Every Newspaper ... Ever

An amazing project has just gone live in the UK - Four million pages of newspapers from the 18th and 19th Centuries have been made available online by the British Library.

Most of the newspapers printed from 1800 can now be searched and accessed online. Whether for nostalgia or for research into the past this is a fantastic feat to bring dormant, hard to access information into the modern information age. 

The public can now scan the content of 200 titles from around Britain and Ireland. Local events and individual knowledge will be a tremendous resource but also with the power of hindsight, you can look at events unfolding at the time and how the events unfolded.

It would be interesting to see how the search ability and visualisations will be completed by the team. Having looked at this with our Information Access / Search experts it is difficult to traverse articles and find the details of the stories. One idea that was liked was enabling user tagging, i.e. user can tag and add details to the stories to add colour and context to the seemingly smaller stories to the larger context of events and vice versa.

5point9

Give Me Signals from Noise - Information Filters

Is there too much information too handle? Does the volume of information available to us dilute our intake of quality?

The consequence of the information explosion is that it is increasingly difficult to know what to look at. What book to read, which movie to see, which blog to follow, who to watch on twitter... Time is a diminishing asset as more and more sources compete for our attention.

Because of this at 5point9 we believe that the mediums which allow us to filter which information are increasingly critical. 

The Man Booker prize is proving to be the most popular yet. This is an example of this high value filtering which people are looking to increasingly with the information explosion. Going for over 40 years the award is ran each year and whittles down the contenders to a shortlist and is an old world example of filtering. There is of course other trusted sources of information that we use, both new and old world: trusted blogs, industry leaders, Top of the Pops (?). We believe that with the increased competition for our time brands (competitions) like the Man Booker will be increasingly popular. 

In the context of the work place we have the same issue. Most large organisations have several portals or disparate silos of information - where should you turn first? There is a need for some analysis, whether automated or manual to give the user the detail they need. Clever algorithms and behavioural analysis can do a huge amount as well as other sinews of automated intelligence. As we saw with Google when they started to look at human intervention it opens up a lot of questions in terms of who should control information and what are the consequences?

Thanks,

5point9

Game Changing...

Some of the team have been divulging in some RnR with the third instalment of the Gears series. We keenly look to game theory and innovation in our information management and business intelligence projects and we were very impressed by Foldit's recent achievements which harnessed gamers.

Foldit, launched in 2008 by the University of Washington aims to harness the might of the video gaming community to do good in the world and the results are pretty staggering and compelling. The premise was to see if a critical mass of gamers would be able to find the answers or solve puzzles for science as the tag line reads.

The popularity of Foldit has been increasing and recently, in a matter of 10 days, gamers were able to do what biochemists have been trying to do for 10 years - unlock the structure of protein called retroviral protease. This is an enzyme that is key to understanding the way HIV multiples. It is hoped that this will help scientists understand and then prevent the way this grows. You can see how we are doing here on our profile page.

You can find out more here and their blog is well worth a view. Other initiatives look to harness the power of the human brain to out perform the performance of super computer, Galaxy Zoo is an other example.

At 5point9 we tend to use the techniques that work in game theory to improve business solutions. This can often include rewards, ambient find-ability and maintaining interest levels through levels of details. To find out more get in touch with us at Technical@5point9.com.

Green Clouds

Further to our previous post (http://tinyurl.com/5point9Cloud) on Cloud Computing and calculating the Return On Investment (ROI) there is a new study which shows the green impact that cloud can have and further benefits of going to cloud.

The report which has been created by the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) estimates that through cloud computing, there is the potential to reduce global carbon emissions by millions of tons. The report is well worth a read and goes on to show the projected savings that are to be made through cloud computing. 


The research is compelling and reinforces the benefits of cloud computing in a rarely considered angle of the energy consumption and associated cost savings as well as the holistic benefits. As we have mentioned when considering moving to the cloud it is critical to consider these factors when looking at the NPV and ROI calculations. 


For more information you can reach us here: info@5point9.com.

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Go To Market, Pricing, Business Model, 5point9

ROI Calculations - It doesn't have to be rocket science

Supporting our clients to build business cases and return on investment calculations is something which we are regularly engaged in. One common misconception is that this extremely complex and something akin to rocket science. It doesn't need to be.


When we engage to assit clients to define their business cases our first question is: Why are you doing this now? This may sound easy but it is often something which our customers can not always succinctly define. There is often a lot of pontification and perceived benefits or pressures from areas of the business but no measurable criteria or monetary value saving. We also try and come at these challenges from the savings perspective. Why: If it is not going to offer you savings, what benefits are you going to get? Even if the driver is legislation or regulations their is still a monetary benefit as you will be reducing the risk of litigation or a fine. 


So how do you begin to work out the savings? We recommend taking a look at the FTE's who will be involved and their average costs - we then work this out at a very broad level to give a day rate or even more granular, such as a hourly rate or even minute rate. With this you are in a position where you can immediately work through some scenarios for the savings you will make and build in some assumptions. This does not take into account the benefit of financial implications of freeing up the resources to do more high value or other key tasks which will impact your business in a positive way or if IT is involved any technology savings.


The next thing that we do is to look at the primary, secondary and tertiary drivers. These are the things that will impact the business case to varying degreed:

• Primary
• These are the elements which will directly drive the benefits of the project. 
• If the project is optimisation related, this could be the amount of an asset used and the amount to be saved by this project. This can then be mapped to a cost per GB for CAPEX and OPEX (maintenance, management etc.).
• Secondary
• This can vary largely on a case by case basis. In general terms we consider this to be areas that will be impacted but will not have the same effect as the primary driver. They are effected but not to the same extent as the primary, we use Pareto's law here, 20% should be primary and where we focus.
• To follow the optimisation use case, this could be the benefits of reassigning the asset to something else and the cost savings or value of doing that. This can be complicated and may not be required.
• Tertiary
• These tend to be things that are in proximity but not directly involved.
• We consider these to be things of interest but not having significant impact. They are included to have a holistic view.

We have developed various ROI calculations for various Line Of Business (LOB) activities and we can share further details on these. You can reach us at info@5point9.com.


Thanks,


For further information or details you can reach us here Enterprise@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Business Case, Compelling, 5point9

Simplicity is complex resolved, Constantin Brancusi

We are often called in to assist clients with their business intelligence solutions and the one common challenge that we find is to simplify the information so that the user can effectively action the information. We have come up with a simple and sometimes controversial approach – we don't always give users what they want.

Business Intelligence solutions are growing in importance and the need to have effective access to information and maximising the benefits of the insights are now business imperatives. Whether to meet compliance / regulatory demands in financial services, advanced analytics in anti fraud cases or performing forecast scenarios the need to enable users to simply converse with data is critical.

It is always tempting to try and offer the user a feature rich experience in order to maximise the amount of data available in a dashboard or report. Offering users the maximum from what they have is always a solid approach however it is often by saying "no" to features or data that can be more useful to users and the business. The risk and common pitfall that we see is that there is a risk of "noise" which can dilute the information and insights that are available for the user. This noise can be in the form of irrelevant or spurious data, extra features which users rarely use of complex filtering or other secondary and tertiary  features which can slow reports or make it very complex. We are not suggesting that we want to limit the ability to drill or interact with the data but that these features are done in a logically and intelligent way which makes sense.

It is always positive to get the users input into dashboards, dials or reports but the issue is that the user does not always know what they want – this may sound counter intuitive or a brave assertion but the number of dials and pie charts that we see allow us to conclude that things have been done because they could rather than what they should. User feedback is important for adoption but in order to avoid the above pitfalls their should be a business decision maker who has the right to veto and is the single point of decision making.

The approach that we use is to create prototypes on paper which can then be reviewed in workshops with the various decision makers and users. This is a powerful tool and can be drawn on with marker pens to show how they can be improved. After a couple of iterations there is usually consensus and the single decision maker has come to the conclusion of what should and should not be included. Once this has been completed the initial version of reports and tools can be created and shared with the business. With web analytics, this should then be monitored to see how the users are interacting with the tools and also who effective the reports are being, we always try and tie back the reports to actionable insights and therefore business results – this helps to focus the offerings and can highlight areas of improvement or additional information requirements. This continuous improvement cycle will have a longer timeframe and require less effort once the business intelligence solution is in place as the solution is honed and streamlined to the business.

 Thanks,

You can reach us at Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence, Data Visulaisation, 5point9

The lights go off - Infographic of the Internet Blackout in Egypt

This infographic from the National Geographic shows what happened when the government turned off (see the original article here - http://bit.ly/rtiFCv)

With the corporate social responsibility of organisations it is clear how big an impact an internet service provider has and also how big their impact is on governments and society. Several service providers brought down or restricted what was allowed through.

The campaign group Access (https://www.accessnow.org/) attended one of these ISP’s Annual Meetings and called for providers to sign up to an action plan to avoid the intervention of governments on their services. It shows again how actions in an other region can impact the brand and reputation of organisations.

In researching this post we had a look around the Access site and there is also an interesting map of how countries censor the Internet (https://www.accessnow.org/policy-activism/lang/13/). Interesting to see which territories have limited the information super highway and to what extent.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this as usual!

For more information you can reach us here, Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Egypt, Business Intelligence, Data Visulaisation, CSR, 5point9

Mobile Retail and Codes

Tesco wanted to take market share without increasing the number of stores. A name refresh and a “let the store come the people” idea. 

There was a recent study that showed that the number of smart phones being activated each day is more than the number of people being born in the World. The trends and market share in the below presentation from Microsoft tag is staggering and the opportunities for retailers to  maximise this is phenomenal. 

As mentioned in the intro, Tesco are working to increase market share using QR codes in the metro to give  busy commuters the ability to shop while they wait for the train to do their weekly shop. This is the most interesting use of the QR / Tags that we have seen and it is a really smart way to grow whilst also giving your customers a unique experience. This follows the trends of retail utilising the smart phone explosion and we believe that this will continue to proliferate. 

As consumers continue to use their smart phones while in the store to do price comparisons or find out more detail of the product. The retailer needs to do more to tailor this experience and  is in a unique position to personalise the shopping experience. 

For more details on our retail team and offerings please drop us a line: info@5point9.com.

Get in touch: Enterprise@5point9.com 

Technorati Tags: Retail, Tags, Tesco, South Korea, Innovation, 5point9

Making Positive Behavioural Patterns the Norm

The modern employee has a responsibility to ensure that there work is completed in time and to the highest quality for the good of the business, to this end it must also be in  accordance to the companies guiding principles and governance rules. We have recently worked with three clients on different projects but found a commonality between their challenges to unobtrusively enable their employees to capture and add find-ability to their information.

The sirens devoured sailors that happened to pass their islands and succumbed to their songs. 

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is warned by Circe that he will pass the sirens island. She tells him to plug his men's ears with wax so they can not hear the sirens songs and to have them tie him tightly to the mast so he may listen if he wants to experience their seduction. Odysseus would have fallen in the sirens trap but for being tightly bound to the mast of the ship. Odysseus therefore chose to experience the sirens temptations and would have succumbed to the sirens but for his foresight to have his men bind him to the mast of the ship.

I am not suggesting that the modern organisation needs to go to such lengths as bee’s wax and chains but there are similarities with the modern challenges associated with information governance, PMO and effective communication. All require self control and discipline but, more importantly, all need to have the correct way (process or channel or method) to be as intuitive as possible. The employee should be empowered to do their work with as little admin or extra effort for the key requirements of the organisation’s governance or compliance requirements. Following structures and meeting the demands of defined processes needs to be intuitive and inherent not obtrusive. 

We have recently worked with three clients who were all doing different things but with common challenges pertaining to user adoption and compliance.  

Communication Strategy 

A global firm were looking to maximise their return on investment from their communication tools projects. A large amount of money had been spent on various communication channels including email upgrade, collaboration portals, chat / messenger tools and video communication. The firm were delighted to offer their staff so many different tools to communicate however they quickly realised that there was an issue. User adoption was hugely inconsistent across the different businesses and territories, with no consistent approach or rules of engagement there was a risk that information was being lost as not everyone was using the tools in the same way or as they were intended. Technically everyone was up to speed on how to use the tools. The firm were looking for a consistent, efficient approach to communication across all medium. 

The critical challenge that we faced was to not be too rigid but rigid enough so that there were defined, consistent approaches and most importantly that the approach was intuitive and easy for the users. The recommended approach for this type of engagement is to firstly understand who was using each tool across the organisation and map that use to their training to spot and highlight any issues in the roll out plan (if any). This also enabled us to spot patterns across the geographical regions which assisted us later to focus efforts based on each region’s behaviour with specific channels which were under used or incorrectly used in order to bridge any social issues. The next step is to come up with the defined best practice and to ensure that all parts of the organisation are represented in this step - this is critical. We need to answer the following: Is the approach as simple as possible? If not, how can it be simplified? What are the risks of users not following this approach and the consequences etc.? Based on this the teams need to be made aware of the approach for the different channels in order to maximise the ROI and this can be done in a multitude of approaches from incentives to focussed training to policies to enforce use. Finally and perhaps most importantly in order to ensure the user adoption continues and grows after the initial focus, the key is to include some very simple Aide Memoir’s in order to brief users in a very simple way as well as monitoring use to highlight the continual improvement and efficiency / cost savings for the initiative.

Information Governance

A global airline who was concerned with information overload, silos of information and unnecessary repetition of effort / duplication wanted our thoughts on how to introduce controls and governance in order to maximise the value from the information and to ensure it was optimised for the organisation in terms of its use, find-ability and benefits. There was also a legal consideration around the governance and retention of information.

The challenge on these engagements is striking the balance between the benefits and the user experience. The other challenge being faced was how to tackle this - there was information across the companies business units and divisions with different maturity levels. In terms of the user experience, we need to ensure that the governance processes and requirements are delivered in such a way that enables users to do their job’s without being restricted or causing additional, intrusive admin or overhead. This is the big challenge and one in which technology and well-defined processes can assist with. The benefits of the process must be shared with the users in order to gain adoption and buy in. The most successful way to achieve this is to show the users the benefits in terms of time savings, consistency and find-ability - as per Odysseus’ men, having your head bitten off is quite the incentive. In terms of the disparate business units, the different levels of maturity needs to be captured. The learning of this assessment should be fed into the approach and methodology. This would be a structured undertaking and would need to follow a phased approach. Initially the organisation would need to evaluate what they have available in order to understand the magnitude of the challenge; if this is not a feasible option the approach could be to define a central approach and then distribute this out to the teams. This approach comes with risks – the central approach may not capture all of the information required or it may be less user friendly than the current approach – this will have an impact on teams in the field and can cause animosity to a new approach. Taking an iterative approach can reduce the risk but can increase the timeframes and this balance must be struck. Their needs to be a central team who owns this or the risk of losing sight of the end objective will be high. Based on this and a pilot which looks at a cross section of functionality the project can be structured to prioritise quick wins and core business areas as well as policies, the taxonomies and meta-data that is critical. This will then map back to the framework to put the policies and controls in place for the areas that should be focused on. With this information an iterative approach can be taken but based on the above choices this will need to be defined. Once completed the key outcomes are: corporate compliance in terms of retention policies and data, there will be a clear audit trail of the information lifecycle, governance will be in place and the find-ability and legal requirements will be met. The benefits to the users will be unobtrusive compliance as the tool and processes aim to be low impact to their normal operation. Any requests for information can be serviced much simpler and efficiently thus driving down costs.  The information itself will be stored in the right place making it secure and cost effective as its value evolves over time.

Programme Management Office

A large communications firm who had huge market share but were under threat from government changes and fierce competition wanted to control spend and make sure that they had control over projects, avoid overrun, ensured visibility and control costs. 

The challenge with this engagement is inevitably how to enforce, without restricting and without being intrusive - how to enable the employees to maximise their contributions whilst also having a control and sustainable approach. Through a series of simple structures we were able to define high level processes that ensured that the visibility of projects was high whilst also offering a model which could adapt to the situation based on various drivers. One of the keys here was to create roles which various people could map into dependent on their requirements, this ensured that the right people were included, projects had a consistent approach and could also scale. We also ensured that the communication plan was simple and escalations had to go through a process which everyone bought into. We also enabled “shortcuts”, this was for a minor change or a high priority action to be fast tracked through the process(es) in order to be resolved in a timely manner - this was hugely successful but needs to be taken with caution as it can be abused to bypass controls. Thanks to the processes being simple we were able to summarise them into neat high level, visual representations which enabled people to be empowered and understand the processes very quickly. There was also detailed documentation behind these but the visual aids should cater for 80-90% of queries. Due to the escalation and defined meetings with senior stakeholders the risk of micromanaging was reduced - saving senior staff’s time and also empowering the project teams to progress and empowering them to succeed. we made the team more effective and added controls.

Summary

As per Odysseus’ strategy to overcome the risk of the sirens there is a need for us to empower employees to meet the strains and demands of the organisations essential controls and mechanisms. By making these tasks intuitive and as simple as possible you are encouraging and empowering your teams to do the right things for the greater good of the company without impacting productivity and admin tasks.

For further details you can reach us here Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: PMO, Communications , Information Governance, Empower Users, Information Management 5point9

The Stroop Effect

Having recently worked with customers on their information dissemination challenges we put together this video to show the Stroop Effect. This is particularly powerful during Business Intelligence reports and where users have pattern associations.




Making reporting intuitive and insightful can be a challenge - you need to maximise the useful information available whilst providing the business actionable insights - in the right context, to the right level of detail and in a timely manner. This a big challenge however there are some simple techniques that can assist your users to understand the information. 




One that we have recently demonstrated to a client is trying to allow users to pattern match or use the associations that they are used to seeing. This could be that red is bad and green is good as a very obvious example, but this can be extended to different types of details such as symbol use. The aim of this is reducing the time for a user to interpret the results, this is known as the Stroop Effect (more details on Wikipedia).  


By portraying the information that maximises the users inherent knowledge or meets their preconceived patterns the data can be interpreted much quicker. We typically try and do this through a myriad of ways such as:




Using known hierarchies: Ensuring that the information they are expecting to see together is presented together and uses the common names or styles of that dimension. This would typically include a business unit or function or product which is displayed alongside the similar items.  ColoursAs mentioned above this can cover basic indications of positive and negative but could also include the common colour associations with a product or brand - coal would be black and soil would be brown etc. This sounds simple but if you are looking at a multi-tier report or dashboard this consistency and knowledge can save considerable time and frustration. Symbols and Controls I expect a + or an up arrow to be positive as per the comment on colour. This needs to be handled with care, I currently fly a lot and the airport I use has the departure sign as a plane taking off but the arrival plane is one facing the opposite way - a good representation but not the ideal image as you arrive to the airport and see a plane directed towards the ground.With the explosion of Web 2.0 there are lots of common user interface techniques or widgets which users come across regularly and these should be maximised and harnessed for users to traverse their data.


The above are a couple of very simple examples for giving your users the information that they need and using some really simple techniques to speed up their interpretation. We would like to know what you do and your thoughts on this in the comments field below.




Thanks,


For more details on our data visualisation and Business Intelligence initiatives you can reach us here: Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Stroop Effect, Information Presentation, Data Visualisation, Data Visualization, Information Management 5point9

Information Police

Having watched the Eli Pariser talk Beware Online “Filter Bubbles” on TED I was taken by the huge impact that filtering can have on the information that is available to us and especially when we map this back to a business context. The balance between the speed of access to information that you need and the context that the information is being returned from.

The context

The amount of information in the world is vast, by 2020 it is predicted that there will be 35 ZB of data according to an IDC White Paper. This is an incomprehensible amount of data. If that was all mp3 files then it would be the equivalent of 190 billion centuries of uninterrupted music; if it were DVDs, that is 2 billion centuries of uninterrupted movie viewing. That is if we continue at today’s pace, which is unlikely, we could be looking at yottabytes of data which is 10 to the power of 24 - staggering numbers. 

Historically information has always needed to be classified in order to make it accessible and retrievable. Robert Cawdrey wrote the first English dictionary in 1604, the first telephone directory was in 1878 and contained a single page, libraries are thought to have appeared in Greece in around the 5th Century BC and maps date from around 16,500 BC - these are examples of systems that can be used to find information in a timely manner and have been utilised for years. 

Today we have a different challenge, volume - It is estimated that there are 2 trillion webpages on the Internet - that is equivalent to 300 per person on this planet. That is a long book. With tagging, taxonomies and other categorisation we begin to be able to find information more easily then trawling through indexes of websites and information. This is where we got to in the late 1990’s. Fast forward to now: with the social web 2.0 explosion there is a myriad of ways to search information and embedded intelligence that can be automated to give us information based on our behavioural patterns - such as where we are, our browser and historic searches etc.

Filter Bubbles

This takes us to Eli’s presentation and a couple of interesting statements, the first is from Mark Zukkerberg:

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than  people dying in Africa.”

Whilst on first reading this sounds in poor taste, I interpret the message as being that everyone cares about important things at the global level but they are more interested in the things which directly relate to them or have a more immediate impact or effect. This as a concept is really important and I think of this as spheres of information and different levels of weighting depending on what your objectives are when you are searching. 

Search engines cannot read your mind or even really predict what you are trying to do accurately so they work based on past behaviours and various signals with complex algorithms to work out what is and is not relevant. This is flawed because it does not have the benefit of understanding your emotions or your objectives at that snapshot in time - search engines cannot tell exactly what type of detail you are looking for. 

Eli’s example of Egypt is a powerful one and also raises lots of moral questions, how much should be filtered based on our past trends of behaviour against what is available? Getting information quickly is the biggest benefit as more often than not this approach will give you what you are looking for very quickly and effectively. But this doesn’t always work as per Eli’s point. Dependent on my objective my personal sphere of interests may be more important than a global sphere. On this, I think that we have several spheres of information in our personal and business domains which map roughly to the following:

•Personal 

•People who I know well or are in close proximity to my location. 

•Subjects that I am very interested in or follow avidly. 

•Community

•People or topics that are further removed but are familiar to me and frequently accessed. 

•Regional 

•Things that I am aware of but do not have a major impact on me.

•I may be aware of the people and subjects but not in detail.

•Global

•I have a high level understanding and whilst it might be important it does not directly effect me.

Based on what I am doing I may want to focus more on different spheres or bands of information and here we have the time tradeoff. I recall a few years ago a search engine which allowed you to use slider bars to focus on different areas and essentially add a priority to information. When the search engines or filtering tools are doing this it would make a lot of sense to show this so the user can clearly see what information is in scope and what has been filtered out - a Venn diagram of results would be relatively simple for most advanced users with the context focus being tweaked as the user wants to see more or less of certain spheres. Eli uses the example of dessert and vegetables - at times you want dessert - find information about football, friends birthdays or low brow comedies, other times you want to find out about international affairs or the works of Dostoevsky. I prefer to see these as both valuable sets - whether it is dessert or vegetable information you still want to see it. 

In the business context I come across this all the time - how can you enable an employee to find the information that they are looking for? How can you minimise the steps or hops required to surface the information that they need? The right information, in time and actionable. I do not believe that there is enough done to utilise the types of algorithms used in public Search engines in the business domain and obviously the technology is improving in the business context, I am impressed with what I have seen of Fast, which are limited by the security and other constraints. How often do you have to scour through pages of information to get the information that you need? Wouldn’t it be easier if you could remove the types of pages which always come up and that you have to sift through? So in the business context I think there is a case to be made to have more filter bubbles. 

Regardless of personal or business context, regarding filter bubbles I do agree with Eli that the algorithms and filtering approach should be clearly shown to users so that we know what we don’t know. 

For more info you can reach us here: Technical@5point9.com

Technorati Tags: Filter Bubble, Search, Ted Talks, Eli Pariser, Information Management 5point9

Get On My Cloud

I have recently been working with a large telecommunications customer defining their cloud offerings, go to market strategy and chargeback model here are some of my thoughts on the challenges and recommendations.

Divide and Conquer 

There are many challenges when you are trying to take any new product to market and cloud offerings can be even more complex because of their range, customer knowledge, market understanding and complexity. If we categorise cloud services into 3 types, we have:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

• Software as a Service (SaaS)

Classifying the offerings into these sub categories is essential in my opinion, without this you are trying to find a model (pricing, business, support, product packaging, technical etc.) which fits too wide a subject matter. By subdividing the offerings into these categories you can take a divide and conquer approach which reduces the complexity and enables you to focus on the offerings whilst maintaining consistency across the services. 

Customers

Customers pose a couple of challenges when we are looking to offer cloud services. The background and understanding of these concepts is relatively new and we have found customers are in one of two camps, especially for the more infrastructure (IaaS) based offerings: they either have a comprehensive understanding of the tools or have no knowledge.  This makes positioning and marketing more difficult as you need to provide collateral which informs the prospective customer of the offerings and benefits whilst not alienating them by speaking at too high a level or too low. One way I have found to overcome this is to use language which enables your customers to understand the offerings through problem equivalence. The simplest way to perform this is to use some of the language which is now common through firms like Google, Amazon and Microsoft’s marketing strategy and also by linking this back to the traditional way of achieving the business or operational goals.

On the Software as a Service and also Platform as a Service approach this is slightly easier as the customer base is less disparate in the understanding stakes. SalesForce.com and DropBox as well as Google Apps have helped to bridge this gap and these concepts are more defined. Customers also understand the consequences of using these services and the benefits. 

The concerns of the customers are common across the offerings and these must be comprehensively addressed. The balance that must be struck is the ability to offer the quality, security and availability whilst also maintaining the flexibility and cost benefits of essentially outsourcing your environments - infrastructure all the way up the value chain to your business problems. This can be achieved in a number of ways but the most success that we have found is based on facts, actually showing the operational SLA’s with stats to back them up. Access is obviously the critical factor and the availability of network will need to be clearly shown.  

Service Level Agreements

The SLA’s that are offered should be tiered and should ensure that the support and infrastructure is capable of handling a large percentage of the customers per tier; this should be an obvious observation but is all too often missed and best case scenarios or anecdotal estimates are used - the reputation of the cloud and also future sales will be dependent on this. The usual cycle that we have seen is that a customer will outsource  one business function and see how this goes before committing more services to the cloud, therefore the performance and delivery of the initial services will have a direct impact of the future sales and growing the accounts. The staffing considerations are also a major area of focus for this as the staff will need to be completely trained up and competent - if you are re-skilling existing staff members then adequate training must be delivered. The operational timings must also be considered here, for example it is unlikely that you will want all customers to have 24 hour support due to the impact of this on the team, the out of hours support should be offered to the highest tier and the price should reflect this premium offering.

Packages

On packaging the solutions you will get the best benefits for dividing up the offerings into IaaS, PaaS and SaaS because of the nature of how these offers will be sold. The critical elements here are to make the delivery of the offerings as simple as possible. You may not be able offer a single configuration or offering per service but it should be possible to limit this to a few scenarios - the aim for the packages is to provide an entry level right the way up to the intense use case. This should also take into account the requirements of the SME as well as the Enterprise Account. It will be impossible to create a controllable number of configurations to meet every customers need and ad hoc configurations should be considered at a premium price, taking into consideration the cost of deviating from the out of the box configurations and the opportunity cost from the other services.

Capex vs Opex

One of the big benefits of the Cloud is commercial, being able to spend from operational expenditure rather than capital expenditure and taking on an asset or assets which will devalue over time and require support etc. In terms of the price point this is a critical and often misunderstood element. Just because something is in the cloud does not necessarily mean it should be cheaper than the alternative of buying the solution through Capex. If you take a basic server as an example the life span of this may be 3 years - but you cannot simply take the cost of a server and divide it by 36 months to see how it compares to hosting the same box in the cloud. My view is that this totally misses the benefit of the cloud and is an unfair comparison. To purchase the server outright you will also have to add the costs of support, power, floor space and disposal as well as consider the depreciation of the hardware over the time period. The benefit of the cloud is that all of those headaches are outsourced with the extra benefits of  flexibility - with the cloud you can scale up or down dependent on the business needs.

Business Model

Coming up with a competitive pricing model is a huge challenge and this will be determined by 2 critical factors - the amortisation period (period of time you want to make the investment back) and level of investment into the setup costs for the platform. We want to offer flexible solutions so that the customer can use the services as simply as possible but this does pose a problem in terms of estimating the use over the period. We recommend an approach which looks at a reasonable utilisation target over the amortisation period by year and then works out how this cost should be distributed across the costs of each offering or configuration based on a monthly bill cycle. This has the positive result that the estimates and revenue can be forecast however it does reduce some flexibility in terms of the customer’s purchasing options - as per the Amazon model, customers may want to purchase compute time on a more granular basis and this approach restricts this flexibility. The tradeoff between flexibility and forecast revenue control will be based on the investment in the platform, the higher this investment, then the more flexibility that can be offered. A hybrid model is also an option here, based on the monthly cost, the hourly cost can be worked out to come up with an hourly fee based on working hours (not hours in the day, if you do this you will be too cheap). With this you can then add a premium to this (maybe an additional 70%) and use the spare capacity based on the utilisation for the initial year, once you have this you can tweak your offerings as appropriate - this will need to be iterative. We have not looked into detail in terms of the change management processes and the PMO requirements of this project, if you would like more details on this please drop us a mail, info@5point9.com.

Conclusion

In summary taking cloud offerings to market is a complex, multifaceted challenge and we have only touched upon a couple of key concepts and challenges. As a first step we strongly recommend market research to find out what your potential customers know, what they are looking for and what barriers  they will need to overcome to use the cloud offerings. The services will need to evolve and the offerings will have varying levels of uptake, to this end re-alignment should be possible so that the infrastructure distribution can change based on the market conditions. Bundling up offerings is also a great way to enable your customers to use the services and increase adoption through incentives. An initial period of testing or internal use is also critical for any innovative product offering especially if this is a shift in the organisational operation, by allowing internal users or “friendly” customers to use the service for free will allow you to test all of the internal operational and billing systems as well as the support network and technologies.

For more details you can reach us here: Technical@5point9.com

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