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100-day Cloud Watch: Location, Math, Money and Value

 

After a short break for some client work, I returned to the 100-day cloud watch.  I’m on the adoption subtopic, working my way through the cloud computing survey list.  At the time of my last update, I had reviewed the two enterprise architecture related surveys.  Those findings:

• MWD Advisors Survey: Cloud Computing is Fundamentally about Service Delivery & Consumption
• Forrester to Enterprise Architects: Use Cloud Phenomenon to Boost Role as Business Advisor

Since then, I reviewed 6 more surveys, 4 of which had notable findings.  My commentary:

• Impressions from CIO Magazine Survey: Do the Math, Don’t forget the Business
• BT Global Services Enterprise Intelligence Research Report: Location does matter in Cloud Computing
• F5 Networks Cloud Computing Survey: Business Reasons, Business Influencers
• Enterprise Management Associates: CapEx reduction is largest, but not sole, cloud computing benefit

Related to the major finding of the BT Global Services Intelligence report – Location does matter – I posted two cloud watch items: 

• James Urquhart: It’s not (just) the data destination, it’s also the journey
• Forrester: Interactive Data Protection Heat Map

And while not adoption specific, I couldn’t help but comment on, and pass along these posts:

• F5’s Lori MacVittie: Users use Applications. Applications use clouds.
• Gojko Adzic: Tips for keeping your sanity (and apps) in the cloud

Finally, I began my coverage of Cloud Connect with the post below.  If you are attending Cloud Connect and want to meet up, let me know.  I’m taking meetings on Wednesday.

• Cloud Connect Announces Launch Pad Finalists

 

Follow 100-Day Cloud Watch on Twitter.

Express Scripts GlowCap: The absence of an event (pill taking) is an event

While an event is defined as “something that happens”, a common event processing scenario is detecting when something fails to happen.  In this scenario, a failure event is generated based on the absence of “thing happened” events. 

For us geeks, a common usage is the systems heartbeat.  A system is designed to emit heartbeat events at a specific interval.  If the event processor doesn’t receive the heartbeat event in the specified interval, a failure event is generated.  The failure event is then processed, which typically includes notification actions.

This week’s Wall Street Journal has an article entitled Beep! It’s Your Medicine Nagging You.  The article highlights pharmaceutical advances, in packaging and ingestible chips, that monitor pill taking, and absence of pill taking, events.  The majority of the piece is dedicated to Express Scripts’ new GlowCap:

“Express Scripts Inc., the big St. Louis pharmacy-benefit manager, is about to test an electronic pill container that issues a series of increasingly insistent reminders, in a national study among patient members.

The container—actually a high-tech top for a standard pill bottle called a "GlowCap"—is equipped with a wireless transmitter that plugs into the wall. When it is time for a dose of medicine, the GlowCap emits a pulsing orange light; after an hour, the gadget starts beeping every five minutes, in arpeggios that become more complicated and insistent. After that, the device can set off an automated telephone or text message reminder to patients who fail to take their pills. It also can generate email or letters reporting to a family member or doctor how often the medication is taken.

It is one of the high-tech ways companies are grappling with medicine noncompliance. Only about half of patients who are prescribed a medication for a chronic condition are still taking the drug regularly after a year, says Daniel Touchette, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.”

…

“In about a month, Express Scripts will start a small test of the GlowCap, made by Vitality Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., maker of high-tech health packaging. Express plans a larger trial focused on drugs for cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart failure this summer.

Bob Nease, Express Scripts' chief scientist, says the goal is to see if the gadget improves pill-taking, and also to use detailed information that the device beams wirelessly to learn more about how and why patients take—or fail to take—medication. "It is an outstanding instrument" for tracking such information, he says.

Patients using the GlowCap get reminder calls only if they opt to do so. They can opt out of having doctors and family members receive email updates. One issue the study will address is whether the device raises patients' privacy concerns, Dr. Nease says. Dr. Nease declined to comment on the study's cost or size. Participants won't have to pay for the devices, which sell online for around $100.”

Of course, just like when that on-call pager beeps, not everyone is thrilled with the prospect of chirping, and tattling, pill bottles:

“Some patients won't welcome the idea of having their daily medication monitored. Vera Karger, a retired Monroe, Conn., speech pathologist, says she wouldn't mind the lights and noises, but emails to her doctor or family would "make me feel inept, or like I was being regarded as a child."”

However, for patients who don’t, or can’t remember their pill taking, this real-world application of event processing sounds like a good idea.

Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence

Save the date!  On May 24-25, 2010 in Washington DC, the OMG is hosting Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence:

Learn how Event Processing enables agencies and corporations to profit from continuous intelligence at the Event Processing Symposium 2010, hosted by the new Event Processing Consortium.

Hear from industry pioneers, leading vendors, and early adopters on Event Processing technologies and techniques that increase mission and business visibility and responsiveness.

Interact with industry experts, leading adopters, and peers in roundtable discussions on business analysis, information analysis, management techniques, and technologies to create an environment for continuous intelligence.

Influence, participate in, and benefit from the rise of event processing as we launch the Event Processing Consortium.

I’m working with the OMG on both the Symposium and establishing the new Event Processing Consortium.  Over the next few weeks, we’ll be announcing more on each, including our superstar conference headliner.  [Hint: I’ve written about him in the last few months.]

If you are interested in participating in the Symposium, let me know.  We’ll be issuing a formal call for speakers soon.  Practitioner stories encouraged! 

 

[Disclosure: The OMG is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Counterintuitive: Creative Agency + ISO 9000 = Creativity Increase

The Van Halen brown M&M anecdote wasn’t the only interesting piece in the March issue of Fast Company.  I also found a good example of "optimization for innovation”, which I first wrote about on the Business Ecology Initiative blog.  The article, entitled Partners in Time, describes how Partners & Napier, a Rochester, NY based creative agency, streamlined its processes at the request of Kodak, resulting in increased productivity, billings and creative time for the agency, as well as cost savings for its clients. 

How did they do this?  By mapping out processes, to identify and remove wasteful steps and interactions.  According to the article, Partners went “all in, applying for and earning certification in ISO 9000, a quality-management system akin to Six Sigma that's normally used by manufacturing companies.”

Initially, the idea of applying process rigor to a creative business was met with skepticism:

"A creative embracing quality management may be unusual, but it also may be the model for how to handle clients' increasingly stringent ROI demands.  When Kodak first asked us to do this, people worried that no one understood how long it takes to get to a great idea," concedes Partners' CEO Sharon Napier. Chief creative officer Jeff Gabel says the opposite has happened. More often than not, Gabel says, creative work resembles a "giant hair ball." And that's fine with him. "You don't want to straighten it out," he says. "It's nonlinear, illogical, and often occurs at unpredictable hours." But, he says, if the time allotted to a project could be rejiggered so more time went to creating great ideas -- and less against the job's ancillary grunt work -- then he was game to try.”

The certification process and initial results:

“The certification process took six months and required each step of an assignment, from developing a brief to reviewing final work with the client, to be documented. It cost roughly $20,000 out of Partners' pocket, but it revealed some surprising inefficiencies, including a lot of time wasted in back-and-forths for approvals of briefs, concepts, ideas, and directors. Partners was able to trim the time on a job from eight weeks to three, save the client approximately 40%, and boost productivity by 3.5%.”

The on-going impact:

“…its creative output seems to have blossomed as a result, as the agency is increasingly turning out higher-quality work, it says, in significantly less time.”

“Partners has been so happy with the results that it now uses the same approach with other clients. It's winning more business because it can jump on opportunities once dismissed due to time constraints. Its billings have grown 300% in the past five years.

Still, the process is not without its flaws. All that hyper-efficiency can be exhausting, Gabel admits: "You've removed your slop factor."”

As you consider optimization opportunities in your organization, don’t limit yourself to traditional operational areas and boundaries.  Nor, fall victim to the “optimization = automation trap”.  Think about your creative types, strategists, and knowledge workers.  How can their work time be “rejiggered” to focus on value creation activities?

 

[Disclosure: Cross-posted from the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) blog.  The BEI is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Lessons from Van Halen: What’s your brown M&M?

In the March issue of Fast Company, Dan and Chip Heath’s column focuses on early warning indicators.  In one example, they explain why David Lee Roth banned brown M&Ms from backstage.  It wasn’t a diva thing, but rather, an operations performance metric.  The excerpt:

“Your source of data doesn't need to be high tech. In fact, it doesn't even need to be numerical. Consider Van Halen. (We have been waiting years for a chance to write that sentence.) In its 1980s heyday, the band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true -- confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself -- and it became the perfect, appalling symbol of rock-star-diva behavior.

Get ready to reverse your perception. Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band's standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted -- Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read "like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages." A typical "article" in the contract might say, "There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes."

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation." So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he'd walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he'd demand a line check of the entire production. "Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error," he wrote. "They didn't read the contract.... Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show."

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn't spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention -- whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth's world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

Like Roth, none of us has the time and energy to dig into every aspect of our businesses. But, if we're smart, we won't need to. What if we could rig up a system where problems would announce themselves before they arrived? That may sound like wishful thinking, but notice that it's exactly what Roth achieved. Surely, you won't be outwitted by the guy who sang "Hot for Teacher."”

As you explore active information strategies and event processing, make sure you do the business and information analysis to answer the Heath brothers’ closing question: “Where's the brown M&M in your business?”