Just Do It

In Loughborough at the moment for two related seminars. Yesterday was the first UK Universities Google User Group. A roughly even spilt between people who are already using Google Apps, and people who are evaluating it or considering options. As a representative of the latter group, I chaired a panel on 'Building the Business Case', and got to quiz Aline Hayes of Sheffield Hallam and Chris Sexton of Sheffield on why they adopted Google Apps, and how they made the case to do so. Lots of questions from me and from the floor about worries over security and loss of control, and some very good answers from Aline and Chris. Hopefully a recording of this session, and the others, will be up online soon.

Today is the UCISA Cloud Computing Seminar, so a more general agenda. Yesterday I felt like a bit of a laggard - I was talking to some of the same people I first quizzed 12 months about Google Apps & MS Live@Edu. Some were very surprised we haven't just got on with it! Today I can hold my head up a little higher, giving a 10 minute talk on something we did Just Do - Deploying GetSatisfaction at the Bristol. It's a great online forum / community support tool, and it took us very little effort to get it into service. Some lessons learnt from the experience though, which I hope others may find interesting.

The impact of technology on Higher Education

The piece below was originally written for Insight, Bristol's in-house newsletter for IT & library staff. It explores some themes from my #fote09 presentation, in which I developed the idea of IT department as trusted guide. I'm presenting the essay here in an effort to be more accessible.

Douglas Adams was a great technophile and visionary. In 1999 he wrote how to stop worrying and learn to love the Internet and said:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

In 1993 Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was released. In 2004 Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was awarded a knighthood, and topped a poll for Greatest Briton. Douglas was right - it took us about ten years to cotton on to the importance of this new technology. But Douglas went on to explain that we still don't understand the Internet. We're stumbling along, cobbling it together. We don't understand it instinctively. We overemphasise the risks and underestimate the benefits. It will take the generation of digital natives, those who grew up with the Internet, to make the best use of it.

The world has been transformed since 1993. Libraries have been at the forefront of this. In 1993 we had too little information. Now arguably we have too much - the volume of information sources is overwhelming! The role of the librarian is to act as a trusted guide through the maze of good and not so good sources. Teaching people about information literacy is more important than ever.

The instinctive reaction amongst some academics to Google was to decry it. But people used Google anyway - it is convenient and it works. So instead we need to harness the power of the network. If I go to google.co.uk/scholar from within the University then resources the library holds show up in the results, with a "Get it@UoB" link that takes me to the full text. That's working with the network, not against it.

It's fantastic that we are already doing this, but we could be doing more.

We could export our library catalogue to WorldCat, the worldwide catalogue of over 10,000 libraries. It would make our holdings visible to a wider audience, while also benefiting our own staff and students. You can already search WorldCat from a mobile phone - not something we offer ourselves.

We could deposit all our PhD theses, and many of our published papers in ROSE, Bristol's e-print repository. This provides persistent, long-term, reliable storage for papers to reference papers. They show up in any search engine, exposing the research to new audiences. This increases the impact and reach of our research, enhancing our reputation.

These examples harness the power of a larger global network to enhance Bristol. In a networked world we must think globally, not institutionally.

Should we feel nervous? Once upon a time we were in control. People would come to the IT department with requests, and if we didn't like it we could just say no. Now in an Internet-connected world it is very easy to bypass us. Anyone can get a free webmail account from Hotmail. Laptops are cheap enough that people buy them with their own money. You can get network access from your mobile phone company. File storage and processor cycles cost just a few cents a GB from Amazon.

It may be a hoary chestnut, but this threat is also an opportunity. This is an exciting time to work in Information Technology or Information Management. We should be the trusted guide that people turn to. We won't have all the solutions ourselves, but can find them. For every requirement that comes along we should assess it pragmatically, considering the risks and benefits of different solutions. Some things we'll invent or deploy entirely in house. For others we will use a service delivered over the Internet. Often it will be a hybrid between the two. There is a huge amount for us to do with such services: to customise, build on top, integrate, and train people on them.

Just understanding all this is half the problem. You could read Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology from JISC. You could read the report from Sir David Melville (former VC of the University of Kent): the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience. Both argue very strongly that higher education must embrace the web and new technology. Alternatively ask a real expert - try one of this years Freshers, who were three when the first web browser was released.

Google Wave: A glimpse of the future

At yesterday's I/O conference Google previewed an early version of Google Wave:

What is Google Wave? It's a communications & collaboration tool from the team formerly responsible for Google Maps. They set out to answer the question "What would email look like if it was invented today?".

Waves combines previously separate functionality into a tool that looks seamless and genuinely new. It's includes elements of email, instant messaging, wikis & collaborative document sharing. What exactly is a Wave? Start of by thinking of a wave as a threaded rich media email or instant message conversation. These are a few of the features:

• Conversations can take place one to one or in groups
• Combines asynchronous and real-time conversation in one.
• Anyone in the conversation can comment, or amend, in place, in the stream of the conversation
• Simply drag and drop documents, pictures etc into your browser to share them with other people
• Rewind and look back through the conversation history

Wave is more than just another Google App. It's also a platform, and a protocol.
A platform: Google's push right now is to get developers on board. You can embed rich content like interactive surveys. There will be plugins and bots to extend Wave how you want - rich content like an interactive survey, spellcheck, even translation. You can embed Waves in your website. Getting a large crowd of developers enthusiastic is a great way to make your platform the one that succeeds.

A protocol: absolutely crucially, Google will release the protocol specification and the code for client and server as open source. They say they want to see many separate but interoperable wave servers - it won't just be a Google App. A company could implement their own private Wave server which will talk to other Wave servers in the cloud, or at other organisations (just like SMTP today) . When the goal is a big as defining the next version of email, that's essential, and it is why I'm excited about Wave. The functionality looks excellent, but it would do no good at all in an isolated environment. I can have all the clever communications software I want, but it is useless unless the people I need to talk to have it too. I don't want a proprietary unified communications product which only works within my organisation - I want an open, global tool which everyone uses. Google have the resources to develop the tool, and by opening the standard the ensure that anyone who wants to can use it.

Communicationss & collaboration tools are normally seen as an enterprise requirement, but Google are a consumer company at heart. This will help them do groupware properly. JWZ put it crudely but got it right in his 2005 essay, Groupware Bad: The first question a social software developer should ask is "how will this software help my users get laid?". If you prefer, how will it make it easier for them to do what they want to do - meet and communicate? Good groupware solves problems for people, bad groupware tries to solves problems for organisations that no actual users want. Google grok this. They say "Google Wave can make you more productive even when you're having fun!".

What are the implications? Wave is hugely important in its own right and also demonstrates Google's strategy more generally. The implications look terrible for Microsoft:

• Google often say that they can do anything in a browser you can do in a native desktop application. As they put it, "never underestimate the browser". Wave uses elements from the HTML5 spec, which extends HTML further towards rendering complex applications. It's taken over ten years, but finally the web is becoming the platform.
• Although the ratified HTML5 spec is some way off, Firefox, Chrome, Safari & Opera already support key parts of it. Internet Explorer doesn't (yet?). If it doesn't, tools like Wave will be compelling enough to shift users away from Internet Explorer to other browsers. Microsoft either need to catch up and support modern web standards fully, or lose market share.
• Nobody else is going to propose a next-gen email protocol with Wave in the offing. By open sourcing Wave Google scare off potential competition. Who wants to go head to head with the gorilla? The only company with both the resources and willingness to do so on this is Microsoft. They difference is that Google's money is from advertising, Microsoft's from software. Microsoft can't afford to open source their software to define the next standard - they'd destroy their revenue. Google, can, and just just did. [As a side note, Microsoft purchased Groove, a very Wave-like product in 2005, and then had no idea what to do with it].

Poor Microsoft. On the day Microsoft announce Bing (another attempt to merely catch up on search) Google are racing ahead...

Wave is exciting, but maybe there's too much hyperbole over it already. I'll finish with a few notes of caution:

• Wave isn't ready or available yet. So far the developers attending the I/O conference are the only people with access to it. Google suggest that Wave will be available to consumers later in 2009. My guess is that we are at least 12 months away from Wave appearing in the corporate version of Google Apps, or getting the source code to deploy your own Wave server.
• It's not clear how Wave fits in a mobile world. Threaded, interactive conversations with rich media work well on a large screen.
• Email isn't going to disappear. Although Wave is an attempt to redesign email from the ground up, email is quick, cheap, lightweight, easy, and universal.
• Wave doesn't include voice or video communications. In the Googleverse, how does Wave fit in with Google Voice?

A truly unified communications tool should include voice too. Add a few more years for Unified Communications then - by which time our requirements for unified communications will have broadened even further. Perhaps this Holy Grail is as far away as ever - but we've just had a tantalising glimpse.

CIOs Present & Future: Google event at the Science Museum

Last Wednesday I attended this Google event. It was an interesting format - attending were a mixed group of university students, and people working in IT. The event was rather grandly titled 'CIOs Present & Future'. I wasn't either, and was unsure whether to be more flattered if mistaked for a student or a CIO...

It wasn't all sales, but the main thrust was to explain the concept of Cloud Computing and Google to pitch their Enterprise services, especially their email, calendar & collaboration offering Google Apps (free of charge for education customers). I have been quite cautious about Cloud Computing. I am though a firm believer in the consumerisation of IT, and designing IT systems with an understanding of how people behave. These were two themes that came up throughout the event. I had several 'Yes!' moments - nodding enthusiastically to what the speakers were saying.

We started with Robert Whiteside (Head of Google Enterprise UK & Ireland) & Dave Armstrong (head of Marketing Google EMEA). Dave talked about consumerisation. Consumer technology innovates faster than enterprise technology (the iPhone was quoted as the classic example).
In the enterprise market, tools and user interfaces for traditional enterprise apps have often been constructed based on business processes (as they should be) but with no consideration of the 'human factor' - how people actually behave. Ease of use of user interfaces is a good example, but it's more than that. For example, people don't like to laboriously assign lots of metadata when creating a document.

User satisfaction for consumer technology has overtaken user satisfaction for business technology. What are your users saying?: "why can't I do this as easily at work as I can at home?". Can we benefit from this?

People are the same person at home and at work.

On the Internet, products win based on the number of mouse clicks - the 'democracy of the mouse clicks'. Those that don't get the human factor right don't survive, as people move elsewhere. Google study features in public beta, looking at logs of how people use them, and refine, enhance or scrap them accordingly.

The Big Switch by Nick Carr was mentioned several times as the tome to read on Cloud Computing. I've bought a copy, half way through so far.

We then had several of Google's customers speak. Rob Ramsey of Taylor Woodrow came first. Taylor Woodrow have bought into Google Apps in a large way. He says it made sense for them as they have a very mobile workforce. The key to successfully deploying it was to find the real wins for people. A big one was the ability for people to have separate personal and work calendars, but view them joined together in the same environment.

Barbara Colledge, Dean of Partnerships for Students of Leeds Metropolitan University was next. Leeds Met have deployed Google Apps for all their students (but not for staff). They were the first UK university to deploy Google Apps (SOAS have since done so as well, and others such as UWE have deployed Microsoft Live).

Previously at Leeds Met student mail was little used, as the quota was small and it didn't meet student requirements. The benefits in going with Google are

• enhanced service,
• brand association,
• environmentally sustainable,
• constant innovation (frequent new features),
• additional tools

They went live with a trial of 3000 students in January and then extended it to all 30,000 students in September. Leeds Met have a history and culture of partnerships, and don't mind the risk of not doing everything in house. They did have concerns about privacy and data security. These came from staff - the Students Union were completely behind the plan. They resolved those concerns by getting the lawyers to consider it carefully.
Leeds Met now have a limited pilot for staff, but are unsure about whether to deploy for all. They are also planning to introduce email for life for alumni - this is a big attraction.

Paul Cheesborough, Telegraph Media Group finished this section. They surved their staff and found that 9/10 believed they would be more productive if allowed to bring their own home computer into work. They are now piloting a new approach with Google Apps.
Don't underestimate the frustrations of a limited email quota - this is a huge problem for people! Email is a touchstone issue which affects everyone (like car parking)
Google Sites collaboration features are another big win
Major attractions for the business are

• lower costs,
• more innovation (features)
• Open APIs to customise for the business

The Telegraph haven't adopted Google Apps wholesale yet, but are at the point of making the decision.

Summary of my personal thoughts on Google Apps? More impressive that I had expected. Worth exploring further. A better fit for student use than for staff use. There are huge concerns around data protection - look at it in conjunction with Guidelines for Using External Web Services from University of Edinburgh.

We finished the first session with Dave Cliff (from the Computer Science department at Bristol!). He is trying to improve UK CS courses to produce graduates who have the skills to manage the increasingly complex 'systems of systems' which IT produces. This was interesting stuff, but not so relevant to the rest of the event. Along with The Big Switch, he also recommended Technological Revolutions & Financial Capital by Carlota Perez for a historical view of how technology develops.

After the break we had workshop sessions with a mix of the student and industry participants. The topic was 'what are the top 5 challenges facing the CIO of the future?' Our group (after interesting debate from different viewpoints) came up with:

1. The transition from CTO to CIO. It is less about managing infrastructure than about managing information - making it both secure & available.
2. Focus on people, look at how they work and provide technological solutions to enable them to work more effectively
3. The ability to change
4. Become more involved in the actual business decisions, not just IT
5. Navigate increasingly complex compliance issues (eg data protection)

Update 14th July: A quick note in response to some comments off-blog.
I am enthusiastic about the consumerisation of IT and user-centred design/experience design. I am not enthusiastic about cloud computing (getting a third-party, eg Google, Microsoft or whoever to host services for you in their data centres). 'Cautiously interested' would be a better description.

After reporting an event with case studies from happy Google customers, to redress the balance somewhat it's worth looking at those universities who have evaluated cloud computing and decided against it.

One view from Oxford University Computing Service:

"I think outsourcing of an institution’s e-mail to a third party is fraught with problems. Probably the same could be said about documents. Maybe one role for Google Apps is to use it in addition to what you currently provide, perhaps for use on specific projects."
[I think OUCS originally looked at Google Apps for calendaring]

UC Berkley established a committee which produced a report UC Berkeley:
Exploration Of Partnership Opportunities For Campus Collaborative Tools

"the general consensus of the committee is that the campus should not contract with either vendor [Microsoft & Google] for the provision of email, calendaring and/or web storage services at this time. Serious concerns stand in the way of the campus adopting such an approach. On balance, the potential for realizing cost savings and increased functionality from outsourcing these campus services to Google Apps for Education or Microsoft Live@EDU are not sufficiently compelling to overcome those concerns." [the major concerns were around privacy & accessibility, these were described as showstoppers by some people]

"In the near to medium term (12-18 months), the result of the committees findings is that the
campus should continue to improve existing messaging services..."

"In the longer term, the committee feels that it is important to continue to track the developments in this field... As with any service offered by the campus, we need to continually evaluate if the services we offer are provided in the most cost-effective way and continue to meet the evolving needs of the campus community. Additionally, the capabilities envisioned for the collaborative tools Microsoft and Google (and others) are developing beyond the email, calendar, and file sharing space are potentially quite compelling, and may offer considerable value to the campus community."

Finally some news stories from just the last month:

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/08/docs_and_spreadsheets_goes_down/>
<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/court-ruling-will-expose-viewing-habits-youtube-us>
<http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/google-tests-using-your-search-data-to-tailor-ads-to-you/?ref=business>