In the early to mid nineties, the typical ICT department were entirely in charge of what went on with your computing experience at work. New requirements were dealt with by an expert 17 year old technician (with a massive pile of 3.5 inch discs) manually installing new software on your computer, or by developers knocking up an application, which (after the 17 year-old had been out to install it) may or may not have done what you asked them for in that meeting six months previously. If you weren’t happy with things, well then, tough – business ICT was by its very nature a closed shop, run by people who had technical knowledge that you couldn’t possibly hope to comprehend, let alone argue with.

Gradually this pattern began to change, as general ICT know-how increased and the software market matured to the point where you didn’t need programming skills to knock up a simple macro or application, staff with an interest started trying things out for themselves. This might have just been a bit of tinkering in Excel or maybe a little Access database, but in other cases it meant people wanting to use different technologies or equipment than ICT wanted to provide, openly challenging the technical status quo and the authority of the ICT professionals.

Unsurprisingly the ICT professionals didn’t like these people at all, they dismissed them as hobbyists and treated them with the sort of suspicion and scorn that society usually reserves for the type of people who go around scraping up roadkill and popping it in the freezer to save for dinner at a later date.

To be fair, their suspicion and scorn were often borne of sound instincts, if anarchy and discord were allowed onto their carefully configured and maintained network, how could they possibly guarantee to provide a stable and reliable service, particularly as ICT was now a critical part of any large organisation’s day-to-day operation. QUICK ASIDE: I was working at ICL at the time as a sandwich year undergraduate and wrote my dissertation on why this was the case. A dissertation that really hasn’t aged well.

This logic kept the ICT department in clear control for some time, right up until the point that the underground, hobbyist, ‘it’ll never catch on’ phenomenon of the World Wide Web started proving itself useful for more than just academic bulletin boards about particle accelerators and role-playing games.

Initially the web didn’t offer much of a challenge to the ICT establishment, it was more of a concern for HR, as staff used it to waste time during the day, while occasionally finding a practical business reason to justify their continued access to it.

Fairly soon however, the sort of people who liked to try stuff out were downloading and installing all sorts of software left, right and centre – much to the displeasure of ICT professionals who now had a whole raft of new problems to deal with including security threats, viruses and staff behaving, shall we say ‘inappropriately’, in their use of the web.

These things were causing problems to whole organisations, not just the ICT component, so a technical clamp-down approach was adopted. PCs were locked down so that users couldn’t download and install anything they liked. Access to the Internet was monitored and blocked to make sure that people couldn’t look at things that they shouldn’t or use sites that we in ICT didn’t approve of (usually for very sound reasons). We were slamming the stable door, but unbeknownst to us, it was too late, the horse had already bolted.

Staff interest in ICT had developed from a small segment, to a much wider proportion of the workforce. This much wider proportion were not impressed that they couldn’t access their hotmail accounts at work anymore, or use the software that they had downloaded onto their PC at home which they thought was much better than the stuff their company made them use.

The ICT industry responded by creating a delineation between what was proper, industrial-standard, professional ICT and what was lightweight, consumer-focused, amateur ICT: The stuff you used at home might be nice to look at and easy to use but it wouldn’t stand up to the hardcore requirements of operating in the enterprise, where security, scalability and reliability were concerns. This was analogous to reinforcing the stable door, but by this point the horse was enjoying a successful career in flat racing.

The development of what became known as web 2.0 led to radical changes in the way that organisations were able to offer services over the web and the nature of the tools web sites and applications that we all now take for granted. The move to heavy use of the AJAX approach to web engineering meant that it was now possible to build fully fledged applications that would run entirely within the browser, across many different platforms. Thanks to the ingenuity (and massive investment capability) of a number of technology businesses such applications were suddenly available for everyone to have a crack at, often for free in non-commercial, ‘we might support it if something goes wrong’ offerings

This model started to change as the capabilities of web technologies improved and the ingenuity of web developers led to richer, more functional services becoming available over the internet. Soon it was possible for applications and services that were traditionally installed on your PC (or run off a server from a room in the bowels of your office building) to exist entirely on-line, requiring the user to just have a compliant bit of browser software (ironically the corporate choice of internet explorer was often not considered up to the job) and an internet connection. These were now fully fledged business applications that began to eat away at the market share of traditional, well established rivals.

Concurrently, the large ICT players began building huge estates of computing power in order to not only provide you with applications that existed entirely on-line, but also to store all of the information that you wanted to use or produce in an abstract technical space which could be accessed at any time, from any place, potentially negating the need to buy storage technology.

The congruence of Software As A Service and cloud computing has rapidly changed the face of consumer computing, where individuals can quickly evaluate the benefits that they will gain and make the choice to use these types of service. In the professional ICT world, there has been a great amount of resistance, as models of working that have stood in place for the best part of twenty years have been threatened by a world where users don’t understand why they shouldn’t just circumvent the entire ICT department and use services directly from the web, requiring only a device and an internet connection to do so.

The  ICT world has put up both rational and irrational arguments about why users still need them to facilitate access to computing services. In the rational camp are issues around reliability, continuity and security of services that are provided from the cloud. While these are valid arguments, the problem is that users are already experiencing a world where the benefits of cloud computing/SaaS are outweighing the risks.

Old-school ICT departments continue to block sites where they can determine that SAAS is being used that they don’t approve of, or discipline users for making use of sites that countermand ICT policies that are no longer relevant and need to be updated. Meanwhile suppliers who have made their fortunes in client-centric software and applications are warning that SaaS services are not as functionally rich as their client based forebears.

Returning regrettably to the previous metaphor corporate ICT are putting padlocks on the stable door – but at this point the horse has finished its racing career, retired to a riding school for a few years and is now quite probably nestling somewhere in a can of Pedigree Chum.

Users are voting with their feet, the SaaS apps may not be as functionally rich as the client versions, but they were never making use of those functions anyway. Where a clear business benefit can be served by ignoring an outdated ICT policy on internet usage, this will happen – particularly in private companies where increasing the bottom line is the absolute priority.

The ICT world has to accept that, as counter-intuitive as it may be, we have to embrace and exploit the wave of consumerisation – not try to swim against it.

So with a solemn promise not to mix and mangle any more dodgy metaphors, how must we as ICT professionals change the way we approach our work?

The encouraging news at WCC is that we have been thinking about this for a very long time and it is already influencing the way in which we provide ICT services and will be a growing factor over the next couple of years.

In the last few years the concepts of SaaS and consumerisation have heavily influenced the strategies that we have written and the direction that projects have taken as a result. This will be clearly apparent when we update our overall ICT strategy in the next few months.

Practically speaking, a number of SaaS services such as Yammer, Google Apps and Prezi have been used informally by WCC staff for some time.

In a more official sense we have agreed that any staff who want to set up a blog for their part of the business can just make use of the wordpress.com SaaS blogging platform, rather than procuring, implementing and supporting a product ourselves. The trade-off is that they will agree to certain branding and security best practice. Such an approach gives us the best of both worlds – the speed, low cost and flexibility of SAAS/Cloud working along with relevant ICT input on security, to enable rather than block people who are just trying to find the most effective way to do their jobs. This is the kind of model we want to expand where it is practical and safe to do so.

In the development arena we have used cloud services from Amazon and Heroku to provide our open data web site and repository, partly as a proof of concept, but also to take advantage of the rapid set up time that such services provide.

By far the biggest example of WCC embracing the SAAS/consumer approach to ICT is the recent announcement that we will be moving our e-mail solution to a cloud based Google model, a model that also allows us to use all the other SAAS products under the Google umbrella – allowing us to move towards a model that will give the council staff greater flexibility in how they work, as well as hopefully saving the authority large sums of money. You can hear our very own James Smith (@jsmi4s on twitter) telling the world about this at a number of conferences in the coming weeks.

In an incredibly weak link, we are also working on formalising our applications strategy.

This strategy has been different from other areas that we have been working on, in that it has been established through practical work, rather than a purely conceptual exercise. A chunk of our systems centre developers have been on real live projects using the principles laid out in our 2008 classic release “New Wave Applications Blueprint”. The Open Data site, the iphone application and the HR-Electronic Records system are all examples of projects that have both helped to develop (and have benefited from) the approach laid out in the bluepint.

Now we have reached the point where we have proved the vision achievable and now need to formalise the techniques methods and technologies that we want to roll out so that all new applications are developed in line with the strategy rather than a select few.

So each of the members of the team has been assigned a technology/best practice area to specialise in (examples include web service definition, presentation standards, use of GIT as a code repository etc) and are currently beavering away to produce the definitions, standards and processes that we will then roll out to the rest of the organisation through training, mentoring and violent brute force.

In concert with this I am writing up a more formal Applications Strategy document (hopefully to be released before the end of April) which will also help form the basis of our overall ICT Strategy refresh later on the year.

We are currently having all sorts of interesting discussions on strengths and weaknesses of specific development technologies. Although as our strategy is all about avoiding proprietary issues and embracing open standards – these discussions should have no effect on the way that we choose to work in the future, but may help to confirm the types of skills and training that we need to concentrate on.

Fortunately I was able to find a decent quote to introduce my reasons for why we need to develop a new approach to the web. In 1993 William Gibson was quoted in an interview as saying “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed“.

Admittedly it is something of a reach for me to jump from Neuromancer to the concerns of a local government ICT department – but the maturity and reach of the “future“ that was possible in 1993 has now been fulfilled with the widespread adoption of a standards driven world wide web and the availability of high speed communications links to a large proportion of the public.

As such a whole new world of opportunities and threats has opened up for organisations like WCC, which leads to reasons why we need to re-evaluate our stance towards the web and how we interact with it. I’ve banged on about this in the document for quite some time, but in a very condensed summary:

• There are loads of new and emerging technologies that it would be great if we could exploit.
• Public expectations of what can be done via the web are expanding all the time and we need to keep up.
• Pressures from legislation (e.g. more open data and transparency) and the rise of the enigmatic “3rd sector”.
• The fact that the organisation is going to need to make some changes to exploit the benefits and avoid the risks.

In addition to these high level considerations, we have a number of very pressing business needs to satisfy, as well as the ongoing requirements to save money, do more with less, become more efficient and finally perfect that process for turning lead into gold.

So to understand our specific needs we are complimenting the pure strategic stuff with an exercise to gather the requirements and priorities for electronic service delivery across all areas of WCC.

Once we understand our priorities the strategy then goes on to suggest (at some length again) that there are four main aims that we should work towards to help fulfill our service delivery requirements, while taking advantage of the benefits that the web can now offer us. NOTE: These ideas are still up for discussion so may be different by the time the strategy is completed, but I’ve included them here to give you an idea of the concepts we are developing:

1. Embrace the practice of using ICT as a Utility: It is now possible to consume software, development platforms and infrastructure from the cloud which can potentially lead to many benefits. We need to understand where working this way will help save us time and money as well as avoid extensive development in re-inventing the wheel where a product or service can be used off the shelf. As an example our open data site is already provided using the Ruby on Rails platform as a service provider Heroku.
2. Warwickshire as a service: This is a (hopefully) catchy way of saying that we need to expand our initial work on open data to include as many of our data sets and services as possible i.e. build an open API for the organisation. The vision is that both internal and external developers will make use of the same building blocks for creating services applications and web sites.
3. Rational approach to information management: We need to overcome the historical and technical silos that we have built up around information to build single sources of the truth and gain a clearer understanding of the context around our data and documents. This will allow us to build more useful, accurate applications and web sites as well as providing clear understanding of which information must be kept safe and secure.
4. Use the web to extend the organisation: We need to move from an arms-length model of interacting with the public web via a curated web presence and individual point solutions for deeper interaction to becoming an organisation that is engaged with the web at a cultural as well as technical level. Staff at WCC need to merge the web into their everyday work-life in the same way that they do in their personal lives.

Here is a link to their site:
http://www.thecloudcircle.com/

I found a common theme for most organisations was not so much if the cloud could help them deliver better technology solutions but more about how they should prepare for when they did. This was also discussed in some of the presentations throughout the day and for me, made sense.  Like all good boy scouts be prepared, understand your business and how technology can enable it before you start concerning yourself too much with solutions.

Understanding how much time and effort you put into this preparation or analysis will vary on the organisation, identify low risk areas (R&D environments were discussed a few times) and use these to better understand the technology and its adoption while you focus more on high risk areas, a sensible approach.

Some key messages:

• Baseline your risks (Justin Pirie presentation http://www.justinpirie.com/)
• Understand your organisations service level requirements
• Define the technology functions the organisation needs
• Look at where ICT really delivers value to the organisation and make that your focus
• Don’t specialise  in the areas where IT is, or is becoming a commodity

Some interesting thoughts and questions that we can take back into our organisations.  There was also one presentation (http://blog.mattballantine.com/) that talked about how the right technology (in his case Google Docs) not only provided users with the functions they needed but acted as a catalyst for innovation – staff started changing how they worked because the technology enabled them to do so. IT became an enabler not a blocker, something I think all organisations strive to increase, the cloud in this case helped achieve it. We have to ask ourselves can it also help us?

I have no such excuses for why I haven’t updated the blog lately, I just haven’t got round to it. However there has been a burst of applications strategy related work so I will try to make sure of a couple of updates each week from now on.

In terms of the work that we are doing at the moment here are the highlights:

Mobile Application: Following on from the success of the Warwickshire iphone application we are creating a new cross-platform version that will take advantage of the maturing standards that allow an app-like experience delivered via web technologies. This means that we will have a basis for delivering information and services across the major mobile platforms using one technique rather than building different versions for different technology platforms. NOTE: We will also be rolling out a minor update to the iphone app in the near future.

EDRMS Repository: We have a number of projects and services in the organisation whose success will require an element of electronic document or record management. This is becoming more relevant as the need for flexible working arrangements and potential property rationalisation grows stronger. Rather than build individual solutions for each requirement we want to build a generic repository based on open standards and the principles of service orientation to create something that can be re-used to satisfy the bulk of our EDRMS needs.

HRMS – Web service enablement: One of the key data sets involved in a large proportion of business processes is our staff and HR information. The main store for this information is an Oracle HRMS implementation that has been historically difficult to interact with, unless a blank cheque has been handy. We have now completed some proof of concept work to show that we can build and use open web services to access the HR information without incurring large costs. The ongoing potential of this R&D work is huge, we plan to expand on it with some further developments (involving the generation of dynamic structure charts from the HR data) before working on how we integrate such services into our wider applications architecture and business processes.

Open Source DBMS research: We are acutely aware of the need to use open source technology efficiently and appropriately over the coming years. To this end we are running a research project with a focus on the DBMS sector to both understand how open source offerings compare with their commercial counterparts as well as gaining an understanding of how open-source, leading edge products could indicate the future roadmap for handling structured data.

Just a quick entry to say that we will be running the second Hack Warwickshire competition from Monday 23rd August until Friday 29th October.

This time there are loads more Open Data sets to play with and there will be one prize for the best entry from either a member of staff or a member of the public.

More info and rules on our Hack Warwickshire page…

Open source was seen as a risky and unstable option. Certainly the zero-cost part of the deal was attractive, but what about quality control? What about support? What about patching? All of these concerns and reasons for ignoring open source alternatives can be boiled down to 2 key points:

1. The inescapable concern that an important part of our ICT infrastructure was dependant on the continued interest and efforts of a small bunch of bearded, Scandinavian hobbyists. The sort of people who can recite The Lord of the Rings backwards and only like bands which have umlauts in their name.

2. The continued belief that an ICT product or service only has inherent value if it comes with a hefty price tag from a big, renowned supplier. The old “No one ever got sacked for buying [insert name of large multinational company of your choice here]” approach to ICT architecture.

The last few years have seen, if not a reversal of these views, then a softening of the scepticism and worry around open source. Linux took hold in the operations world for most organisations some time back, the hybrid “open source software/paid for support” model appealed both to the Microsoft-hating techies as well as the risk carrying management.

The numerous examples of huge multinational groups of developers relying on and contributing to major software projects has provided the sort of stability and reliability that has led to massive consumer and commercial take-up of open source products.

Coupled this with the sudden, crushing need to save absolutely loads of money and the (to be confirmed) guidance of central government’s ICT strategy – and we now have a growing number of public organisations willing to actively embrace the possibilities of open source alternatives.

However it is important that we don’t just absorb the benefits from the open source community. Councils must contribute to the development and discussion surrounding the products that they make use of.

The flip side of embracing open source products is to add our own development projects to the community and see if there are others who can make use of them, re-purpose them or even work with us to develop them further.

To this end, I will be encouraging all new WCC application development projects to distribute their source code and documentation under an open source license. The first example of this is the application that drives our open data catalogue, developed using Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku.

The source code has been uploaded to the humorously titled repository github and all manner of documentation should hopefully be following in the near future. You can find it at: http://github.com/equaliser/Open-Data-Catalogue

It would be great if more council projects can start to be exposed in this way, after all we all provide roughly the same services and any opportunity to work together in order to save time and money can only be a good thing.

For the uninitiated, our open data site provides a one stop shop for public data held by Warwickshire county council. The key point is that the data is held in open, machine readable formats that can be re-used and re-purposed by any number of different web-sites and applications.

Currently the info is mostly static data but where possible we will be providing dynamic web services for developers and applications to take advantage of.

An early example of how this approach can provide real benefits in terms of scaleability and re-usability (not  a real word I am sure) can be seen through the web service that provides details of our recycling centres.

The data is provided via our Open Data catalogue at: http://opendata.warwickshire.gov.uk/datasets/recycling-centres

The raw data of which can be found at: http://ws.warwickshire.gov.uk/recycling_centres.xml

That same feed of data is feeding the wcc iphone application: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/warwickshire/id345904759?mt=8

…Which can also be used on the new iPad:

The data has also been used by this excellent entry to our Hack Warwickshire competition: http://www.pezholio.co.uk/warwickshire/

The demonstrable success of the open data approach has now led to a project to set up a similar catalogue and repository of internally facing data sources and web services.

The solution being piloted is the CKAN repository (also driving data.gov.uk)which we eventually hope will provide the foundation for both our internal and external open data sources – leading to the beginning of a universal API for the organisation.

In the same way Warwickshire Open Data is opening up public information, ICT need to open up information about the architecture itself. This is vital to ensure effective management of both the architecture itself and the services it delivers.

Warwickshire have been working on defining services in a language the organisation can understand and linking them with the logical and physical components of the architecture.  This is helping provide Warwickshire ICT with important information from both a service and a component perspective. Adding to this we are reviewing internal management systems that store data to understand how it can also be exposed and re-used.

We are now at the stage where we have good information about a service, next we need to make that information available and present it in such a way that it can be understood and where possible interactive.

This has led us to start investigating what visualisation techniques and technologies are available. Some areas where we are interested in trying different styles of visualisation are:

• Mapping the wide area network – plotting locations and the links between them.
• Browsing the ITIL Service Catalogue and viewing the underlying technical components
• Listing which services are affected by device ‘X’
• Technical devices  located within each office
• Service status dashboards

Until we have some demonstrations to show here a couple of web sites we have found that could be used to visualise complex data.  We will post back here following the investigation and hopefully have some examples – if only screen shots – of the visualisation techniques and technologies used.

Prefuse – Information Visualisation Toolkit
http://prefuse.org/gallery/

The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
http://thejit.org/demos/