John addressed this question in the Wall Street Journal recently. Here's what he has to say.

Yes: It Is Inevitable

Fight it all you want, but employees are going to be bringing their own smartphones, tablets and other technology to work with them. So it's time to stop resisting and start preparing.

Most of the organizations I worked with or for over the past 40 years had strict rules about technology. They kept tight control over what hardware and software workers could use, believing it would be easier to secure and manage that way. Some even went so far as to lock down their technologies, meaning employees couldn't do things like change user preferences.

Such an approach seemed to make sense, considering the challenges related to fighting viruses and malware, as well as the need to secure business data and make sure company computers weren't used inappropriately.

But talk to corporate IT people, and they'll tell you maintaining such tight control these days has become a real pain.

Continued at Wall Street

John Parkinson will be one of the keynote speakers at the Nearshore Nexus "Do You Really Have to go All the Way to India for High Performance Sourcing?" Conference on Tuesday, April 25, 2011 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Read John's outsourcing thoughts and experience in the article Unconventional Sourcing Advice from a Globally Aware CTO.

John Parkinson will be presenting a consulting industry update, "Where Do We Go From Here? The Challenges of an Evolving Professional Services Market" in the afternoon.

It's time to get over the control paradigm we've all gotten used to and start thinking outside the box. What would it take to allow any device to connect safely and securely to our corporate networks?

Most of the organizations I have worked with for the past 40 years had rules about what technology could be used at work. They spent a good deal of time and money creating or acquiring standard technologies that were supposed to be easy to secure and manage because they were:

1. standardized; and

2. recognizable

Some places even went so far as to "lock down" user technologies, preventing or overwriting changes made by users.With all the well-known challenges related to combating viruses and other malware--as well as the need to secure business data and make sure that business technology wasn't being diverted to unauthorized personal use--all this effort seemed to make sense.

Continued at CIO Insight

Here's a classic problem in behavioral ethics -- what's a "fair" rationing strategy for a scarce commodity?

If you can only meet 90% of demand for something, what should you do? Deprive everyone of 10% of what they would like or deprive 10% of people of everything that want? Or something in between? It gets complicated when 90% supply is actually equivalent to 0% because of threshold effects -- uncommon in many situations but very common in others. Economic theory tells us that in a situation where demand exceeds supply, prices will rise until balance is restored (price rationing) and/or supply will expand until demand can be met at the current price (which is a form of temporal rationing if it takes a long time to add new supply). In the second approach, you can often get oversupply (all suppliers act independently to add capacity) which actually depresses prices for a while.

For some well-studied examples (urban highway capacity is one such case), adding supply actually triggers more demand -- a constant cycling between relatively long periods of shortage and short periods of abundance that planners know will happen, but can't "see" in the planning data because unmet demand is invisible. Surveys to measure unmet demand and alternative scenario simulations help justify additional capacity, but only so much -- and it's hard to justify a capital investment that won't get used until some hard to identify future date.

Continued at Harvard Business Review

What do a Revolution in Military Affairs and the smart grid have in common? The reason it took 600 years for gunpowder to really change war fighting strategy illustrates the risks inherent in a future smart grid.

Gunpowder, one of mankind's most disruptive innovations, made its European debut in the early part of the 14th century. Up until then, security specialists had a simple and effective strategy -- build taller, thicker walls to keep out enemies. An entire economic ecosystem had grown up around this strategy, which was what worked. Visibly. Everywhere. If you could afford it.

Gunpowder changed all that. But it wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that the military strategies of nation states really evolved past the taller, thicker walls approach. That's in part because gunpowder wasn't initially very good and the munitions it made possible weren't very effective. Sure it had the potential to be a problem, but, hey, not in my lifetime -- and, oh, by the way -- I have this really neat idea for a stronger castle I want to build for you. It didn't help that a good alternative to taller, thicker walls wasn't available. Rule number one for strategic advisors: don't show up with a problem you can't solve.

Continued at Harvard Business Review

John recently wrote about how every change to an established system has unintended consequences in Harvard Business Review's Insight Center's blog about tomorrow's smart grid.

Fixing large-scale critical infrastructure in place is one of the hardest engineering and operational management tasks we can face. Yet the better we build our infrastructure, the more we become dependent on it and the more disruptive any attempt at major change will be. We all live this with highways and bridges. Where I live we have two seasons: winter and road construction. Winter is shrinking; road season isn't.

Also where I live, large parts of the local commuter rail system need to be upgraded in place. Not the tracks or signaling or rolling stock -- they handle those upgrades all the time. But bridges, viaducts, and some stations are 100 years old and at the end, or beyond, of their design lives. It's going to take eight years to replace all this -- eight years during which the trains still have to run, if only to generate the revenue to pay for the upgrades. So (or so I'm told) a bunch of "smart young folks with their computers" sat down and recalculated the train schedules so that in some parts of the system half of the right of way can be taken out of service for extended periods. In their "smart scheduling" (they really called it that) solution, no train time changed by more than five minutes -- most by less than three -- although lots of station stops got skipped at peak times. To compensate trains got longer or shorter, requiring passengers to learn new on and off boarding strategies, because the stations didn't get longer to match the trains.

Continued at Harvard Business Review

Here's a checklist of items you won't always learn from the conventional literature on outsourcing or offshoring. Find out why the success of your program depends on these factors.

I first got involved in the offshore business in 1979 via a software engineering and testing partnership that brought together U.S., U.K. and French teams to support a project in the Middle East. This global talent pool was a critical factor in delivering the project successfully on time and on budget. Since then, I have been involved in global sourcing initiatives in India, the Philippines, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Poland, Spain and China.

Along the way, I've learned things that we don't always see in the conventional literature on outsourcing or offshoring. Here's a checklist for CIOs to consider before leaping into "world sourcing."

Continued at CIO Insight

Business intelligence tools have matured, but have IT's internal capabilities? A look at the real challenge CIOs face in executing their BI strategy.

Businesses have been accumulating data in digital form from business operations for more than 40 years now. In parallel with this accumulation, tools for organizing, categorizing and analyzing this data--turning it into the kind of context-rich information that can drive decision making--have been growing in capability and sophistication.

If you believe the vendor stories today, we can "empower" everyone in the business with the information tools they need to make better, faster operational and strategic decisions and thus please both customers--because we know who they are as individuals and can anticipate what they want and need--and stakeholders--because happy customers make for a profitable business. There are even credible "proof points" to back up the claims, such as case studies of businesses that do this really well.

Information-driven businesses do exist. They do work. And some of them even do better than the rest of the market they compete in. Shouldn't we all make use of the mountains of data in our warehouses and match the performance of these pioneers? Isn't it time for "Enterprise BI"?

If only it were that easy.

Continued at CIO Insight

John seldom goes to major vendor events any more. They've gotten so big that you can't actually get anything useful done and he already owns too many of the various give away items that abound at 'partner" booths at these things.

They always seem to be in inconvenient locations (at least if you live in the Northern Midwest they're inconvenient) and I hate the travel. Every now and again, however, something comes to Chicago that looks like it could be interesting or useful, and I sign up.

Inevitably I regret it. Yesterday was no exception.

Continued at CIO Insight