My first ‘CIO Thought Leadership’ piece entitled, ‘The Critical Nature of Planning.’
This is the first piece in a series that I am writing for the Mergers and Acquisition topic section on The Business Value Exchange.
Read it here and get involved by leaving a comment.
Archive | CIO
The CIO – ‘First 100 Days’
My first Skype interview on the topic of The CIO – ‘First 100 Days’ for The Business Value Exchange.
Watch it here and get involved by leaving a comment.
The Business Value Exchange – CIO Thought Leader and Featured Contributor
I am proud to announce that I was asked to become a CIO Thought Leader and Featured Contributor on a new IDG produced site in collaboration with HP Enterprise Services.
The site is called The Business Value Exchange and you can find out more about it here.
I will be contributing regularly through featured articles and Skype interviews, so please take a look and get involved.
IBM’s BYOD and Shadow IT Hangout
I was invited by IBM to take part in a Google Hangout yesterday on the topic of BYOD and Shadow IT (#IBMShadow). 
As a panel, we were asked to discuss the strengths, weaknesses, pitfalls and concerns related to the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ phenomenon, and Shadow IT.
It was a lively and fun discussion and you can watch the YouTube video of the event by clicking here.
The other participants were Simon Gale – CTO Workplace Services UKI at IBM Global Services, Wendy Carstairs – Head of Technical Strategy Borderless Networks UKI at Cisco and Will Kelly from TechRepublic.
The event was moderated by Jay Sorrels – Senior Social Media Strategist at Ogilvy, London.
The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership
The CIO role can be a lonely place at times with not much written about it other than its demise or difficulty breaking in to the highest echelons of the corporate structure.
The CIO Paradox by Martha Heller changes that and has instantly elevated it to one of a handful of books I recommend as a must have reference book on every CIO’s bookshelf.
This book breaks the mould and not only enthuses you with an amazing amount of knowledge and case studies from other CIO’s but it also challenges your current strategic reasoning through its elegantly structured paradoxes.
It drives straight to the heart of the CIO role, openly discussing (with real world feedback) ways in which you can improve yourself/your IT organisation but it also takes the time to highlight ways in which you identify, nurture and manage talent within it.
It is well researched and Martha clearly knows her topic well having written about and engaged with CIO’s for many years.
My only reservation about the book is that the level of CIO’s that contributed to it errs on the larger corporate but this certainly shouldn’t detract from the lessons contained within that CIO’s from companies of all sizes can learn a considerable amount from.
The book is broken in to four sections, each of them relating to a key CIO challenge:
1. YOUR ROLE: YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DO AND YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DON’T
2. YOUR STAKEHOLDERS: WILL THE BUSINESS EVER LOVE IT?
3. YOUR STAFF: THEY JUST DON’T MAKE THEM LIKE THAT
4. YOUR FUTURE: WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE CIO?
I’ll break out a small portion of the first challenge with some of my own reasoning.
I could easily discuss and write about every single point in more detail but for the sake of the length of this review I will hold back:
YOUR ROLE: YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DO AND YOUR DAMNED IF YOU DON’T
As CIO’s you are hired to be strategic and innovative.
The stark truth is that you can spend most of your time on operational issues and whilst being the steward of risk and cost containment it can also be difficult to innovate.
Sound familiar?
This section quickly revs up and breaks in to the cost versus innovation paradox.
Regular readers of my blog will know my drive for innovation within the CIO role and the need for the CIO to add REAL value to the business through it but this must not be done without first stabilising the ‘run’ side of the IT organisation.
Running before you can walk is the death knell for many an IT leader, with the mantra here being that you must earn the trust and respect of the business in the stabilisation of the IT organisation before you move on to the chunkier, more innovative projects.
The most successful CIO’s (the ones who have broken the paradox) are those who do more than apply IT to business problems. CIO’s who have broken the paradox take the expertise that they have developed in their role as leaders of the IT organisation and use it to make improvements across the enterprise. They are company leaders, in addition to being IT leaders.
You must speak the language of the business, building relationships with business leaders, being a business leader first and a technologist second.
Whilst a huge group of CIO’s get it and are bona fide business leaders, another huge group does not….
——
When you think through the various paradoxes that are broken out across the book, many of them really resonate and delve in to the essence of the CIO role.
Each of the four main sections and resulting paradoxes will be graded differently in importance for each CIO that reads this book but I’m sure that we will all appreciate every one of them just as much.
The key strength of the book is exactly this and proves that not only does it cover in great detail a wide spread of the main issues facing a CIO in executing their role but its elegantly crafted paragraphs mean hardly a word is wasted in doing so.
When you work through the book you find yourself nodding in appreciation and making notes in the margin (and in my case putting index markers in to mark key pages).
The book is filled with many canny and informed pearls of wisdom that all CIO’s will appreciate but the best quote in the book by far is:
“it is really tough to be strategic when your pants are on fire”
– Ron Kifer, CIO at Applied Materials
The simple conclusion is that this is a must read book for every CIO.
Its going to be a well thumbed reference point for me that will stimulate my thoughts and interchanges with others for a long time to come.
The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013
Perhaps no C-level position has undergone as many changes in expectations, approaches, and philosophies during the past few decades as that of the Chief Information Officer.
And the turbulent forces shaping businesses in today’s always-on global marketplace promise to accelerate that ongoing evolution. In that context, I’ve put together a list of what I believe will be the top priorities for strategic CIOs in the coming year.
As you’ll see, each of these 10 is rooted in change, and calls for the CIO to be a leader instead of a follower; a disrupter instead of a go-alonger; and a business-driven executive instead of a tech-focused manager.
Several themes reverberate throughout: analytics, breaking down silos, social, the cloud, and particularly customers, opportunities, growth, and innovation. I hope these prove helpful, and please share your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter at @bobevansIT and @christianmcm.
1) Simplify IT and Transform Your Spending: Kick the 80/20 Budget Habit. While surely not as sexy as Social and Business Analytics and Cloud, this bold decision to take an entirely new approach to IT infrastructure is the one and only way CIOs can unlock the funding necessary to pursue those snazzier and unquestionably vital new initiatives. Far too many companies today find that they need to devote 70% or even 80% of their IT budget just to run and maintain what they’ve already got, leaving as little as 20% for innovation. And if you wonder sometimes why you’ve got precious little IT budget available to fund growth-oriented innovation, the answer becomes pretty clear by looking at the list of usual suspects that have brought us to this point: server sprawl, massively underutilized storage resources, unproductive data centers, labor-intensive integration requirements, and a near-endless list of “strategic” vendors. The IT policies of the past that resulted in the 80/20 trap are simply no longer able to meet the needs of today’s intensely demanding and always-on business world, and are indeed becoming liabilities not just because they’re inadequate but also because they suck up vast percentages of the IT budget and make it almost impossible for CIOs to fund essential new efforts in analytics or cloud or mobile or social. CIOs need to determine which vendors are only exacerbating this problem, and which ones offer modern alternatives that are cheaper, faster, and smarter. My POV: CEOs should tie most or all of the variable compensation for their CIOs to changing that deadly 80/20 budget ratio by 5 percentage points per year. The CIOs willing to tackle this huge issue will not only earn some nice bonus dollars but will unlock huge value for their companies as well as for their own careers.
2) Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-Enabled Enterprise.When social media began to invade the corporate world some years back, the traditional border-collie behavior of many CIOs triggered immediate and unconditional opposition to social tools on the grounds of security challenges, lack of familiarity, and unproven value. As social’s ability to forge new and more-immediate relationships with customers became more clear, some CIOs grudgingly agreed to let down the drawbridge (but they drew the line at removing the alligators from the moat!). Today’s business-technology leaders must go well beyond that passive acceptance and become passionate and unconditional zealots for the social-driven revolution and its ability to help their companies grow by providing real-time customer insights, engagements, and processes. Beyond customers, the social revolution is also becoming indispensable internally for motivating existing employees and recruiting great new talent, and in forging deeper and more-valuable relationships with partners. My POV: CIOs who fight this trend will be pushed aside by CMOs and LOB heads who understand social’s potential and know they can’t compete unless that potential is harnessed by the company for competitive advantage. And what does “pushed aside” mean? At best, temporary embarrassment, and at worst, demotion or even unemployment.
3) Unleash Your Company’s Intelligence: Create the Enterprise-Wide Opportunity Chain. Building on but transcending existing notions of supply chain and demand chain and data warehouses and data marts, the Opportunity Chain transforms that internally oriented information into the customer-centric and growth-driven language of opportunity. New prospects, new market trends, new chances to engage, new insights for new products, new demographic patterns: information and insights about all of these probably exist somewhere within your corporate IT maze but are almost impossible to find because we cloak them in IT-specific terminology and then trap them in incompatible silos. But today’s new and always-on global marketplace requires new insights driven by the social revolution, and many of our old and trusty systems and approaches are simply not suited to the new realities demanded by our customers and by our times. In addition, the Opportunity Chain concept provides a market-facing framework and context for richly exploiting the potential of business analytics and Big Data. My POV: Whatever it’s called, this idea of the Opportunity Chain gives CIOs a fantastic, well, opportunity to drive high-value new information assets throughout the company and demonstrate again that when business technology is aggressively imagined and led, it drives growth and sparks new and deeper engagements with customers.
4) Embrace the Engagement Economy: Merge the Back Office and the Front Office into the Customer Office. One of the most-valuable perks of being a CIO is the ability to be involved with and understand not just some but all of a company’s end-to-end processes. From manufacturing to marketing, from procurement to product development, from finance to Facebook, the CIO and the business-technology team have tremendous insights into how a company’s operations, its priorities, its vulnerabilities, and its opportunities. So today, as our systems of record become systems of engagement, and as the social revolution opens up all facets of our enterprise to customer interactions as well as customer scrutiny, isn’t it time to bulldoze the internally constructed silos separating the folks that have traditionally touched the customer (the “front office”) with those that were never allowed to—or at least supposed to (the “back office”)? Shouldn’t we try to engage our customers in product development? Engineering? Service plans and operations? Marketing? Pricing options? My POV: While traditional systems reinforce the notion that only the privileged few get to interact with customers—and while that might be convenient for us internally—today’s socially powered consumers want access beyond the sales team. The question is, are you able—and willing—to grant that essential access?
5) Future-Proof Your IT Architecture. Think back just three years to the state of your business and the state of your IT strategy: the cloud was still mostly conceptual or isolated out on the fringes, social was a minor but persistent irritation, Big Data was mostly an egghead conversation and not likely to get beyond that, “engagement” was something you hoped your daughter would not get into with her goofy boyfriend, business analytics was all taken care of by a big team of specialists serving a small team of executives, and the iPad was still blessedly nothing but a rumor. The CFO badgered you every month about your endless demands for more real estate in which to put endlessly growing racks of servers requiring endlessly growing volumes of electricity and air conditioning, but what else could you do? The data explosion required a parallel explosion infrastructure growth, right? But the physics and the finances of such an approach no longer work, and the new business demands of today must surely be met with more-innovative tools tomorrow.My POV: Businesses need fresh thinking about the architecture of tomorrow because merely rehabbing or adding on to the existing plan will simply not meet the wildly different and more-demanding requirements of tomorrow. Cloud, social, mobile, engagement, Big Vision (formerly Big Data), and a greatly accelerated pace and scale of global business require modern apps, optimized systems, fault-tolerance, full support across cloud and on-premise and a mix of both, and built-in BI and social capabilities.
6) Upgrade “Cloud Strategy” to “Business Transformation Enabled by the Cloud.” Without question, CIOs must have detailed strategies and plans for cloud computing and many already have those in place (to those of you who don’t, well, did you ever get that high-school teaching certificate?). But the strategic CIO will use the next several months to collaborate with the CEO in upgrading that tech-centric plan into a broader vision for a sweeping business transformation of the entire enterprise. If you’re still viewing your cloud strategy based on a tech-driven plan written a year or two ago—before the ascendancy of social, customer engagement, Big Data, and business analytics—you’re going to miss the boat. My POV: Cloud projects will not be judged on their technical merits or on hitting their go-live dates, but rather by how deeply they impact essential business-transformation initiatives, and by how much business value and opportunity they unlocked. In the process, CIOs will segment themselves into two groups: IT leaders who focus solely on the tech aspects of cloud deployments, and business leaders who ensure that cloud projects are conceived and executed in the service of customers, business execution, and engagement.
7) Transform Big Data into Big Insights, Big Vision, and Big Opportunities. In the past year or so, much of the talk about Big Data has obscured the fact that the real issue is enabling intelligent and instantaneous analysis to provide optimal insights for business decisions. CIOs need to ensure they’re looking at these high-volume, high-velocity challenges in the right way: as business enablers, not tech projects. For example: What if you could enable dynamic pricing of your company’s products around the globe? What if you could perform fraud-detection analytics across all of your transactions in real time, instead of across just a random sampling of only a few percent of all those transactions? What if you could analyze three years’ worth of customer data in minutes, rather than only the past three months in hours? In the meantime, we can be certain that the scale and speed of this current challenge will only increase as CIOs must rapidly and seamlessly enhance their traditional corporate data with vast new streams of social and mobile data to realize the full potential of these strategic Big Opportunities.My POV: Some forecasts say the CMO will soon be calling the shots for IT; while I don’t buy into that, I do agree that CIOs who choose to sit back and wait for “the business” to tell them what to do will end up reporting to the CMO within a year or two. But companies will fare much better if their CIOs eagerly and rapidly begin framing Big Data challenges and opportunities in terms of customers, opportunities, revenue, and business value.
8) Preside over a Shotgun Wedding: Systems of Record Marry Systems of Engagement. Your traditional back-end systems might be sturdy and proven workhorses but they’re simply not equipped to handle the vast new streams of data and information from social, video, Customer Experience, and more. Conversely, while those new engagement tools and solutions are fabulous gateways into the real-time wants and needs of customers and employees, they lack the historical and institutional breadth and knowledge of your trusty ERP systems. The strategic CIO will find new approaches and/or solutions to rapidly and seamlessly tie these separate worlds together. This strategic integration will become the cornerstone of the Opportunity Chain described above in #3, and also of the consolidation of the archaic front office and back office into the modern Customer Office as described in #4. My POV: This union of social/mobile with transactional capabilities will give companies a new way to move at the speed of their customers, new methods for engaging with customers to build multifaceted relationships rather than linear transactions, and the ability to avoid getting stuck in the tar pit of siloed systems designed to meet internal requirements rather than enable the co-creation of value with customers.
9) Lead with Speed: CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer. I first suggested this aspirational model about 18 months ago when I wrote the following http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-cio-my-farewell-column-10-big-thi/229300888?pgno=2 , and the rationale for the CIO to function as chief corporate accelerant is even more true today: “If you could promise your CEO that you could shorten product-development times, reduce days-of-inventory turns, accelerate deliveries to customers, cut or eliminate the wait-times customers endure on your support lines, and shorten your order-to-cash cycle, is there a CEO on planet Earth who wouldn’t idolize you? So why not embrace that as a new mission for your IT organization and think of what you do as being the Chief Acceleration Officer, the exec who leads the company’s efforts to do everything it does not just better but faster? Give the gift of speed, and see if anyone in your company or among your customers wants to return it.” My POV: While I’m surely not proposing that title as an official thing, businesses in every industry will find in 2013 that, more than ever before, speed kills—the only question will be whether your company’s going to be the victim or the perp.
10) Bend the Value Curve: More Innovation, Less Integration. For the past 30 or so years, tech vendors have generally introduced streams of new products that were not only increasingly more powerful and capable, but also increasingly more complex, requiring ever-greater volumes of integration, testing, tuning, modifying, patching, upgrading, monitoring, etc., etc. Back when viable alternatives weren’t available, that was an okay model—IT teams specialized in stringing together piece-parts from hundreds of vendors and somehow managed to figure out ways to make it all work together. But today, that model is ready to begin making the transition over to the Computer Museum. Customer-side CEOs in particular are growing increasingly fed up with the apparent black arts of IT operations that require larger and larger budgets without predictably delivering more and more business value. For CIOs, the answer is simple—not easy, but simple: they need to begin rapidly withdrawing themselves and their business-technology teams from the integration business and begin devoting more and more of their time to growth-oriented and customer-centric innovation. In the past few years, a handful of IT vendors have begun offering a new breed of engineered systems or optimized systems designed to offer pre-bundled and pre-tested purpose-built machines that free customers from the drudgery of endless integration busywork. Oracle led the way at the high end with Exadata, Exalytics, and Exalogic, and Apple’s iPhone is on its way to becoming a $100-billion example of the core concept: more innovation and less innovation. IBM followed Oracle’s lead a few months back with its Pure Systems, and even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in introducing the new Surface tablet, said it was time for Microsoft to try to optimize the hardware/software interactions.My POV: While not the answer (yet) for every question, engineered systems give strategic CIOs considerable latitude to devote more people and energy toward innovative customer-facing initiatives, and simultaneously alleviate the need for CIOs to pour so many budget dollars into low-value integration work that generates little or no competitive advantage.
So there’s my list of priorities for the strategic CIO—how about sharing yours, along with your feedback on the list above?
Authored by and reproduced with full permission of Bob Evans, Senior Vice President, Communications at Oracle
The Evolution of Today’s CIO
The face of today’s CIO has changed dramatically. Once upon a time the CIO was only concerned about the business of IT, from the development process and implementation to the operation of the IT world. What these CIO’s have learned, and some the hard way, is that isn’t enough. This narrow view has gotten IT in a load of trouble over the years.
This is manifested in many ways, the first being how consumers leverage our products and services. In 2009, the Better Business Bureau in Vancouver Canada listed Computers and Technology as the number one complaint across all areas.
As shown in the report, computer software and services are worse than those pesky car salesmen hunting you down on their lots. We not only see this from our consumer base but also from within our four walls. It is easier to not look at but there are systemic issues with the business of IT as it is today. As an example, the Standish Group released a report stating that 50% of all technology Initiatives are a waste of money. So what is the CIO to do? Stick with the status quo or make a change? It’s time for a change in how IT is operated.
It used to be that aligning IT with the Business was strategically in vogue for CIOs. And it still is. However there is a fundamental shift elevating the modern role of the CIO to that of not only doing the business of IT, but also transforming and innovating along the way. With 54% of mid-market CIOs viewing IT as the critical enabler of business and organisational vision, CEOs are now looking to the CIO as the trusted enabler, the mainspring for IT solutions that meet the demands of the business, in real-time.
Figure 1: Pressures of the Modern CIO
The traditional lens of the CIO focuses on providing technology platforms that “allow” the business to function while aligning IT priorities with business priorities, reducing solution cost and ensuring proper controls are in place. This is the CIO as Optimiser, immersed and concerned with driving internal IT process, efficiency and responsiveness, keeping pace with the needs of the business.
Today however brings a new set of business pressures that stares the CIO as Optimiser squarely in the eye and asks the question: “How are you helping the business adapt and cope with accelerating changes in market conditions and technology disruptors?” The answer lies within the new-fashioned role of the Transformative CIO.
The 2010 State of the CIO Survey provided by CIO magazine highlighted that nearly nine out of 10 (89 percent) anticipate assuming some additional area of non-IT leadership responsibility three to five years from now, compared to 61 percent who are currently responsible in a leadership capacity for one or more non-IT areas of the business. Security (55 percent), strategy (49 percent), and risk management (41 percent) are most frequently cited by IT leaders as areas they expect to assume leadership responsibility for in the longer term.
The Transformative CIO will help in this fashion by striving to partner with the Business, truly advancing the business relationship beyond pacing alignment. He becomes an expert of industry solutions; understanding, rationalising and recommending strategies that meet the ever-changing demands of the Business. And as council and advisor to the CEO, he empathises and takes action on his concerns.
Figure 2: Understanding the Maturity of the Modern CIO
As CIOs gain a foothold with the Business thought process, maturing strategic business value through the IT lens means continuing to find new ways of delivering value, service and cost containment. Enter the CIO as Innovator. He sees that in order to support business growth, he must be out ahead of the game solving real strategic business problems through innovation.
The new CIO also provides clarity of IT utility by understanding how competition can affect the company and by making strategic big bets on emerging technologies that are directly in line with business goals. He truly believes in a business first organisation. In fact, fully 70% of the CIOs surveyed in the 2010 State of the CIO report said long-term strategic thinking and planning will be most critically needed in the coming year.
CIOs are starting to realize this in a substantial way. CIOs are actively moving their focus to not only the transformational areas in partnership with the business but also in an innovative role as well. The 2010 State of the CIO Survey also includes an interesting point that 54% of CIO’s will focus their time and energy on driving business innovation. That is a substantial amount of time for any role, especially the CIO. This will completely change the tone of the IT organisation.
The modern CIO is one who not only understands the mechanical aspects of IT but also harmonizes the elements of IT culture, business maturity and industry innovation. And by having a seat at the business decision table, embracing enterprise architecture and running IT as a utility, he or she can incubate these elements in to a set of enablers the business can count on.
The pressure to deliver beyond the traditional role of the CIO is evolving in to a key asset for CEOs. A blend of CIO as Optimiser, Transformer and Innovator provides a powerful profile mix that amidst the constant of change will emerge a stronger and more service-focused business partnership with IT. After all, without IT there is no Business. Or is it the other way around?
Authored by and reproduced with full permission of Mike Walker, Enterprise Strategy and Architecture Chief IP Architect at Microsoft
2012 in Outsourcing – My prediction for Outsource Magazine
To get some idea of what lies in store, Outsource reached out to over 40 key thought leaders, tasking them to give their bite-sized predictions, prognostications and prophecies on what will be making headlines in outsourcing in 2012. Representing buyer, provider, advisory and analyst communities, and featuring commentary from the C-suite to the shop floor (via input from the Outsource Editorial Board and our international array of online columnists, of course), our 2012 Preview gives a huge range of perspectives from right across the space. So, for a peek at what some of the outsourcing community’s leading lights expect from the year ahead, pull back the veil and read on. One thing’s for sure: whatever lies ahead, we’re in for an interesting ride…
See my contribution here and let me know what yours would be?
IBM Event – The Future of Software Innovation?
The Future of Software Innovation?
Something for all you software and systems professionals out there: Innovate, IBM’s flagship event based on the topic of software innovation, is taking place next week on the 11th and 12th October (Tuesday and Wednesday) in London.
Over two days, with sessions focusing on software, systems, security and other key areas; the event is an opportunity for those interested in software innovation to really gain some valuable insights into the future of IT, and for the industry as a whole to engage in some interesting discussions on where the future lies.
Click here for a detailed agenda, including a timetable, session abstracts and information on key speakers.
Day 1 is being held at the Grange St Paul’s in London (http://www.grangehotels.com/hotels-london/grange-st-pauls-hotel/grange-st-pauls-hotel.aspx) and will feature a wide range of guest lectures from leading voices within the organisation and around the industry. The objective of the first day is to share and discuss ideas that inspire and fuel software innovation. A second day of workshops on-site with IBM at their Bedfont Lakes and Southbank offices, will offer hands on experience with IBM product experts.
Registration is free, and those wishing to attend can do so for either one or both days.
Here’s a link to the registration page where you can sign-up for the event and find more detailed information: http://bit.ly/innovateuk
IT just gets easier
We are all looking for the easiest and most cost effective solutions in everything that we do but often shy away from certain tasks due to their intricacies and capacity in being overcharged by vendors or providers.
As the web and enterprise have evolved and moved upwards through Web 1.0 and on to Web 2.0 the tools and information sources have improved but the need to develop all of the features necessary to e.g. build a website have remained quite basic.
I have always delighted in tools and services that not only provide quality functionality but also ones that save me time and effort in having to do exactly so.
My absolute favourites are ones that not only do the above but continue to deliver new releases that each time improve upon their initial offerings with quality support (i.e. More than just a teenager in Nebraska available outside school hours to offer it)
This was all brought home to me recently when I looked hypothetically at how easy it would be to create a new website and more specifically one which could be underpinned with ecommerce functionality.
Firstly, part one of my objective was to look at the website creation side of things.
I was pleasantly surprised by what I found and in how straightforward it would be to achieve this thanks to the quality of the offerings in the market place and through recommendations passed on to me by friends.
Not only that, they would look good too with minimal effort.
If you want a straightforward flash site, stop everything you are doing and head over to Wix and start playing around with what you want.
You can have something very impressive up and running pretty quickly that people will think you have had done professionally.
No coding necessary, search engine friendly, drag and drop design and above all its FREE to get going (you can upgrade to their Premium plans should you wish to bolt more on or remove ads etc.).
It really is as simple as that.
Moving on to the second task and the locating of a robust and easy to develop e-commerce platform.
Having previously created successful e-commerce sites for large multinationals, I appreciated the complexities and nuances to look out for but I was blown away by the quality and richness of the Magento E-commerce Platform offering.
These guys have really nailed the ‘out of a box’ e-commerce platform that has eluded us for years and have included everything that you could ever possibly need and wish for when trying to build an e-commerce platform.
The sheer breadth of features means you have to get your head together and really plan out your site beforehand. Study both your target markets and plan for the features that they will expect to see as well as the logistics of not only managing your inventories but also in managing the housework of the site itself.
Unless you are a developer or have access to the relevant development skills, you will obviously have to work with one of their solution partners to get your site to the level that you want to deliver to your clients.
I can certainly guarantee the cost of doing this is much cheaper and more beneficial than if you had to create a team of developers to create something from scratch, so it’s a no brainer to get a head start with a package like this.
Not only that but you will also benefit from all of the new features and functionality their new releases bring to market.
Their hosting and support model is also a nice comfort blanket and will keep you from waking up at night through the fear of losing your own developers and their specific skill sets and knowledge of your site/code.
The key here as always with development projects is to not over customise your offering so you can still benefit from the new product release and functionality delivered in the Magento software updates (over customisation is the most elementary and often repeated error in development projects).
The opening up of the Magento Platform through Magento Connect delivers a rich seam of extensions that are more often tailored by sector or specific niche but make no mistake they all help bolster an already feature laden platform.
I believe that opening up to a marketplace or 3rd party add on approach is crucial to the growth and richness of any platform – just ask the guys at Salesforce.com!
Footnote to Magento is that whilst I was writing this, it has been declared that they are being acquired by EBay – good for them and testament to the quality of their product!
So is this the evolution of a brief stopover at Web/Enterprise 2.4 on the march towards the fabled Web 3.0 with its primary drivers of personalisation and the Semantic Web?
Personally, I think this is a point version update that shows evidence of technology providing real and tangible progress that empowers both the enterprise and the individual.
At present, Social Media appears to be the magic carpet carrying society and enterprises in to a new technical era where it not only drives commercialisation but has also overtaken the older, rock solid medium of television amongst younger generations. However, this alone cannot sustain all necessary technology.
The benefit of all this to Enterprise is clear in that most software development will become easier and cheaper to produce.
With the evolutionary improvement of ‘out of the box’ solutions the size of development teams will naturally reduce as the volume of hand crafted code and subsequent support is reduced when compared with older methods of developing such products.
With the ultimate aim of delivering better products for your customers and in building shareholder value, we must embrace this advance in technology and developers must also move forward in learning new skills and taking that step forward hand in hand with the enterprise rather than rebelling against it.
The conclusion of all this is that tools and technology really have moved on and now offer incredible power and functionality to the individual that was only previously available through professional service companies.
Gone is the need to carve everything from the single block of marble by yourself as technology has yet again moved on and taken another long stride towards the nirvana of absolute functionality.
