By: Alessandro Perilli, GM Cloud Management Strategy, Red Hat
Photograph attached
With the term
Frictionless IT, we mean an enterprise IT that just works, reshaped
after the experience offered by modern consumer-grade public cloud
services, which business users are growing to expect. If we don’t start
moving towards Frictionless IT, we all risk irrelevance.
Current generations of IT professionals are experiencing a growing disconnect between Enterprise IT and Personal IT.
- Enterprise IT remains reliable, but in most cases slow to procure, complex to use, and overall frustrating. Think about your expense report system.
- Personal IT is evolving into a set of instantaneously available, incredibly easy to understand and blazing fast at executing the tasks that they are supposed to execute. Think about Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote, IFTTT, and the plethora of other public cloud services that we all interact with on daily basis through our phones, tablets, and laptops.
The first problem with
this split brain between Personal and Enterprise IT is that our brain
is exactly the same, inside and outside the office. Any interaction with
this emerging Personal IT raises the bar on how the IT experience
should be. The more we use Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote and IFTTT in our
personal life, the more our expectations grow for a similar experience
at work. We wonder more and more, “if my Personal IT is such a breeze to
use, why does my Enterprise IT have to be miserable?”
The second problem is
that current generations can endure frustrating Enterprise IT only
because that’s all that they have experienced for decades. New
generations will not be so forgiving. The kids in college today, and
those who just started their first job in a new, exciting startup, are
growing used to only one kind of IT experience: the frictionless one.
At some point in the
near future, these kids will land more reliable and less stressful jobs
in large enterprises. It will not be just one or two individuals with a
different set of expectations joining a typical bank or insurance
company. It will be a whole generation that permeates every department
of an end user organisation, from marketing to engineering, with a
completely different set of demands and expectations. The overwhelming
majority of IT organisations, and the traditional solution providers
that support them, are completely unprepared to meet that demand.
We believe that at least three ingredients are necessary to meet the demand for frictionless IT:
- Ease of use
- Speed
- Integration
Ease of use
A key enabler for a
Frictionless IT is a smooth user experience (UX). The user experience is
defined by the quality of an interaction between the human and the
system, and it takes place when you deploy, integrate, customize and use
enterprise systems. Intelligent installers and self-contained binaries,
simplified back-end architectures, supported out-of-the-box plug-ins,
modular front-ends, consistent UIs and even coherent documentation all
contribute to improve the quality of the UX. However, very few
organisations in the world look at these aspects from a holistic
standpoint and take a user-centric approach. For example, the user
interface (UI), in both commercial-off-the-shelf and custom-made
applications, is one of the most overlooked aspects of enterprise
software.
If you think that
investing in state-of-the-art UI is unnecessary, or not worth the
effort, think again. The primary reason why some public cloud offerings
become overnight successes at a planetary scale is their intuitive UI.
In our Personal IT we are already getting used to intuitiveness, and the
demand for it is supported by the broad market offering. We have
already reached the point that when an app on our smartphones is too
complex to use in the first few minutes, we simply delete it and
download an alternative. There’s no second chance for the app that is
not frictionless.
Now let’s go back to
the upcoming generation of technology consumers. Even among the most
technical of them, some may have never built a computer by screwing a
motherboard to the case (like many of us did, including me), used a
command prompt or plugged in a network cable. Those users will expect
that installing software will be as frictionless as deploying a virtual
appliance, plugging a cable will be as frictionless as drawing a line on
a service catalog UI and so on.
If the IT organisations of tomorrow
don’t deliver that kind of ease of use, future generations of business
users will simply circumvent them, more than today, relying on external
cloud service providers. And to meet the expectations of future
generations, the UX in enterprise software has to dramatically improve.
Speed
A second key enabler
for a Frictionless IT is speed. If the interface is pretty but you still
need to take 20 steps (or 20 weeks) to get the job done, it’s not
frictionless. We are already know that speed deeply influences the UX,
to the point of impacting search engine rankings, thanks to the enormous
research conducted around aspects like loading time in web development.
And yet, it took a lot for the industry to realize that the same human
brain which doesn’t tolerate a very slow page load very likely won’t
tolerate a very slow enterprise IT experience.
Speed has become an
increasingly important factor in the last five years, to the point that
the industry constantly mentions agility as the most desired attribute
for business and development models. Of course agility is not just
speed, but speed is a very big part of it. Which is one of the many
reasons why, for example, we are seeing a shift of interest from virtual
machines (VMs) to application containers.
Operating system and
application virtualization are as old as (and in some cases, older than)
hardware virtualization. More than ten years ago, the emerging
virtualization industry was rich with technology startups focused on all
three approaches. As we know, eventually the mainstream audience
preferred VMs over what we used to call operating system partitions and
application layers, but today we are experiencing a second coming of the
latter technologies because customers’ business needs are changing and
evolving, as they always do.
Ten years ago, IT
organizations’ primary challenge was modernizing the data center while
maximizing the ROI on existing hardware equipment, and hardware
virtualization brilliantly helped to accomplish the goal. Today, IT
organizations’ primary challenge is addressing the business demand as
fast as possible, because there’s now a competitor that never existed
before: the public cloud provider. Application containers can be
deployed in seconds rather than the minutes needed for VMs,
significantly shrinking the reaction time for a variety of scenarios,
including scaling out a web application to address an unexpected traffic
peak and avoiding a fatally slow loading time.
Application containers
are just one example (and to be fair, they have more virtues than just
speed of deployment); we constantly look at solutions that can
dramatically increase operational speed.
Integration
Integration
A third enabler for
Frictionless IT is seamless integration between enterprise products and
the ancillary services necessary to make it work or unlock their full
potential. No successful software or hardware comes without a certain
degree of integration with the existing enterprise IT environment, but
the extent of that integration makes or breaks the UX, in turn impacting
on users’ productivity.
Integration can happen
at the back-end level and at the front-end level. The latter is rarely
considered, so I’ll focus on that in this post. To clarify the deeply
underestimated importance of front-end integration, I always use the
analogy of the smart calendar.
In many cases, in
preparation for a business meeting we always check a couple of apps on
our smartphones: the calendar app, to know when, where, and how we need
to meet; and the map app, to know how to get there. In a perfect world,
especially if the business meeting is a delicate negotiation with
parties you’re meeting for the first time, we might want to check at
least another couple of apps: LinkedIn, to learn more about the people
that we are going to meet; and Twitter, to learn more about what those
people have to say about topics that may be relevant to the negotiation.
Out of the four, it is the last two apps that could provide the
intelligence necessary to successfully close the negotiation. But
because the information is spread across so many different apps, which
dramatically increases the friction, we limit ourself to checking the
first two, the indispensable ones. Crucially, because of the friction,
we don’t check the information that could be most valuable for the
meeting, which deeply impacts our effectiveness.
Thankfully, there’s
now a better way. A wave of so called smart calendar apps are emerging
(and rapidly being acquired), with their biggest value being the ability
to blend the front ends of the aforementioned four apps into a single,
consistent UI that dramatically reduces friction. If you have ever tried
smart calendars like Tempo or Sunrise, you have an idea.
Ease of use, speed,
and integration are key ingredients to dramatically improve the
enterprise software (and hardware) UX. But what’s the difference from
the past, you might ask. User experience has been considered as a key
differentiator since the late 60s by companies like IBM. And there are
plenty of ROI calculators showing that UX has a quantifiable impact on
business. The difference is that now enterprise users have choice, and
enterprise IT organizations have competitors. And the choice is
incredibly broad and incredibly accessible. If IT organisations fail to
deliver Frictionless IT, lines of business (LoB) will simply go
elsewhere and get the job done with the tool that is most convenient
(simplicity, not cost) out of the many available.
A LoB doesn’t care
about security, compliance and integration issues, nor do they trouble
themselves with the politics driving the IT organization choices towards
a specific solution versus another. A LoB only wants to get the job
done within the deadline. And if the corporate policies get in the way,
they will be often circumvented. In turn, if the corporate policies get
circumvented and the tools that empower a LoB are provided by external
cloud service providers, in the long term the role of the IT
organisation will become less relevant. To stay relevant in the eyes of
upcoming generations, both vendors and their clients must recognise the
ongoing transformation, anticipate the upcoming demand, and adapt.
