HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 2

CONTENTS

Overview 3

The Benefits of Proving a Concept with Cloud Technology 4

1. Operating Expenditure 5

2. Massive Scalability 5

3. Speed and Agility 6

4. Wasted Investment 6

5. Going Global 7

How to Get Your Data into the Cloud 8

1. Load and Store 9

2. Transform 9

3. Search 10

Fast Cloud Innovation 11

1. Know What You Are Measuring 12

2. Bite the Problem Off in Pieces 12

3. Get Stakeholders Involved 13

4. Retain Your Focus 13

3

OVERVIEW

INNOVATE OR DIE HAS LONG BEEN THE MANTRA OF IT, BUT LIKE MANY THREE-WORD SLOGANS, IT’S OFTEN EASIER TO PREACH THAN PRACTICE.

Innovation is hard. Not as hard as the death part of that equation perhaps, but it still presents many challenges. It can be expensive and risky, and part of the problem is that in looking forward, too many businesses fail to consider what they already have and aren’t using very well. There’s no point gathering masses of information if it sits unnoticed and unloved on countless devices and media formats scattered around the business where nobody can access it. Great innovation comes when that raw data gets turned into useful intelligence.

In the past, this sort of project involved a large commitment of time and money to plan, install, test and implement. By the time even a small proof of concept (POC) had been developed, so many resources had been committed to the project, it had become too big to fail, even though the solution turned out to be, say, unable to cope with discontinued product lines or mergers and acquisitions. This left businesses with no choice but to move forward lugging their sad failed analytics dreams behind them.

The rise of cloud platforms has changed all that and “innovate or die” now jostles with “fail fast, fail often” for real estate on PowerPoint presentations. Not every solution is going to be the right one, but the quicker you can experiment and discount the misses, the faster you can get to a hit. When something works, you can stay on that path and scale it up throughout the business. If not, you can quickly extract the lessons and get started on your next attempt to generate better business insights.

In the pages that follow, we’ll look at how the cloud can make your business more innovative.

“ Invention requires two things:1. The ability to try a lot of experiments.2. Not having to live with the collateral

damage of failed experiments.”

Andrew Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 4

THE BENEFITS OF PROVING A CONCEPT WITH CLOUD TECHNOLOGYCLOUD PLATFORMS CREATE AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH POCKETS OF INNOVATION ARE POSSIBLE AS PROCESSES BECOME CHEAPER, MORE FLEXIBLE AND SCALABLE. HERE’S HOW IT REMOVES BARRIERS TO ENTRY:

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 5

1. OPERATINGEXPENDITUREThe first hurdle in getting any project off the ground is finding the money to for pay for it. In the past, that meant a huge upfront investment to requisition equipment, which then had to go through a time-consuming process of installing the required patches, firewalls and software to get it ready for action. Instead of all that money being spent before you’ve even reached the starting line, you simply purchase server space in the cloud that’s ready to go as you need it. Financing moves to a subscription model that only charges you for what you use, when you use it, bringing with it cost savings.

2. MASSIVE SCALABILITYWith in-house data centres, your space to grow is landlocked by your ability to plan, accommodate and budget for new servers and the speed at which you can install them. You’re left weighing up the need for enough infrastructure to service peak demand against the expense of running underused equipment for the remainder of the year. That’s why the US’ Natural Resources Defence Council puts the average server utilisation rate between 12-18 per cent. The cloud stops you guessing about capacity because it can simply be purchased as you need it.

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 6

3. SPEED AND AGILITYThe reduced time and cost required to get a project up and running means you can turn on resources whenever you need them. Better still you turn them off once that phase of development passes and they’re no longer needed. If the idea doesn’t pan out, you can pivot, dump it and move onto the next one without breaking the bank, while a successful POC can quickly be scaled up across the business.

4. WASTED INVESTMENT:A decade ago, Gartner famously announced that 80 per cent of enterprise IT spend was devoted to keeping the lights on. That’s hardly surprising once you start calculating the costs of buying a depreciating asset, patching, maintaining and eventually replacing it (on average after five years), and then factor in the energy demands of powering it and climate control. But it doesn’t make it any less annoying, especially since, as research by consultancy Anthesis found, about 30 per cent of servers sit idle. Dead money spent on comatose servers is no way for your businesses to innovate.

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 7

“ A single developer, with just a small pocket book of budget, can go do projects that used to cost millions of dollars five years ago.”

Mark Russinovich, CTO, Microsoft Azure

5. GOING GLOBALCloud computing is the ideal way to get everyone on the same page, no matter where they are. You can build a script in one location and have it run in other regions immediately. Moving data to the cloud removes information silos where data is visible only to one business unit or branch, giving those who need it a bigger picture and ensuring that everyone is working with the same, most current version of information.

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 8

HOW TO GET YOUR DATA INTO THE CLOUDWHEN MIGRATING DATA INTO THE CLOUD FOR BETTER BUSINESS VISIBILITY, THERE ARE THREE MAIN PHASES:

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 9

1. LOAD AND STOREHow your data gets to the cloud will depend largely on its size. During the POC there will only be a relatively small amount of data that can manageably be migrated over-the-wire. Once you get to final rollout, drip feeding terabytes of data can make for slow progress. There’s always the option of buying a bigger pipeline, but unless you’re going to be uploading data non-stop around the clock, it still means paying for capacity you’re not using. Both AWS and Microsoft Azure have physical media options, which may seem a touch old school in a cloud world, but it means that data sets can be transferred onto a rugged device, shipped to the nearest data centre and tipped into the cloud. As the amount of data increases, cloud storage can adjust to fit, meaning that you only pay for what you use.

2. TRANSFORMThe good news is that you have all your data neatly stored in one place instead of random file servers, laptops and the odd stack of CD-ROM drives in the back of the stationery cupboard. The bad news is that’s about all you can say for it. There are Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, map data and so on, and all of these are of varying vintages that do not get better with age. You need to extract the metadata from all of these files so you’re retaining useful origin information, such as when and where it was created and who by. Then it’s a matter of indexing the data to make it searchable so that if you are, say, a mining company, you can find all mentions of the word “copper” in your vast back catalogue of technical reports. The beauty of working in a cloud environment is that you only pay for these services during the initial set-up phase and you can scale them down when they’re no longer needed.

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 10

3. SEARCHThe final phase is implementing a search interface to start reaping intelligence. There’s no point having all this useful information on tap, if no one wants to use it, so you need to ask yourself what the user experiences will look like and what it is that you want them to do. How you want them to interface, and consideration of their existing experience, dictates what sort of filters, history, pagination and so on to build into the front end.

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 11

FAST CLOUD INNOVATIONWHEN EMBARKING ON A POC PROJECT, YOUR BEST CHANCE OF SUCCESS IS TO MAKE IT BIG ENOUGH THAT THE RESULTS ARE MEANINGFUL, BUT SMALL ENOUGH THAT OVERHEADS ARE LOW AND IT CAN BE DEVELOPED QUICKLY. HERE ARE SOME GUIDELINES TO ENSURE IT STANDS THE BEST CHANCE OF SUCCESS.

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 12

1. KNOW WHAT YOUARE MEASURINGIn order to determine whether a POC is a success, it helps to know exactly what success looks like. Is the aim to prove the project from a technological perspective? How much do you need to make the business case for scaling now instead of waiting?

2. BITE THE PROBLEMOFF IN PIECESYou’re not building the entire solution, so stay focused on a sprint and not a marathon. Agile innovation means a testing environment that’s small, quick and low cost. There’s only so much you can do within these guidelines, so focus on one part that can be extrapolated to the whole. Select a sample size that can be quickly uploaded into the system and run through its paces, but make sure it’s representative enough to extract useful metadata and get meaningful results.

HOW TO REMOVE BARRIERS TO INNOVATION WITH THE CLOUD | Developed and Produced by SMS Management & Technology 13

3. GET STAKEHOLDERSINVOLVEDThe successful introduction of new systems is as much about the people as it is the technology. Understanding what sort of information the rest of the business is looking for and how they already search for it is vital to creating a good environment for analytics. The scope of the POC may limit how useful it is across the entire organisation, but getting a cross-section involved in the testing phase will generate more valuable feedback. You can use this to develop a better picture of what’s working and how the project should continue to develop.

4. RETAIN YOUR FOCUSEnthusiasm for a project is great. For one thing, it means you’ll have plenty of advocates when it comes time to sell the business case for scaling the project. Just don’t let people’s exuberance derail the POC via death by a thousand requests. Yes, you can change the look and feel of the user interface, load more data and add fuzzy logic or autocomplete functions to the search, just not during the POC. Adding every bell and whistle will slow down your development, and prove very wasteful if the POC lives up to the fail part of the “fail fast” philosophy. Add all requests to a backlog that can be revisited once it graduates to a fully-fledged project.

ABOUT SMSA leader in advisory, solutions and managed services, SMS cultivates innovation, digital, mobile and design-led business and technology capability to empower organisations across all industry sectors. With over 1700 staff across Asia Pacific, SMS promotes and delivers next-generation customer-centric outcomes for our clients.

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