Impact of Convergence of Cloud, Socialand Mobile Technologies

Draft 2

April 18, 2013

Contents

Impact of Convergence of Cloud, Social and Mobile Technologies

Draft 2

Acknowledgements

Workgroup Leaders

Key Contributors

Reviewers

Executive Overview

Business Innovation & Transformation due to convergence of Social, Mobile and Cloud

Social

MOBILE

Mobile – Key Value Drivers

Cloud

Examples of Convergence of Social Mobile and Cloud

Roadmap for Cloud, Social, and Mobile Solutions (15-20 pages)

Step 1: Define a Comprehensive Business Strategy

Step 2: Develop an Effective IT Strategy & Architecture

Step 3: Ensure Your Cloud Decisions Support Critical Requirements

Step 4: Deploy a Robust Mobile Platform

Step 5: Deploy a Rich Social Business Platform

Step 6: Leverage Analytics to Gain Additional Insight

Step 7: Ensure Proper Security & Privacy Controls are in Place

Step 8: Establish a Robust Development Environment

Step 9: Ensure the IT Environment can be Managed Effectively

Step 10: Consider Integration & Interoperability Requirements

Works Cited

Additional References

Appendix A: Current State of Mobile Standards

Acknowledgements

Workgroup Leaders

Key Contributors

Reviewers

Executive Overview

<Will be completed in later draft>

  • Target audience
  • Key objectives of the document
  • Document will focus on consumer perspective
  • Brief introduction of major sections

Business Innovation & Transformation due to convergence of Social, Mobile and Cloud[jv1]

The simultaneous adoption of Social, Mobile, and Cloud is having a profound impact on businesses. Even though each of these technologies provides a different value for organizations the synergistic effect of all three technologies is becoming more evident, and is providing new ways for businesses to innovate and create value[jv2].

As an example[jv3], consider a large software company that has encouraged product managers and designers to use tablets while visiting customers to enhance ideation, and customer feedback. The tablets are used to sketch ideas and potential solutions while visiting customers. The product designers also use their tablets to record video of customers working in his/her environment. These sketches and videos are then immediately posted to the company’s internal social network. The team members of the company’s globally distributed product team can now provide feedback, new product ideas, and engage in a rich and lively discussion on the company’s social network. Furthermore, all this interaction and feedback can happen in near real time and most critically while the product managers are still on the road meeting clients.

The company also wants to allow their customers to be part of the social network, and in order to reduce costs and meet scalability needs has deployed the social network on a cloud infrastructure. Since the company deeply values collaboration, it runs analytics through an external cloud service on the social data collected thus measuring the use and effectiveness of social tools in promoting collaboration and communication throughout the company.

The example above hints at how mobility, social networks and clouds are working synergistically to enhance business processes within the organization. Furthermore, providing access to company’s IT resources through mobility and clouds (public/private) enables rich interaction, sharing, and collaboration. The marginal cost of such collaboration among enterprise staff, partners, and clients is zero, but the effect on group communication and group dynamics creates enormous value for companies.

Enterprises face a large number of challenges in effectively adopting cloud, social and mobile technologies, but in our view it is important to develop strategies that take advantage of the synergistic effect of these technologies. As we discuss later in this section, companies using these technologies successfully are beginning to see rewards that range from more efficient business processes, better customer insight, to development of new business models.

Social[jv4]

Social technology at its core is the evolution of how people communicate and collaborate in digital mediums. Social technologies are designed to capture rich interactions (pictures, video, text, environmental/social context) among groups of users, which enables co-creation, collaboration, and development of richer relationships between employees, partners, and customers. Furthermore, the emergence of novel group dynamics due to social networking tools within organizations contributes to innovation, new and improved business processes, and host of other gains.

In a 2012 study, Mckinesey estimated that the vast majority of social technology benefits in enterprises are in the area of communication across enterprises, and adopting these social technologies can lead to a 20 – 25% gain in productivity, especially among knowledge workers. Thus, it is imperative that a Social Business strategy of organizations focus on opening up the way the organization communicates and collaborates both internally and externally with customers. This is in turn can lead to improvements in productivity, business processes and sales.

Many organizations already use Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking websites for external activities such as branding, marketing and recruiting, often with positive results. Many have further adopted social business platforms, also known as enterprise social software, for internal collaboration and to connect employees, partners, information and digital assets throughout the organization. Some companies are actively mining social data to study sentiments related to their products and services thus providing them key insights that are helpful in branding, messaging, and even new product development.

Social technologies are in the early-mid phase of enterprise adoption, and in many cases are already transforming enterprises by flattening hierarchies, creating previously unthinkable networks of employees, spurring wider collaboration and even democratizing workplaces. A recent survey of 3,500 business executives conducted worldwide by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte LLP found that Fifty-two percent of the respondents said social technologies are already "important" or "somewhat important" to their business.

Key Benefits for use of Social Technologies.

Collaboration and Distributed Business Processes

Social technologies provide a rich collaboration and engagement platform to facilitate sharing of knowledge around products, services, technologies and business issues. For example companies that develop mapping software facilitate user/community reporting and correction of map errors by providing social collaboration tools in their products.

Customer care and Insights through social technologies

Analysis of social interactions, behaviors, and social conversations can help customer service staff pre-empt potential problems and prevent harm to the company brand. Social networks can also act as a channel for providing customer care, a place where customers can post questions which can be answered by users or by customer service reps.

Product and Service Innovation- Businesses can seek the best ideas and solutions to problems by leveraging of best-of-breed ideas, technologies and capabilities from their communities.

Marketing and Sales - <To be done>

Talent Management - Finding and connecting people, teams and expertise.

Social Commerce - <To be done>

Key Challenges in Adoption of Social Technologies

Although it is not in the scope of this section to present a detailed account of the challenges businesses face in adopting Social Networking technologies, we provide a brief account of some of the most important challenges being faced by businesses when dealing with social technology adoption.

<To be done>

MOBILE[jv5]

The adoption of mobile devices has grown tremendously in the last few years, fuelled mainly by the benefits of smart phones which provide location independent computing, growing array of mobile applications, and connectivity to cloud services and information. Because mobile devices offer real-time communication and ubiquitous computing, they have become an important platform for services such as financial transactions (e.g., ebanking, buying, selling, payments, coupons), social networking, location-based queries (e.g., map services, traffic advisories), entertainment (e.g., gaming, ticketing), education, health care, inventory management and tracking and countless other domains.

According to Gartner, development and deployment of enterprise mobile apps has been moving more slowly than of consumer-facing apps. One main reason is IT leaders’ concerns about the security of mobile devices, which are often employees’ personal devices, and are vulnerable to being lost, hacked or stolen. CIOs generally agree that they face three core challenges around enterprise mobility that are going to continue to shape their strategy. They are:

• Security of the devices and mobile data

• Provisioning and servicing mobile users

• Keeping abreast with rapidly changing technology.

While there are plenty of established tools and practices for keeping Web visitors from straying (or hacking) into sensitive corporate data, managing security across a diverse set of mobile devices remains a challenge.

Mobile – Key Value Drivers

Enhanced Productivity through Location Independence

Adoption of mobile technologies in the enterprise is beginning to impact individual workers in a number of ways. With location independence, people can now work from virtually anywhere and access the same applications, information, and resources they have in traditional offices. Employees in such environments can be more easily rewarded on performance, and management’s focus can shift from monitoring attendance to evaluating results. Furthermore, workers that are primarily in the field can now easily access the company’s IT systems which increases productivity, improves business processes and customer service.

Sensors and Context

Mobile devices are becoming nearly ubiquitous. In addition, mobile smartphones have been enhanced with a variety of sensors, such as accelerometers’, microphones, cameras, medical sensors etc. These sensors and the capacity to capture user context can contribute to development of new and unique applications. Furthermore, use of context information can provide key insights into user behavior that can be targeted by companies in myriad of ways. Some of the context information that can be captured using mobile devices includes location, weather, current activity (walking, driving etc.), bio-metrics (heartbeat, pulse), nearby attractions, and many more.

Mobile Commerce

The location independent nature of mobile phones accompanied by rich interaction open up a new channel for commerce, and allows companies to engage with customers in myriad of ways. Companies can use contextual information like weather, location, mood etc. to offer promotions for new products. The new channel also helps sellers close the loop from though urge to purchase much faster since the capability to buy/sell or conduct transactions is literally on the users finger tips.

Cloud[jv6]

Cloud computing offers a value proposition that is different from traditional enterprise IT environments. By providing a way to exploit virtualization and aggregate computing resources, cloud computing can offer economies of scale that would otherwise be unavailable. It can also offer opportunities to immediately exploit installed hardware and software, rather than using time and resources to design, deploy and test a new implementation. Because virtual instances can be provisioned and terminated at any time and the user organization pays only for the computing resource they are employing, costs can be lower.

Essential Characteristics

  • On-demand self-service. A consumer can provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.
  • Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
  • Resource pooling. Cloud computing pools a provider’s computing resources to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. Cloud computing provides a sense of location independence. Customers generally have no control or knowledge of the exact location of the resources. But, they may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or data center). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.
  • Rapid elasticity. Resources can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, sometimes automatically, to scale out quickly, and rapidly released to scale in quickly. To consumers, the resources often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.
  • Measured Service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction suitable to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Providers and consumers can monitor, control, and report on services with transparency

Value Drivers

Reduced capital costs - Cloud computing permits the expense of infrastructure and its management to become an operational expense rather than a capital investment. This can be beneficial for the business both from a tax perspective, and also because it allows the organization to conserve capital for other purposes.

Lower Operational Costs - Cloud computing offers a centralized, remote facility for computing, leading to economies of scale in both the use of hardware and software and a reduction in required resources for administrative management.

Business Agility - Cloud computing provides the ability to make use of computing resources on an immediate basis, rather than a need to first invest time and skilled resources in designing and implementing infrastructure (hardware and middleware) and then implementing and testing it. This leads to faster time to value which may mean enhanced revenue, larger market share, or other benefits.

Challenges

Although it is not in the scope of this section to present a detailed account of the challenges businesses face in adopting Cloud technologies, we provide a brief account of some of the most important challenges being faced by businesses when dealing with social technology adoption.

  • Legal and regulatory requirements
  • Security
  • SLA
  • Governance
  • Lack of standards and interoperability

Examples of Convergence of Social Mobile and Cloud[jv7]

The growth of Social, Mobile and Cloud technologies is having an unprecedented impact on consumers and businesses. In a very short amount of time, social interactions have migrated from traditional online social websites to mobile devices. Rapid growth of mobile devices world-wide means that users will have access to a mobile device, before access to a regular land-based Internet connection. This is having a direct impact on how businesses engage with their customers, their own employees, and the capabilities required within the enterprise to take advantage of these enormous shifts. As we illustrated earlier in this section, by using Social, Mobile, and Cloud synergistically a large software company is dramatically improving their interactions with customers, collaboration in their own organization, and in turn the level of innovation in their products.

The rise of location-enabled mobile phones and location based services is providing opportunities to apply personalization and recommender system technology to people's everyday lives. A variety of digital traces can now be used to infer how people move about a city, track their habits, and contexts. Personalization and recommender systems, potentially merged with the data from social networks, web ratings etc. can recommend new places, products, events. These personal recommendations contribute significantly to the average basket size for many companies. The computation to enable such recommendation systems is offloaded to the cloud. The scalability and large compute resources provided by the cloud even though seamless is a key enabler in providing personalization features that are critical to the quality of mobile experiences.

In medicine many hospitals & physicians are embracing secure social networks run in the cloud to share and collaborate on complex cases. Physicians can take pictures or video of physical symptoms using their mobile devices, and share them with other physicians on social networks to collaborate on complex cases. The richness of the interaction and discussion facilitated by these medical social networks cannot be replicated with conventional technologies like emails, text and voice. Even patients using certain mobile applications have the capabilities to record blood sugars levels, log migraine headaches and digitally share data with their physicians. Suddenly physicians have a temporal record of physiological activity rather than just description by the patients, which can provide better insight to physicians and improve patient outcomes.

These examples highlight how the convergence of these technologies is be effectively exploited in myriad of ways by organizations to enhance customer engagements, and productivity within their own enterprises.

Roadmap for Cloud, Social, and Mobile Solutions (15-20 pages)

This section provides a prescriptive series of steps that should be taken consumers to ensure successful deployment of cloud based social and mobile solutions. The following steps are discussed in detail:

  1. Define a Comprehensive Business Strategy
  2. Develop an Effective IT Strategy and Architecture
  3. Ensure Your Cloud Decisions Support Critical Requirements
  4. Select a Robust Mobile Platform
  5. Deploy a Rich Social Business Platform
  6. Leverage Analytics to Gain Additional Insight
  7. Ensure Proper Security and Privacy Controls are in Place
  8. Ensure the IT Environment can be Managed Effectively
  9. Establish a Robust Development Environment
  10. Consider Integration and Interoperability Requirements

Requirements and best practices are highlighted for each step. In addition, each step takes into account the realities of today’s landscape and postulates how this space is likely to evolve in the future, including the important role that standards will play.

Step 1: Define a Comprehensive Business Strategy[jv8]

This section will be delivered in Draft 2.

Step 2: Develop an Effective IT Strategy & Architecture[jv9]

This section will be delivered in Draft 2. Note that this section subsumes the Technical Characteristics section that was part of the original outline. Both functional and non-functional characteristics will be covered in this section.