Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle Helps Delta Airlines Better Deliver Critical Business Applications

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the second in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion that examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement. Complexity, silos of technology and culture, as well as the shifting landscape of applications’ delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications’ approaches in large organizations.

In the book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors pursue the role and impact of automation and management over applications, as well as delving into the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

This is the second (read more about and access the first podcast) in the series of three podcasts on the "Application Lifecycle Management" book. We're here with the authors, but we are also here to learn about how one enterprise, Delta Air Lines, has moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality and impact and to better deliver real business results from those applications.

We will hear Delta story from two IT executives there and gain the reactions to the new application life cycle book’s findings. So please join me now welcoming our panel, David Moses, Quality Assurance Manager for Delta’s eCommerce IT Group, and John Bell, Senior Test Engineer in the eCommerce IT Group at Delta.

David Moses and John Bell: Thanks for having us.

Gardner: And we're joined by book’s authors, Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager for Solution Marketing at HP Applications. Welcome back, Brad and Mark.

Mark Sarbiewski and Brad Hipps: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Before we get into Delta’s experience, for our listeners, I'd like to explain a bit more about the book. Mark, what were the driving needs or necessities that prompted you to write this and then perhaps get into some of the high-level takeaways and bindings?

Combination of factors

Sarbiewski: It really is a combination of factors, but the headline for me is that, more than ever, business moves as software moves; as your website moves, as your ERP system is advanced, your supply chain, and your financials.

Businesses are driven so much by software now that it's really the long pole in the tent. Standing up infrastructure is a necessity. Potentially, it can be done really fast. How quickly can I innovate on my capabilities for my customers or my internal users?

So, business moves as software moves. When we look at how we've done over the last 10 or 15 years, I could sum it by saying that legacy applications and approaches are just too slow. Not only are they too slow, they are too costly. They're riddled with security holes, which are increasing the challenges out there.

So, we have this dynamic that the business needs to move faster. Software is a prime driver in innovating for the business, and where we've been is simply too slow. We need to rethink our approach across the board, because there is no one silver bullet. It really boils down to I have to leverage the latest technologies for things like reuse, where I get huge leverage for richer customer experiences that need those wonderful new web application technologies that we have.

I have new processes that I can leverage in forms of agile and iterative types of things. To keep the cost in line. I really want to be able to leverage global teams for flexible low cost, but expert resources around the globe. I want them acting as if they were all local, like a dynamic Tiger Team that was all local.

That’s a lot of change to make happen to serve the ultimate business needs. We took the opportunity to take a step back and ask how all these things come together and how you can blend this modern approach to really deliver what you need to deliver for the business.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, do you have anything to offer in terms of what people will take away from the book?

Hipps: A lot of it is the chance to take a step back and have a bit of brain space to consider and contemplate a lot of things Mark just touched on -- what are these ramifications for my organization?

Nine times out of 10, most of us who are in IT developing applications, trying to get on top of what it is the business wants, don't generally have the luxury of taking a step back and asking has the ground shifted underneath my feet with regard to all the things I am now expected to do and the ways I am expected to do them, whether that’s process shifts, organizational shifts, or technology shifts.

Generally the case is that the ground has shifted. Am I equipped, organized, and oriented to respond effectively to all these changes? That’s one of the driving factors of the book and one of the hopes that gives people a chance to step back, contemplate what these changes have been, and also give a bit of guidance about how we might better get on top of these changes and really wring the benefit out of them that we had expected when we first began to make them.

Gardner: Let's go to David Moses at Delta Air Lines. This isn’t just academic now. This is something probably near and dear to you in your day-in and day-out activities. Maybe you could sum up for us quickly what it is that you are doing there at Delta and why your customer-facing applications are so important to your business.

Innovating for customers

Moses: The biggest thing that we have at Delta is to make sure that we innovate for our customers and give them the latest greatest ability to take control of their situation. If somebody wants to book a flight, they should be able to do it on any media they like.

We want them to be able to make it in as few clicks as possible and as little typing as possible. We really want to make it as convenient for the customer and through the entire experience from the inspiration, all the way to when they are back home. We want to deliver quality products to them.

That comes down to innovation and speed, because you can innovate for ever and never actually release the product. For us, getting it out the door is very, very important. Some of the things that we've heard already from Mark and Brad touch on the need to back away, get out the weeds, and look at your overall lifecycle to make sure that you can get that speed. A lot of times, if you're doing the status quo over and over again, you never realize how fast you can be. So, you raise your head up, look around, and try to make some big changes.

Gardner: John Bell, what do you see as some of the hurdles that you need to continue to get over, in order to get into that innovation and speed? What are some of the complications that are typical, when you're trying to move these applications fast, but you also need to make them of a high quality?

Bell: One of the things that’s really important to us is that we work with multiple vendors in multiple locations and with multiple time zones. It's important to make sure that all of them are using the same processes and that we're all using the overall tools. We use quality center personally to help organize a lot of the requirements and things like that in our testing efforts.

It's important that all of our vendors, whether it's in-house or people outside, are giving us the same processes and that we are able to leverage any of our automation or any of our business process testing or any of those tools, and that we can actually deliver high quality software quickly, can reduce our turnaround time, make sure that we're giving customers their best experience, and that we are getting our time to market in a timely manner.

Gardner: David Moses, we heard a lot of in the book about automation and management and then integrating those as much as possible. Maybe you could give me some perspective on that higher level ability to excel at applications, multiple applications with rapid iteration, but not lose control, and not let the complexity lead to chaos.

It's about getting rid of all the clutter, reducing the complexity, having simple processes, getting rid of all the ones that don't matter, and just really streamlining.

Moses: Complexity is always the enemy of speed and innovation, isn’t it? The idea is to make it as simple as possible by having one version of the truth. You really have to get to that point, a central repository of data, a central tool that everyone can use. As John said, we use Quality Center. We keep everything in that, requirements, tough cases, automation. We pull scripts and things from there for our test plans. We have one area with all that data, so all of our areas can come to that and pull that information.

Whenever somebody needs to start up a script or anything like that, they’ve got a library that they can pull from. They can bring it into their project. When they are done with their manual testing and they place their test plan back in the library, John can then take those pieces and immediately automate them.

Somebody once said they required a form to find out who they were going to, or what pieces they were going to automate. For us, if you have one version of the truth, you know when things are checked back in. You know when your test plan has been updated and your automation people can make that decision. So, it's about getting rid of all the clutter, reducing the complexity, having simple processes, getting rid of all the ones that don't matter, and just really streamlining.

Gardner: Also, David, when you have a lifecycle mentality, you can fall back to that single system of record for the application process. You can extend that not beyond just the development test and deploy phases. It’s something that probably benefits the operation side, maintaining, iterating, and improving on that app over time.

State of the application

Moses: Definitely. It's a great tool, because everyone has access to it. Everyone from our business side people to our IT side, our operations people, can look in this and see exactly what state the application is in at any time. They've got that snapshot. They can go in and determine what new requirements they need to make and what enhancements they want. It's really helpful.

Gardner: John or David, I don't know which of you would be more comfortable, but can you tell us a bit of about the recent development activity, maybe moving towards multiple devices or entry points for customers. I know that's important to me when I fly. Tell us about the way that you have been executing on this innovation, maybe relating that back to some of the principles in the ALM book.

Moses: Recently, we've brought in some of the mobile devices like the iPhone and some of those types of applications. In the past, a large number of our customers have always been using the .com form. Now, we're finding more and more users are going towards the mobile devices.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

We wanted to make sure that a lot of the applications lifecycle testing we had done with the .com could also be used with the mobile. We were able to take automation and a lot of the test cases and type things we had used with .com and use it with mobile.

We did write automation associated with mobile and were also able to bring that back into Quality Center, running that via Quick Test Pro. Even though mobile was a newer area for us, we were able to get the speed to market up on that as soon as possible.

Also, we were able to leverage that and use some of those automated scripts. We run those on a daily basis against our production mobile environment. If something is wrong with that, we know early in the morning. We run these scripts early in the morning before we come in, and we can know right away if something is there.

They can go in and determine what new requirements they need to make and what enhancements they want. It's really helpful.

So we were able to take the lifecycle information and the wins that we have got from the .com, and bring that into our mobile apps, and it's really helped us a lot. Our speed to market has significantly improved with that.

Bell: Another case would be our new homepage. We're sitting here at the end of October 2010. About a month ago, we released a new, more streamlined homepage, a lot more innovative. A lot of people looked at that. We hid the logo during usability testing, and people were surprised to find out it was an airline website. They thought of us as one of the cool guys out there in the travel world.

We're getting much better in this area. By using all the feedback that we get from the customers, importing information in the Quality Center, tracking everything that we have in there, we were able to look at what we needed to make changes to. Once we released this, it was something that the customers were wanting, so it got a lot of good response.

Gardner: Mark Sarbiewski at HP, tell me as you are listening to these gentlemen discuss their efforts, how would some of the principles from the book help. It sounds to me as if it was very complex going mobile or recasting your website. It could slow things down. It sounds like because they took the proper steps, and it actually fell right into the place.

Getting visibility

Sarbiewski: One of the keys that I heard them talking about here is giving everyone visibility into not just the state of where things are, but the next things that have to happen. One of the important things that to tease out of those kinds of statements is the integration of the management information. What are the requirements, which have been covered? What remain? What tests have been run? What defects are found against what code?

There are a million things that happen to progress that project along. When a test fails, a bunch of stuff has to happen. You've got to go find that and fix that. In all those granular activities, there's a huge opportunity for lag, mis-communication, finger-pointing, claiming it's not a defect, and all that.

When you have a system that pulls everybody together like that and gives a real-time view, it really helps to advance the work forward as well. I also heard them talking about how tying automation into that management system allowed them to do a cool website, that Web 2.0 feel, very slick with a rich user experience, which is a must today, as well as mobile, which is a must, without slowing things down.

To me the translation: Enormous competitive advantage in the marketplace. This has probably never been more true. The technology teams are giving business an enormous competitive advantage, like the kinds of stuff that they are doing.

Gardner: How about that David Moses? Toot your horn a little bit. The applications that you and John are helping to develop and deploy, how impactful is this for Delta? How many of your airline tickets are now being purchased and the customer service elements being delivered through these apps? Is this sideline or is this much more main stream?

Mobile is the future. Everyone is going towards mobile devices and portable devices.

Moses: It's truly huge. I mean if you look at Delta.com, it's the main revenue driver for the entire company. So it's our face to the world, and streamlining that process where people are making it better and making the customer experience better is our number one goal. We want to really give our customers what they want and make it easy for them, because we have a wide range of customers.

We have pleasure customers who travel with their families once or may be twice a year, sometimes even less, and then we have people who travel with us every week. So we have two very different types of audiences and we have to cater to both. We have to make it fast and enjoyable and we have to allow them to dream a little bit and be inspired by where they want to go.

It's one of the biggest things that we have on our plate with mobile. Mobile is the future. Everyone is going towards mobile devices and portable devices. You're seeing more and more iPhones, iPads, and Android devices out there in the world, especially when you walk through the airport. We don't like that it happens, but sometimes things are out of our control like weather. And, we are always safe, so these things impact our schedule.

Our devices now will allow you to jump right online and rebook, and take care of yourself. We're actually going to do it for you first, and we are going to give you the option of keeping our suggestion, but if you want something different, you have got that choice. Its options and speed that really count, when the customers want to do something that impacts their lives. When they are trying to use the product, they can impact whether they get home to see their kids tonight or not. You need to give them options and you need to give them something really quick.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, as I listen, I also recall that one of the principles of the book you and Mark wrote was about being change ready, and I think you were talking about being change ready in terms of how you develop applications. With Delta, that change readiness comes at multiple levels. Not only do they have to innovate rapidly in their development, but their application themselves have to be change ready. That is to say, they need to be able to react to changing weather and very high scaling multiple variables involved with keeping all the people up-to-date.

Maybe you can help me get your impressions about how important change ready is and Delta is probably a poster child for that.

Core lifecycle

Hipps: I think that's right. In the book, when we talk about the core lifecycle, historically the SDLC -- we just call it the core lifecycle, so as not to get lost in alphabet soup. Within that we see traits among world-class organizations. There tend to be four traits that these world class organizations have mastered, and we list these traits as being change ready. They have a high degree of predictability, high degree of repeatability, and certainly their output is of high quality.

So those four: change readiness, predictability, repeatability and quality, tend to be abstracting some traits that we see across these great orgs. Those tend to be the key ones that really they are very effective at. David and John have talked about that we have got data points in each one of those, in some of the examples they have given.

A lot of this change readiness to a large degrees is formed by the point that we made in the beginning in the podcast, which is that fundamentally everything that business wants to do is going to have some applications or set of applications behind it. There is going to be a dependency there.

As Mark said, the business is only as nimble as its applications are. That puts applications teams in a position where they are not holding the business off at arms length, and saying, "No, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. No, that will take months." That rigidity may be historically where we came from, when we had fewer applications. They changed less. They were much bigger, more monolithic, and brittle. That is not the world we live in today.

Today, change is the expectation. David and John have been talking about this code being lead revenue generator and delta.com being the lead source of revenue on the Delta side. It's a great example. Clearly, anything the business wants to do to advance its market presence is going to come through that application.

You’ve got to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

The fact that they have leveraged automation and asset reuse and taken the time to build requirements traceability are all tick marks you put against organizations that have configured themselves to be change ready. That means they have stripped out as much latency as possible, the time it takes to do impact analysis.

They can see pretty quickly what all the dependencies are as a new change comes across. That’s just speaking of the assessment. There is, of course, the execution, which depends on automation, asset reuse, and all the things they talked about. We probably covered four of those, but certainly the change readiness does stand out.

Gardner: David Moses, the idea that more businesses are going to have to do what you have seems pretty clear. You're already well into updated web, very fast change transactional integrity, bringing in mobile devices, and it sounds as if you are well advised in terms of the ALM principles that the book discusses. For those organizations that are not quite there, that are still getting up to speed that are transitioning from legacy approaches and methods around development, what advice might you give them in terms of trying to get to where you already are?

Moses: This is my favorite topic too. First of all, you’ve got to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

Second, it’s about mindset and alignment to your goals. You have to have alignment to the customer. You still have to have department goals, but they should be aligned to what the customer needs.

Contradiction in goals

A lot of times, you see a contradiction in goals between the business group and an IT group. Delivering what the IT group wants to do may not exactly get what the business wants. And if the business was focused on the customer and the IT groups are focused on how many projects they can get out, but doesn’t really matter what projects they are, then there's an issue.

So, you have to really align very closely between business and IT, so much so that if you even have something that is a huge impact to your company, you may want to wrap a special forces team or integrity team around that, and have that group be one. Business and IT all in one group -- that way you completely eliminate the us-versus-them mentality. If you can’t do that, definitely make sure that you're aligned to the customer.

Gardner: John Bell, any further words of wisdom that you might want to share with folks who are making the transition from older legacy, development, deployment, and test practices to some of these newer principles?

Bell: One thing to add to that is that, at first, it can be a little scary moving things in, like moving all your requirements into one area and getting all the test cases and things and even looking at automation.

Sometimes, you have to take a half step back in order to take a full step forward. With us, even as we were moving things and centralizing it, there could be a little pain point in doing that, but that pain point will more than payoff in the long run. A lot of the people who are holding on to the old methodologies and ways of doing business, are thinking, "We're going to have to take a step back to do this."

You're going to get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Whatever step you take in that direction and whatever pain point you take as you move forward, once you start getting the automations in place, once you get these tools in place, you’ll see that you can start moving faster and faster that any initial pain point you took. You're going to exponentially get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Just look at the changing world that we live in. With delta.com now, we live here in Atlanta. If you go over to the airport, you realize that our business is not just flying customers within the United States in English. We now have kiosks in six different languages, and you meet people from all over the world that are now using our products and our websites in everything from simple Chinese to French.

It’s important that we realize the global nature of what we are doing, and that our methodology and our IT departments have to align ourselves, so that we can move this quickly. Without the automation and without the centralized tools and things we would never be able to put out as much work as we currently do.

Moses: If I can jump back in, there is one thing that John said that reminded me of something, as far as taking those steps. You need to take a step back to take two steps forward, when you are coming down to requirements -- another one of my favorite topics. I spent so much time trying to convince other managers in the organization, especially the BA manager to really input requirements in the Quality Center. I really wish I had Quality Center 11 at that time, because now it’s like a Word document to enter your requirements, which is what everybody wanted, right?

Back then, there was a lot of resistance to it, because there were forms and windows and things to fills out. So, it would have such an easier discussion. I hear that often too, whenever I am at HP Software Universe and people are talking about this. They say that there is such a resistance to certain things and certain teams incorporating their work, but now it’s so much easier that it’s almost a no-brainer.

As I said, I wish I had QC 11 back at the time I was fighting that battle, but thankfully we won, everybody saw the benefit of it, and we have been going forward ever since.

Requirements are important

There's another benefit, whenever you're talking about companies moving forward and innovating. I'd like to talk about requirements and not having your quality assurance people sitting in requirements meetings. To me, your quality assurance group really wants to know what the requirements will be, not what they may be. So, they're sitting in a meeting for a few weeks or months at a time to get requirements down, talking about what may be, when they could be testing.

You need to get things out to the customer. You can leverage your team like that. We do a ton of work with the small amount of people that’s comparable to other people in the industry, and that’s one of the main reasons we can do that.

Gardner: I guess we could sum that up as being focused on change ready not change waiting.

Moses: Exactly.

Bell: Absolutely.

Moses: Well, you have to have the right tools and you have to have enough knowledge in your group to be able to pull that off, and you have to have great documentation too.

Gardner: Thank you, David Moses. We're going to wrap it up there. We've been discussing how a shifting application’s landscape has provided a huge opening for improving how applications are built, consumed and managed by using new ALM methods and concepts. And we've seen how Delta Air Lines, in particular, has moved successfully to improve its applications quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from their efforts.

I'd like to thank our guests today. We've been joined by David Moses, Quality Assurance Manager for Delta. Thank you.

Moses: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And I should also add that he is in the eCommerce IT group there at Delta along with John Bell, who is a Senior Systems Engineer. Thank you, John.

Bell: Thanks for having us.

Gardner: We also have been joined by the authors of the book. That would be Mark Sarbiewski. He is Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications. Thanks, Mark.

Sarbiewski: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Brad Hipps, Senior Manager for Solutions Marketing, HP Applications. Thanks, Brad.

Hipps: Thanks again.

Gardner: This is a second in a series of free podcast on ALM. We're examining a new book on the subject, The Applications Handbook: a Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle.

Our first podcast (read more about and access the first podcast) explored the actual need for the book and why organizations should rethink how they develop and deploy applications, and our final podcast will underscore the conclusions from the book, and explain how other organizations can now begin to change how they deliver and maintain applications that better serves a fast changing world.

We hope that you can join us for the rest of our series, and we also hope that you get a chance to get the book and examine it in more detail.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the second in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the first in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion that examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement.

We'll explore the current state of applications in large organizations, and how complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options, have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches.

In the book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors pursue the role and impact of automation and management over applications, as well as delving into the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

This is the first, in a series of three podcasts, on the ALM book, and we're here now with the authors to learn, first and foremost, why they wrote it, and to explore their major findings.

Please join me now in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Sarbiewski: Thank, you Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Hipps: Thanks, Dana

Gardner: I wonder if we could first begin by looking at why applications have been in trouble, what's going on, and why is there a huge opening now for improving how they have been built, consumed, and managed. Why don't we start with you, Mark?

A silver bullet

Sarbiewski: It's really a combination of factors, which is part of the challenge that customers have. They're looking for a silver bullet.

In most large enterprises, applications have been built up over many, many years. You throw acquisitions into that and you end up with layers of applications, in a lot of which there is redundancy. You have this wide mix of technology, huge amounts of legacy, all built different ways, and the business just wants response faster, faster, and faster.

So, we have old technologies hampering us. We have an old approach that we've built that technology on, and the modern world is dramatically different in a whole host of ways. We're changing our process. We're changing the way our teams are structured to be much more global teams, outsourced, nearshore, far shore, all of that stuff, and the technology is fundamentally shifting as well.

That's the context for why you see all these horror stories and these stats about the businesses' level of satisfaction with the responsiveness of IT, particularly in applications. If you think about it, that's what the business experience is.

They understand, have you automated this business process? Have you helped me take the website to a better place and give me a richer experience for my customers? It's the apps that the business experiences. When they see it move at glacial pace for all those reasons we just talked about, that's where IT organizations are looking to change the game.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, from your perspective, these have been problems that have been building for a long time. So why the book now?

Hipps: I'll speak from not only conversations with customers, but my own personal experience when I was running application delivery teams. A lot of these trends that we talk about -- outsourcing, service-based architectures, more flexible methodologies, whether it's iterative or agile -- you wouldn't necessary call any one of those brand new. Those things have been around for a few years now. Many enterprises we speak with and deal with have been leveraging them for a few years in some form or fashion.

If you're an owner of application teams or of a series of applications within an enterprise, these things tend to sneak in. By "these things" I mean these trends. They tend to sneak in on the perimeter, and you wake up one morning and realize all of a sudden that fundamentally the way your teams have long operated has been changed.

In some ways, it's death by a thousand cuts. No single one of these initiatives is going to force you to take a step back and say, hold the phone, let's figure out if the way we deliver applications now requires us to, in some significant way, rethink the mechanisms by which we conduct delivery.

From my own experience, it's difficult to get the time or the brain space to do that. Usually, you're neck deep in getting the next application out the door. You've got deadlines. You've got other applications or enhancements coming down the pike.

Necessary questions

You may not have the time to take a step back and say, "Wow, we're using these different methods" or "We're relying more on outsource teams, so we are not all colocated," or "We've got these new technologies we have begun delivering. What does that mean for performance and security of the application?" -- all the questions that those kinds of trends beg.

One of the objectives of this book was to do just that. Mark and I had the luxury to take a step back and think about what these trends mean soup to nuts for the way applications get stood up and delivered and how, from an enterprise perspective, we have responded or not responded to those new complexities.

Gardner: Mark Sarbiewski, in the book you guys deliver a really interesting comparison. You say the jet fighter cockpit was an example of where too many things happening at once overwhelm the pilot. So, rather than try to keep improving what the pilot was capable of, perhaps beyond what was natural, they redesigned a cockpit. How does that relate to what we are talking about here with ALM?

Sarbiewski: That’s a decent analogy for one of the critical design principles that we think is a way an enterprise should approach delivering and running applications. The idea is that you need both management and automation to achieve your end goals.

People have long thought of those things in very narrow ways. They've thought of management of a narrow domain space, like managing requirements and automating GUI functional tests. Those were all good steps forward, important things, but there was little connection between management across the lifecycle and automation across the lifecycle.

You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock.

The example of that jet fighter you can even extend to you driving a car. You're managing the car, managing how fast you go, and seeing the gauges. They're giving you information about the direction you're headed, if you have a nav system, how long it's going to take, all that. When you hit the gas, automation takes over. When you turn the wheel, it goes in a different direction.

Part of what we're trying to get at here is this interplay. You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock -- to create the situation where I see what's happening. I see across these very complex endeavors that I'm undertaking, many people, many teams, many stakeholders, lots of projects, lots of interdependencies, so I have that visibility. When we need to step on the gas and go in a particular direction, and speed everything up without blowing everything up, that's when I can rely on nicely integrated automation.

Gardner: Now, we are also seeing in the market a definition shift in applications. There's a new emphasis on services, agility, reuse, rapid iterations, and even ecosystems, where we're getting services and applications from a variety of sources.

This is different from what we could call super apps or the big honkin' packaged and integrated apps of the past. How is that shift impacting this, and how does that relate to your book? Let me start with you, Brad.

Hipps: We were talking earlier about these trends and complexities. You can speak about them at a headline level, but then you can take a particular example, like the one you're touching on. The nature of an application today is that it's not a monolith. It's not owned by a single project team or a program consisting of several teams.

Leveraging what we can

More often than not, it's something that has been assembled using a series of subcomponents, reusable services, or borrowed function points from other applications, etc. It's this thing that is, in the best sense, cobbled together. Rather than writing it all from scratch, we're leveraging what we can.

We can all agree that this makes sense, it’s the right way to do it, it's much more assembly line production versus handcrafting everything, which is certainly the direction we want to be headed in, from a software perspective.

But, that also presents us a lot of new challenges. How do I have visibility or discover the components that are out there, that are available for me to use? How do I trust that those components are reliable, that they are going to behave and perform in the way I want them to? Given the fact that I, as a given developer, didn't actually create it myself, how can I have faith in it? And, how are we going to authenticate all these different pieces?

It was one game of validation when, as I say, it was a monolith and all self-contained, and we executed our test from top to bottom, but now we have these individual subparts. We have to test each of them of themselves and then we have got make sure that connected they also do the same thing. A lot of them are GUI, so that presents its own complexity. How am I automating the test against something that has no GUI front-end, but I can record a playback?

I am speaking just at the the technical level. If you marry some of those tricks or hiccups against the reality of how that's going to be delivered, it's going to be delivered by multiple teams. Almost inevitably, those teams are not all going to be sharing one building. They're going to be located in different places.

It's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

So you've got these questions. How do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How do we notify each other of defects? How am I aware when something is ready to retest? Relying on email is, let's just say, less than ideal. And, of course, we may be using different methods. Multiple teams could be using different methods. Those over there are working in agile fashion, we are working in waterfall fashion.

So the catchphrase we have, which may or may not make sense, it's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

Gardner: I suppose another change over the past 10 or 15 years has been the impact that these applications have on a business. In the past, they may have been great for building efficiency, approving productivity, maybe even just a nice to have, versus more manual ways of accomplishing business.

But nowadays, and I would like to borrow quote from the book, the business moves, changes, and expands only as fast and as efficiently as the applications do. So, applications are vastly more important now to a company. Mark, help me better understand why that's the case.

Sarbiewski: You'll see from a variety of industry folks that these eras of computing, when it was data processing, information management, or MIS, came through to the web, it's gone from "let's collate information and spin it around for the business" to "this is literally how we conduct nearly everything that we do."

Internal users

I'm talking internal users, whether it's working with their training systems, working with their expense systems, recording sales, tracking customers and prospects, just about everything goes into some software application.

Between companies and the supply chain is highly automated, all sorts of software, gluing partner and ecosystems together, and increasingly direct to the customer. We just take it for granted now that I actually don't ever really have to go to a bank anymore. I can just do everything I used to do in person now via their website, their web applications.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

I talk to our customers about the challenge. This is another thing that crept up on them. Just about every square inch of the enterprise is automated in some way by software. You always get a lot of nodding heads. What it has meant for IT teams is that you now have to understand every square inch of the business, and the businesses are incredibly dynamic. So, any part that changes almost drags along, or in some cases, is led by, and has to be led by, innovation in the software to make that happen.

I often tell customers that you are running significant large scale software or entities inside your business. You may not think of yourself that way, but a big business will have potentially thousands of apps. It will have software and potentially products that it builds. It will be orchestrating a whole huge mix of technologies, and inside and outside teams, which is more complex than what a lot of independent software vendors (ISVs) do. And my argument to them is that you need to make software a core competency if you are going to differentiate your business going forward.

So it's hugely important. There is example after example of innovations that businesses have created. One of my favorite ones to talk about is Bank of America's Keep the Change initiative. We had a little bit of insight into what that involved. That was an IT-led thing. The ability to use a debit card, have the leftover change rolled into a savings account, required massive software, updating new stuff to have it happened, and it has been hugely differentiating for that company.

Traditionally, in our legacy world, the push was always, can we get the application delivered?

Hipps: Mark, if I am not mistaken, there were tens of applications behind that one initiative, were there not?

Sarbiewski: Absolutely. Updates to existing ones, many tens of new ones, all had to come together on launch date. Think about that? IT is not reacting to "It would be nice if we could have this capability. It would make our lives easier." This was, "We are going to differentiate our business based on this. So, those 70 odd applications that you are building or modifying will have to be here on the launch date, because it's a business initiative."

Gardner: So, while we've had incredible increase in complexity, we have redefined these applications over a period of years. They have now taken on a much larger role within the company and yet, in many organizations, there is this legacy mechanism in place for how applications are treated. This perhaps is the disconnect

I'll throw that out to either of you. How bad is that? How much of a lag do we have here between what's required in organizations to do ALM properly, and what's the real run-of-the-mill way of doing it?

Hipps: The first company I worked with building applications probably had three of four major applications they worried about. One of the biggest ones, not surprisingly, was the billing and rating system that they had created. I think the first release of that system took us two years to get out the door. It was your classic custom-developed application. Many hands were on deck, cranking out code, running tests, and all the stuff you would expect.

Traditionally, in our legacy world, the push was always, can we get the application delivered? Can we get it stood up and working and out the door? And if we did that, we went to our ops brethren and we said, "Look guys, just don't kick the plug out. Just leave it alone, and we'll wait until we have another release sometime next year. We will have the next big push."

When we lived in that world -- and for many of us in apps who grew up in that world, not 40 years ago, but 15 years ago -- it's understandable that we've long taken this view that as long as we get the application built and stood-up, we've done what we need to do for the business.

A lot more planning

If we try to fix that legacy view against what we have been talking about today, which is effectively that the business can't twitch without requiring some change in a set of applications somewhere, we know that the reality of the world is that there is a heck of a lot more planning activity that goes on. We've got applications everywhere. They're going to be under constant review, modification, enhancement, addition, etc., and that's going to be a an endless stream.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing to meet whatever the latest, greatest idea is, and we have got to run them accordingly.

We have got to make sure that once they are out there and available, they are responsive. We have got to make sure that the teams that own them in the data centers are aware of their behaviors, and aware of which of those behaviors are configurable, without even coming back to the application teams.

The legacy view said, "Wow, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the end-all, be-all. If I get the SDLC right, if I get requirements and deployment done right, I win." We realize that this is still critical. What we would describe as the core lifecycle is still where it all begins.

But, this thing is going to live for 15 years. It's going to undergo endless amounts of change in that process. If I'm going to really be successful against what it is the business is after, I do have to account for this complete lifecycle. All the stuff that's happening before requirements, the portfolio investigation that's occurring, the architectural decisions I am making, have got to be true across the enterprise, as well of course as everything that happens once that thing goes live.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing.

How well connected I am with my operation peers? Have I shared the right information? Have I shared test scripts where possible? Am I linked into service desk? Am I aware of issues, as they are arising, ideally before the business is hearing about it? Those things are what we mean by getting your arms around the complete lifecycle is what's necessary, when you think about the modern delivery of applications.

Gardner: Let's drill into that a little bit, now that we understand that. That gap needs to be closed between what applications need to have in terms of support across your lifecycle and some of the traditional ways of doing that. And your suggestions in the beginning of the book are strong management and automation, but integrated.

Mark, what’s the need for integrating and what do you mean by integrating management and automation?

Sarbiewski: It goes back to that analogy of driving a car. You're doing both, and both things are happening in concert. I'm managing. I'm seeing the flow of information. I'm guiding this car, stepping on the gas, etc., and the engine and the suspension system is doing the heavy lifting of pushing me faster, or brakes are slowing me down, in a very automated way. I'm acting in a management capacity, on the management information I have. I'm relying on automation to make these types of things happen.

In the world of software delivery and obviously the operation phase, it's very similar. You have a whole series of things. For example, we'll start at the beginning, let's assume. We would argue that the beginning of an application is the idea, the request. I need to have X for the business.

Specific requirements

We judge whether or not this is of value against all other requests, and we decide we're going to do something. Now, I get into trying to understand the specific requirements. Even in the requirements, there is an aspect that can be a level of automation and a level of management.

Automation can come in when I am building a visualization, a quick prototype, and there are some great solutions that have emerged into the market to help a non-technical user create a representation of an application that has almost the perfect look and feel. We're not talking about generating code. We're talking about using HTML and tools to create the flow, the screen views, and the data input of what an application is going to look like.

You hear that a picture is worth a thousand words. This goes to one of the fundamental broken things that we have had forever about requirements. You and I have a discussion, and I write something down in text. This is a very poor articulation of what you really want and need, but if I can show you something, you can play around with it and give a look and feel to it and make comments on that -- very different.

Once we get to that look and feel of an app, at the push of a button, I can interpret all those business rules, all those rules about where was data, what was on the screen, was this data hidden, what was inputted, when did it flow to the next one, under what condition. All of that will get translated into a series of text-based requirements, test assets to test for that logic, and even the results and the rules and the data that needs to be input.

So, I have a process. I have had discussion and used some technology to visualize these requirements. At the push of a button, I automated the complete articulation, with perfect fidelity, including the positive test cases I want to run. I can manage those now, as I have always have, and my systems and teams expected to.

I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that. This is what we mean when talk about changing the game.

Those requirements trigger test and defects and go against code, all of which can be linked. Whenever progress is made in any dimension against those requirements, I have created a test for one, I have run a test for one. I have run ten tests and eight paths. I have checked new coding against the bugs. All of that can be tied together and automated with workflow.

So, you start to see how I've got a creative series of information. I use automation to advance it to the next stage. I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that. This is what we mean when talk about changing the game and how you deliver software, by doing just that, thinking about, what are the things that I have to manage and how does automation speed things up, and create outputs with greater fidelity and greater speed.

Hipps: In an ideal world, this idea of integrated management and automation is essentially a move away from the world we've had for a long time in software, which is, I have a series of individuated point tools that I use for particular siloed functions. As Mark said earlier, that was necessary, that was useful, and that was the critical step, but we shouldn't expect that or view that as the endgame.

The endgame should be that what I've got is a unified way of getting these various operations connected, so that my management picture has a straight flow through from the automated things that its kicked off. As those automated events occur, I'm getting a single, unified view of the results in my management view, which is, nine times out of ten, not the world we have when we look at big, big enterprise delivery. It is still a series of point tools, with maybe Excel laid over the top to try to unify it all.

Gardner: It sounds as if this is a natural maturation of IT, perhaps along the lines that we have seen with other aspects of business functions over the past 50 or even 100 years. Is that the case now? We are simply letting IT grow up, going beyond a dark art or a mysterious craft, to more of a regular recurring but dependable IT and/or business function?

Hipps: I think that's the case. It's funny, because for those of us who have been in software, grown up in software, there is always a temptation to hold ourselves as being on the cutting edge of everything and the sophisticated leaders of how work gets done.

Older and humbler

As I get older, I'm a little more humbled. If you want to understand the future of IT, you just need to look at where manufacturing has come. We've plagiarized the lion’s share of what we do in IT and the way we work a lot from what we have seen in manufacturing and mechanical engineering. That extends to lean methods. It starts probably all the way back to waterfall.

Maybe it's no surprise that when you ask us to talk about what you mean by integrated management and automation, we are borrowing an analogy from the world of mechanical engineering. We're talking about what planes can do, what ships can do, and what cars can do. So, I hope this is very much a natural advancement.

Sarbiewski: I talk about it to customers and I talk about the industrialization of IT. Sometimes, there's a little pushback on that, because it feels heavy. Then, I say, "Wait a minute. Think about how flexible Toyota or Boeing is." These companies have these very complex undertakings and yet can manage parts and supplies for providers and partners from every corner of the world, and every other car can be different coming off that assembly line. Look at how quickly they have shrunk their product lifecycles from design to a finished model.

Part of what's done that is exactly what Brad was talking about, an enormous investment in understanding the process and optimizing that, in supporting the various stakeholders, whether it's through design software, or automation on the factory line, all of that investment. We didn't do in IT. We built it ourselves. We used Excel and post-it notes and other things, and we created from scratch everything that we have done, because we can, because we made it easy to do that. We have made it easy to design and build it a thousand different ways.

There is this counterintuitive perception that because there is an infinite number of ways, we hold ourselves to be different than that. People are realizing that's not really the case. In fact, the more I can industrialize and keep it lean and agile, how I do this, the tools I use, if I give the people incredible tools to do it, and not just point tools but integrated, the results really speak for themselves.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process.

When we talk to customers that have done this, they achieve incredible results in three critical dimensions. There's a very longstanding joke that you can't go faster, you can't raise quality and take cost down. It's not just possible. This is this impenetrable triangle or it’s squeezing a balloon. We see with our customers that you absolutely can.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process. Guess what, they go faster, they take cost down, they drive quality up.

Gardner: I'm afraid we have to leave it there. You've certainly piqued my interest in this book. We've been examining how the shifting applications landscape is providing a huge opportunity for improving how applications are built, consumed, and managed. You need to use these new ALM methods and concepts to get to that point, move beyond the old, because the gap is deep between what had been norm and what’s the new norm.

I want to thank our guests. We have been here with Mark Sarbiewski. He is the Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and also Brad Hipps, Product Marketing Manager for HP Applications. Thanks to you both.

Hipps: Thank you.

Sarbiewski: Thank you.

Gardner: This is the first in the series of three podcasts on ALM. We are examining a new book, The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, and it’s one that offers methods as well as means to overall business services delivery improvement.

Our next podcast examines how an enterprise, Delta Airlines, has moved successfully to improve its applications quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications. We will hear their story from two Delta IT executives and get the reactions to the new book's findings.

Our final podcast underscores the conclusions from the book and explains how other organizations can begin to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast changing world.

We hope you can join us for the rest of our series, and we hope you can get a chance to get the book and examine it in more detail.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the first in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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HP's Instant-On Enterprise Initiative Takes Aim at Shifting Needs of Business and Government

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on addressing users' and customers' expectations for an always-on environment.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP. Learn more.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion on the impact that rapidly evolving customer, citizen, and user expectations are having on the enterprise.

We’ll be looking at how technology advancements are making it possible to drive innovation to meet these new demands for instant gratification.

There are three megatrends shaping the next generation of successful businesses and governments. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications, highly responsive cloud-computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration.

Indeed, by the year 2020, The Economist newspaper predicts there will be two trillion devices connected to the Internet. And taking a look at where we are right now, McKinsey Quarterly reported in August that in 2010 some four billion people have cell phones, and 450 million have access to a full web experience.

Moreover, Jupiter Research reports that by 2014 there will be 130 million enterprise users involved with mobile cloud activities. Not only is access pervasive, but the amount of information available is also exploding. The Economist reports that in 2005 mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data … and in 2010 we will create fully eight times more data.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

As these trends literally rearrange business ecosystems, a gap will surely emerge between the companies that master change -- and exploit enabling technologies -- and those that fall ever further behind.

For those that do step up to the challenge -- expect a relentless emphasis on rapidly recurring innovation to meet dynamic customer and citizen demands.

We're here to explore these issues, and to better understand how HP is working to help customers make headway, so that the next few years bring about a generational opportunity -- and not a downward complexity spiral.

Here now to discuss HP’s vision and game plan for success on attaining and mastery of the Instant-On Enterprise is Dave Shirk, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business.

Welcome, Dave.

Dave Shirk: Thank you, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: I mentioned a few trends, and clearly we're into a stage here beyond business as usual. There are clearly some changes. How do you see these trends? Are there several that you're focusing on now that you think really represent an opportunity, or even something that needs to be managed in terms of risk?

Shift in the marketplace

Shirk: We're seeing a lot of shift going on in the marketplace right now. When we look at where consumers are driving business or where citizens are driving government, it's fundamentally changing the way they operate. We've seen three core things come out, similar to some of the pieces that you talked about.

One of those is just the business model. The business models are all starting to change the way in which people approach markets across the globe. That's having to really rethink the ways in which they've approached them versus traditional methods.

The second thing we see is this whole shift in mobile computing meeting cloud computing and the enterprise trying to figure out exactly how to take best advantage of that to create this competitive advantage. Then, the overall demographic piece weighs into that.

We've seen the rise of the millennials, as they're being referred to. All of these things are forcing business and government to stop and say, "You know what, if we're going to grow or we're going to create a service differentiation, we're really going to need to do things differently and we're going to have to do it way faster than we've ever done it before."

This is probably best represented in the words of Professor Gary Hamel, who is the foremost business visionary person out there in the marketplace. In his book, Future of Management, he described it as "whiplash change."

That's very much the case when I speak with our clients both on the business side and the government side. That's exactly what they're sitting there and thinking and working through right now. These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

Gardner: And, the role of IT in this needs to be more than simply a speed bump -- something that slows things down. IT needs to shift into more of a high-gear cooperative partnership, accelerating impact on the business. So, how does technology fit into this?

Shirk: We look at the technology piece of it and say that you really can't get there any other way -- the pace of it, the speed of it, and some of the complexity associated with it. For a long time, business has tried to use labor as an arbitrage to try to work their way through this and just throw bodies at it. That's quickly dissipating. The speed and the connectedness that we see, and the confidence level that all of these types of services require make it no longer possible to go through that.

What we see is IT completely embedded in the business. Over the next couple of years, that's going to continue to be the trend and the strategy that will play out in the way in which business and government work this. Ultimately, that's going to be the differentiator that drives an ability not only to serve these constituencies but to out-serve them, and that's going to be the name of the game.

Gardner: This gets us to that element of the workforce, younger folks and, in particular, folks in emerging markets, where they've always been more focused on mobile devices than perhaps a traditional PC. They're the ones that I suppose are driving this change, because to them it’s not changing, it's their norm.

Part of the workforce

Shirk: It's absolutely the case, if you look around the world at the quantity of graduates, for example. According to the Society for Engineers, you now have over 800,000 graduates in China, over 300,000 graduates in India, 100,000 some in Japan, etc. It's over the last 10 to 12 years that each of those graduation rates has occurred. They are part of the workforce now.

When they went through that process, they were always connected and they always were involved in a social network-based environment. They have a level of their lifestyle that is all tied to this always-connected environment. When you think about the ubiquitous computing that that has brought to them, as they enter the workforce, they are looking at things a lot differently than ever before.

They bring new ideas. They bring new ways to that. They're looking for businesses that will support that kind of methodology and structure. They're looking for ways in which technology is used in a whole slew of new avenues to innovate and drive new business models and to drive new products and offerings in the marketplace. They want to be a part of that. So, when we think about that Gen X group that's out there, we see them driving an enormous part of this change.

The last statistic I saw was that they are now over 50 percent of the workforce. The analogy that's always used is that, to them, being connected and always involved in some type of networking-based collaboration or information sharing of some sort is about the same as it is for you and me to pick up our remote controls and turn on our television sets. That's already having a very profound effect on how business and government are changing and the expectations that are out there in the marketplace.

Gardner: Right. It's the expectations of the younger folks, and we are not talking about kids, but basically people under 35. They’ve been developed through their careers with an always-on mentality, and so their expectations are for their governments and their providers of services and products, even their employers, to be much quicker and more direct. If they can't find it there, they know that they can go somewhere else. So, the expectation is for this always-on instant gratification. Is that part of what got you into this notion of an Instant-On Enterprise?

Shirk: Yeah, it's a big part of it. The always on is very important in the backdrop that’s there. As you pointed out, it's this immediate or instant gratification. If I can't get what I want in the following way, I’ll find the business or government environment where I can. While the government piece maybe a bit harder to change, the business piece isn't, and so the competitive pressure to serve this audience, both as the consumer and also as employees, is a big part of that shift.

We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

We call that the "Now Problem." They want this, they want it done now, and they want it to work a certain way. We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

Gardner: If you’re an enterprise or a government, you’re large, and a lot of what you have in place has been put there over a period of 20 or maybe 30 years, or more. There's a disconnect between the requirements that you had to rely on and these different expectations from your workforce, consumers, and a dynamic, changing business environment. How do we convert to Instant-On? How do we recognize that business as usual, IT as usual, isn't quite up to the task?

Shirk: First, it starts with a desire to change and to drive innovation in a different way. We sit and we think about the fundamental change in this. We talked for years that the business was focused on business processes and business process reengineering. While that’s still very important, it isn't going to go away any time soon.

It's becoming obvious that the bigger driver and the more significant trend is the information process, understanding the segments of business or government that need to be addressed. What their needs are, what they want, what they want to talk about, the ways in which they want to interact is all part of this change that’s taking place.

Closing the gap

So, as we start to pull back and step back from this, we look at that and we look at this vision that we have for the Instant-On Enterprise and how we’re enabling end-users to become a part of that, how we’re enabling businesses and governments to provide that type of capability. It really is about closing the gap between what IT can provide and what the business needs to be able to serve each of those audiences.

It's a big part of the solution capability and the path that we’ve been trying to go down in the marketplace. What we’ve launched with this vision is to put the foundations in place to make that possible and take a journey with our clients both from the business side and government side and help them move down that particular path, find ways to navigate these challenges and these trends, and to out-serve and to over-serve all the audiences that they need to meet the needs of.

Gardner: Dave, when I was looking into the Instant-On Enterprise, looking at some research for this discussion, I saw that you’re trying to do enablement around innovation, agility, optimization, and then managing risk. It struck me that this is very ambitious, especially if you try to do those all at once. Do we have any choice? Is this something that we have as a "nice to have" or is this really challenging and daunting, but inevitable?

Shirk: You're right. It is inevitable. Different businesses and governments will have, at different times, one of these four elements be more important or more significant to them at different points. All of them share the innovation requirement. We see that in all things.

A lot of folks confuse innovation with ideation. Our view is that the innovation has to take place throughout that information process. It doesn’t matter whether it happens back at the data center or at every touch point. Innovation has to take place throughout for the business to meet the needs of those segments I’ve referred to earlier -- how it services it, how it conducts itself, and ultimately how it meets our needs or exceeds the needs of the audiences.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used.

Agility, optimization, and risk all vary in and out with innovation in terms of their need and their level of importance. It's hard today to hide from risk. Fundamentally, we can't eliminate it, but are we in a position that we can manage it. Can we use it to our advantage to differentiate ourselves and understand how to navigate within security threats, the regulations, and the data and information sources that are coming through?

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used. A big part of technology’s trouble in the past was that we created all of these things and we never had a plan for ending their lifecycle or turning them down slightly, so that we could turn up other activities or other possibilities in an instant-on environment and an instant-on enterprise. A core part of the vision that we see is being able to drive that agility to meet those changing business needs.

Gardner: It sounds very rational and necessary, but for those folks trying to really grasp this vision, are there some examples? Are there some poster-children organizations of which you can say, "They’re doing it. They’re gaining the results that we expect and now others can follow their lead." Do you have any bellwethers for us?

Shirk: There are a few examples. I’ve had interactions with a number of CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs. One of those that comes to mind very quickly is the insurance industry. There is a particular insurance company that’s been out there for years, and years, and years.

They have been a bedrock. It’s a household name. You’d look at them and say that they totally built the business and the business model on a dealer or agent network and that is the interaction point between the consumer and ultimately their products and services.

Competitive threat

They’ve been cranking along very successfully for years. All of a sudden, they met with a competitive threat, where another company has come along and has almost disintermediated the agent channel with an entire set of online and mobile-based applications that interacts right to the consumer, when the consumer wants and how they want.

So, this company finds itself in a situation as an insurance provider, where it literally is reinventing the way in which it plays in that industry by using technology to shift from that traditional model to a hybrid approach of both the agent being important and this whole set of self-service applications. That’s an example where the fundamental competitive threat is there.

Another example where we’ve had some very interesting success is a large company that provides warranty services. Again, it's another household name. They have an offering in which they traditionally provided warranty services as a third-party provider to a lot of other companies in the marketplace.

One of the things that they wanted to do was take that traditional process, which is very phone- and service-center based, and find a way to move the claims processing and that model to a whole new set of applications online and drive that environment forward. As a result, they watched the registrations that they had skyrocket by 500 percent. The online product registrations -- which is always the Holy Grail for up-sell and cross-sell for any company -- they watched that go from a 15 percent level to a 99 percent level.

As a result of those changes and using technology to meet the needs of the end-user community that they were trying to serve, they’ve put themselves in a situation now where a lot more business has come their way from a number of companies that use them to fulfill their warranty services.

HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense.

It's another example where we’ve seen that kind of change take place pretty prolifically in the marketplace.

Gardner: Again, while I was researching your Instant-On Enterprise initiative, you expect that IT needs to become more flexible, secure with added speed to what they do, leveraging automation, and providing not just function but the insight to their constituents, to their business brethren.

But, at the same time, it also strikes me that IT is operating with millstones around their necks, as they try to adapt and take on these more fleet characteristics. There are aging applications. There are unknown threats within the existing infrastructure. They are looking at development and deployment strategies and processes that are dated, perhaps linear, perhaps sequential, and with this rigid infrastructure, not to mention the fact that many of them are fighting fires around data explosion and trying to manage helpdesk and other types of remedial activity.

So, how do we do this? How do we change the wings in the airplane while we're flying, without crashing?

Shirk: We're faced with this all the time. That's partially why I say that when HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense. There are some things that are much easier to focus on first and then, over time, to gain more and more of an Instant-On nature.

Critical success factors

When you mentioned flexibility, security, speed, automation, and insight, those absolutely are attributes that we look for. We see them as the critical success factors in the way in which every part of the environment that IT leverages, drives, and embeds in the business has to come forward.

And yet, as you point out, everybody is stuck in this mode of an enormous legacy that they have to deal with, and that gets in the way of being able to provide some of these new capabilities.

The challenge in all of these, as I said, is where you start first. Our view is that we work with our clients and figure out ways that they can, as we say, shift that equation. How do you shift from 70 percent of that equation being focused on operational management, and 30 percent, if you are lucky, being spent on new and innovation-based capabilities to help or assist the business and its growth versus shifting it the other way? How do you get to 30 percent operational mode, and move forward with 70 percent focused on the business?

We help our clients work their way through that with a series of workshops that we do to get in and investigate. We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

We’ve spent a lot of time and gotten a lot of expertise over the years trying to figure out the best ways to do that and address these albatrosses that are keeping IT from being able to deal with the needs of the business. In the Instant-On Enterprise journey, that's a big part of the set of steps that we have to work through and work with our clients to make sure that they understand where to prioritize.

In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

Gardner: This also strikes me as a rather fresh perspective, particularly for a technology provider like HP. Many times we hear, "Here's what the technology is capable of and here is what you can do with it." But, you seem to be coming from the perspective of, "Here’s what the customers need. Let's re-engineer and back up from that."

It's sort of a fresh perspective. You've been at HP since April and you’ve had a chance to look deeply into the company, back up, and rearrange some thinking. Perhaps you could walk me through that process. How did you get to this point of Instant-On Enterprise, vis-à-vis customer needs?

Shirk: A lot of this has to do with just spending time with our clients and understanding their viewpoint. In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

We're in a unique position, because we're the only company in the marketplace that has a full suite of consumer products, and yet we stretch all the way back through to the data center. All the capability, all the offerings, that are in between, all the services that are necessary to address each of those pieces, are contained inside the portfolio capability that HP has of hardware, software, and services.

Changing business models

When I spend time with clients and listen to them, a big part of what they're asking for is, "We’ve got these pressures. We're seeing the business models change and we're experimenting with some things. We're seeing the mobile and the cloud computing pieces coming at us like a freight train. At the same time, we're seeing the demographic shift both on the end-user consumer side and on our employee side. We need strategic partners to help us with this. How do we navigate this? What is the way in which we should do that? HP, do you have a point of view?"

So, as we stepped back and looked at where we would want to go with this, we thought that a big part of this is coming to the marketplace and sharing a strategy and a vision for where we would like the clients that we work with to end up and what that destination looks like and how we're going to get them there.

We looked at this and said, "How do we take the best combination of that breadth of portfolio and bring those together in a set of solutions to best address what we are hearing over-and-over from some of the research that we’ve done and listening that we’ve done with our clients?"

They need to figure out how to modernize their applications. We want to make sure that we are there and we’ve got a set of solutions for that. They’ve got huge data-center issues in terms of how they're going to transform their data centers and deal with more virtualization-based techniques and capabilities and bring networking and storage and compute power together in some fashion.

They’ve got this issue of enterprise security. They need to figure out how to secure the enterprise. I don’t mean desktops, but all points, all touch points of the enterprise -- how they build applications, how this information is accessed inside and outside of the organization, and then fundamentally optimizing that information, the ways in which you store it, the way in which you deliver it, the way in which you print it for that matter, all those pieces.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

Then, they need to underpin that by the best way to figure out how to deliver it. Do we do it for them? Do they build it themselves with our architecture, and our capability set, and our consulting expertise? What combination of ways makes the most sense to set that up?

I looked at all of that and listened to the clients. There are some really rich stories that were shared with me. As we pulled all the stuff together, this is the underpinning of that capability, trying to push HP’s leadership in the marketplace through all the work that it’s been doing and then set this vision and destination where we really want to try to take our clients.

Gardner: Let’s come back in more detail to some of the news that you’ve made around the Instant-On Enterprise. You’re talking about hybrid delivery benefits. I wonder if we could just briefly get into those. What does that bring to the table? How would that help an organization start moving and transitioning to gain the attributes that we’ve been describing today?

Shirk: Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

There’s an enormous amount of talk about cloud in the marketplace today. HP has been at the forefront of that, but we have a little different position. We think it’s unique and we think we're the only ones out there that are really positioned to do this, which is the concept of hybrid IT, where you’ve got a mix. You’ve got a mix of traditional on-premises-based capabilities, but then you figure out what private cloud or public cloud-based capabilities best serve your business on a global basis.

HP comes in and, unlike other companies that try to force you into a one-size-fits-all structure, we sit down with the client. Our unique IP in this area is that we have an incredible depth of intellectual capital in this particular area, which is helping the clients figure out the best balance or mix of the delivery methods.

We can help them build it. They can host it or we can host it for them. We can provide those services from our public cloud-based capabilities or from our private cloud based capabilities. We really don’t care, if that blend changes over time. That’s the beauty to the journey to this Instant-On Enterprise.

Starting small

Our data says that most customers still start with a small private cloud implementation to really understand the value of the cloud and demystify it. We’ve said that there is going to be something after cloud. We don’t know what that level or that style of computing is going to be, but our architecture is built such that we’ll be ready for that. For our clients, we’ll help navigate them through each of these pieces, and that’s the important thing for us.

Gardner: For those interested in pursuing more and understanding about Instant-On and the HP approach to these problems, is there an HP enablement process? Is there a way to get started with some resources?

Shirk: All of the above. There are a number of materials that we’ve made available to help begin the education process for folks who are interested in understanding a bit more about the Instant-On Enterprise and how to take or begin that journey. That’s one piece.

The other piece is that we have a whole series of workshops globally that our teams are set up to do, everything from a small couple-of-hour based interaction to a full suite of in-depth analysis and consulting engagements to work with a client. But, we usually recommend that one of our newly announced services would be the starting point.

We’ve got our new HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service, which is a place for a client to start, get a basic orientation, sit down and understand kind of where we think they might consider beginning that journey. So that, along with a number of other capabilities that we have to help them through these various workshops, I think is really the best place for them to start.

Gardner: Well, we’ve been talking about how some of the mega-trends of the day, cloud, mobile, social, Gen X have been buffeting organizations and how the speed of business is accelerating, and IT needs to play a bigger role in keeping up with the speed and isn't slowing the organization down. We’ve been talking about how HP has defined the Instant-On Enterprise as the means to start ameliorating these problems and setting up organizations for opportunity, rather than disappointment.

We’ve been discussing this here today with Dave Shirk. He is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business. Thanks for joining us, Dave.

Shirk: I appreciate it, Dana. Thank you for the time.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

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Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on addressing users' and customers' expectations for an always-on environment. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.