lot for a company-so long as its properly implemented.

According to the 2012 National Study of Employers, between 2005 to 2012, employers have increased their provision of options that allow employees to better manage the times and places in which they work. These include flex time (from 66 per cent to 77 per cent); flex place (from 34 per cent to 63 per cent); choices in managing time (from 78 per cent to 93 per cent); and daily time off when important needs arise (from 77 per cent to 87 per cent) as 2012 National Study of Employers tells.

7. Privacy zone equals to IT perimeters

When the White House revealed a pioneering Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, building on FTC recommendations for increasing the transparency of how businesses use people's personal information, as per media reports; it was a harbinger of more changes.

More regulations, public demand and stringent laws over privacy not only make it an imperative for the CIO to seriously include such safeguards in an organisation's IT fabric, but also make his task more rigorous.

Be it mobile apps or consumer privacy protections a CIO can not afford to shrug off privacy outcry as non-chalantly as many leading Internet companies have been found doing.

The need to invest (and more time than money) in this area is now a prerogative, with compliance costs slated to increase further. More documentation, secure walls and transparency related measure might lead to a change in IT spends as can be initially reckoned here.

8. Super Computing feats

When IBM announces a Client Center for Advanced Analytics in partnership with The Ohio State University, it does nor ring a very loud bell in CIO circles. Why should they be bothered at all? After all it's only about commercializing the technologies behind its Watson supercomputer.

Wait, that sounds relevant.

Specially when we have seen how many electric grids worldwide have started plugging into super-intelligence. To better handle demand spikes and more efficiently use electrical power, with sharper modeling, forecasting and simulation software, as well as clusters that can handle large amounts of real-time data.

Even genome coders have started leveraging this power once relegated to special labs and apron-donned scientists.

Super computing has started making in roads into corporate corridors without doubt.

The super computer's quintessential power is now finding new applications in real business problems

More so with the rise of big data that demands huge performance benchmarks for massive datasets and this is something the supercomputing world has been doing since ever.

Eavesdropping at some big Supercomputer conference might pass on familiar words like exascale and Hadoop to many CIOs With the advent of new clichés this year around the in-memory and analytics lane, it's pretty visible how CIOs need to buckle up on their super-awareness. Petabyte sized data or advanced yet utterly-fast analytics, the ripples of supercomputing world are splashing across many BI decisions already.

9. Girlfriends?

This one really feels like a loud bolt from the blue for the blues.

Some industry-watchers have entertainingly put the spotlight on how hackers might be having image problems and why they brag about it, but what's really tickling many grey cells is the supposition that many young crackers can fade out of hacking feats when they get a girlfriend or embrace other life responsibilities.  Psychologists are juggling this interesting question and the equation between offline relationships and online escapism may not be too hard to discover.

Some Cyberpsychology experts have even spotted how a majority of hackers had stopped hacking due to their changing life circumstances. Personal life can snowball deep into professional lanes after all.

Can a CIO help with cupid interventions here? May be not till some far flung cusp of technology and love.

But ensuring that (when it comes to internal skillsets at least), the human software is in place and conscience architectures not tripped upon, can really help.

10. Watch out for the CMO

There are no hints to corroborate this so far but the way sales pitches are changing and boardroom discussions are sounding, the CMO could mean more than a colleague or a disinterested peer for the CIO.

S/he could mean a rival in the making for many. It can be surmised that this office can some day usurp some power of IT spending. Specially with the way businesses are bridging the last mile between its gates and the consumer and the way a business wants to add more profit centres instead of cost centres. After all, this very year we have heard forecasts showing the irony of IT spends going down on one hand while technology spends are going up on the other hand. 

Who will be a CEO's right hand then?