A single line in reports on a Tuesday conference call with Cisco VP Doug Dennerline opens up the intriguing possibility that the company is "thinking about" getting into the online office pool with Google, Microsoft, Zoho, and other SaaS providers. It's probably too much to read into what may have been meant as a throwaway comment or an expression of individual interest, and probably quite responsibly most coverage has focused on other news of interest in the call, such as the company's overall cloud strategy (what, your company doesn't have a cloud strategy? Are you crazy, don't you know that everyone has to have a cloud strategy now?) of focusing on the top and bottom layers: cloud hardware infrastructure, which the company hopes to become a prominent supplier of with it's California blade servers, and services, which will anchor around the existing WebEx solution and expand from there.

Dennerline was talking about one of those options for expansion on the base of WebEx when he said the company was interested in the online office space. At first blush, it sounds like another "me too" moment, a big company keeping competitors off-balance by throwing its hat in the ring or just keeping the options open for future moves in that direction. But the more I think about it, the more I think Cisco may be ideally suited (at least in some respects) to launch a serious contender to Google and Microsoft in the enterprise online office suite market.

Cisco has two significant advantages in this game that the others are each lacking one of; unlike Microsoft, they have no institutional or financial interest in maintaining the status quo of desktop based office suites, or at least not a very significant interest. And unlike Google, Cisco is both oriented and practiced at working with enterprise customers, both in structuring and delivering deals and in providing support for them thereafter. A major failing of Microsoft's solution is that it isn't "cloud" enough; a major failing of Google's is that they continue to call it and treat it like a beta. These factors diminish the attraction of those solutions to enterprise customers, even as the utility computing concept in general dangles promises of significant savings in front of them.

Cisco probably has a twelve to eighteen month window to introduce a significant, enterprise-grade web-based office suite into the market which could leverage its existing reputation and relationships with enterprise customers to up-end both Google and Microsoft in their respective plays and come out ahead in the online office race. The predominance of WebEx as a corporate solution gives them an easy in; their support and service structure could be enough to make it stick.

I think they have a golden opportunity to get in the game and light the market on fire. But then, it was just a single sentence.

So, after running across the CIO Dashboard of Twittering CIOs last week, I had been toying with the idea of doing a post on dashboards in general. I'm of mixed opinions on them, generally; I think it's valuable and important to have relevant metrics available as close to real-time as possible, available as broadly as possible, and in as plain and understandable a format as can be managed. A good IT dashboard is a great tool for managing operations and justifying IT as an organization to the rest of the business.

On the other hand, dashboard projects frequently seem to go down the rabbit hole into minute detail of dubious value, or end up emphasizing flash and style over the substance of the information. They get pitched and constructed more as cool toys than legitimate management tools and subsequent abandonment and neglect, followed by disillusionment and distrust, are the common result.

So today I run across the Federal IT Dashboard, which is a pretty impressive piece of work detailing spending and performance on almost 40 billion dollars worth of US government IT projects and I think "Hey, this is a really big deal... if the government can pull this off and make IT project progress and costs understandable to the average citizen, why can't any enterprise do the same? What a quick result in such a massive undertaking!" until I realize that this is only a subset of a much larger dashboard, one which will cover, when completed, just about every spending project the federal government engages in. Which makes the average corporate IT dashboard project look all the more feeble.

Turns out this has all been in the works since 2006, when the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act was passed, implemented in large part by the Office of Management and Budget as of early last year. It's not perfect, but it's huge, and it was put together in three or four years by *gasp* the government. I can think of a few business types who look down their noses at government efficiency who should be so lucky as to pull off similar projects in that kind of time frame.

The entire effort points to the benefits of dashboards, however, in ways which are not always obvious. President Obama, one of the original sponsors of the 2006 bill, has made implementation a priority and federal CIO Vivek Kundra has been cracking the whip on government agencies which have been slow to comply with the disclosure requirements. I have no doubt this is viewed as a pain and a hindrance at that level, much as it would be in any corporate environment. But the very exercise of rebuilding processes to introduce more substance and transparency into uplevel reporting is bound to introduce efficiency and improve control over those same processes. A thousand eyes watching government contract allocations are sure to turn up abuse and discrepancies. While some very dedicated and proficient watchdog groups have been doing this for years, expanding their ranks to include anyone with a web browser has to frighten those who abuse these systems. The same effects can be seen in the enterprise which successfully implements such a project... all those hidden kingdoms and private efforts working at cross-purposes inside the organization can be forced to expose themselves, and either be justified or exterminated.

The exact product pricing announced by Microsoft this morning for the upcoming Windows 7 release in October may not mean much to various enterprise clients with separately negotiated volume licensing agreements, but the trend may be indicative of what you can expect next time negotiations roll around: look for discounts.

Microsoft is knocking up to %20 off of the full retail package product suggested pricing on some Windows versions, and taking off up to %50 for pre-orders. This mostly seems to affect the home versions; Windows 7 Professional actually sees a minor price increase over Vista Business ($299.99 versus $299.95). This probably reflects the idea that Microsoft has businesses over a barrel: many of you have locked yourselves into their product, and they know it. But I suspect the lock isn't as strong as they think it is, and depending on how order volumes look later this year, I imagine there will be some softening even on the business price points.

In some ways, businesses have an easier time of managing an operating system transition than individuals. Businesses have paid IT staff, or can hire IT staff, who can provide options and suggest alternatives to extend their existing platform or move to a new one. Most individual consumers are stuck with whatever the PC they purchase happens to ship with. And as has been pointed out repeatedly, they rarely factor in the operating system cost as a component of that purchase... it's built in. Business, on the other hand, sees the licensing costs distinctly and is more likely to factor them into upgrade decisions.

I'm not throwing this out there as a sign of weakness on Microsoft's part or as a thing to attempt to take advantage of. Whether they are making the decision out of based on this factor or not, it happens that lowering the pricing for 7 is both the right and the realistic thing to do after the terribly botched Vista release. After years of expecting customers to smile after being served a steaming pile of... well, you know... it's about time to see some hint of a mea culpa out of the company.

Science is now proving what bored e-mail server admins the world over have known for some time, which is that rudimentary mail traffic analysis can indicate ongoing or upcoming disruption within an organization.

Researchers analyzing mail logs comprised of messages sent to and from 150 senior staff at Enron during the company's final 18 months found that volume increased and the correspondents became more insular approximately 1 month before the final collapse.

This is a more or less intuitive analysis of the situation; when things start to get hairy, the small group of people who know enough to see it coming tend to start talking about it, and they do so within their own ranks rather than with the company staff at large. As a n00b system administrator in a variety of organizations coming up through the ranks I saw this sort of behavior manifest around business deals, mergers, and client catastrophes. It's an open secret that IT knows, or thinks it knows, about everything going on in a company before it happens, and this is part of the reason why. It's not that anyone is reading internal e-mail, although that happens to; it's that you can tell a lot just by who is talking to who else, and how often.

While common knowledge among the lower ranks, this seems to be something that CIOs are either unaware of or not interested in. It seems to me that the tool is a valuable one, however, even if you aren't using it to snoop; other applications may reveal insider threats or internal disruptions which may not have been elevated to management team notice by normal channels.

If you are one of those CIOs who likes to know what other CIOs are up to, then you have probably spent some time scouring the blogosphere and tools like Facebook and Twitter for accounts of other CIOs (although, really, who has time for Facebook when they are running an IT department?). If so, your task just got a lot easier on Twitter, because CIO Dashboard's Chris Curran has just put up the Twitter CIO Dashboard on his site.

Listing, by category, prominent (and some not-so-prominent... would it be more polite to say "soon-to-be-prominent?") CIO twitterers are listed with their most recent tweets. One-stop shopping, a dashboard, in fact, for all your CIO Twitter needs.

You can follow CIODashboard on Twitter for updates as they are added; and since you are a CIO yourself, why not let Chris know who you are, or anyone else you follow who isn't already on the list?

Isn't it getting a little tiresome that Microsoft has to be taken to the mat over every objectionable, insensible licensing decision they make lately?

ComputerWorld reports that Microsoft has backtracked on its initial decision to limit OEM downgrades (wherein customers purchase PCs with Windows 7 licenses but which are running legitimate copies of Windows XP on delivery) to six months after the release of the next Windows; instead, the timeline has been pushed back potentially as far as 2011. This provides some breathing room for organizations which fully intend to upgrade to 7 but need time to test and plan for the migration, while still provisioning and supporting their existing XP installation base.

I doubt that the original decision had anything to do with what the conspiracy theorists are already proposing, which is that the company was going to find a way to extract its pound of flesh for Vista one way or another. Instead, I suspect this was just the result of general thoughtlessness... either no one at Microsoft considered what realistic upgrade timelines might look like for their customers who sensibly decided to wait for 7, or whoever over there might have known this was a bad idea wasn't brought into the decision making process.

Neither of those possibilities makes the company look very good, and they certainly don't reassure customers that Microsoft is truly invested in delivering what they need to run smooth and efficient information systems.

Following Google's recent claims of increasing Apps adoption among enterprise customers, CIO Magazine has a snapshot of one company's transition to the platform as a frame for an article called "Why Enterprises Are Moving to Google Apps, Gmail."

It's no huge surprise that the second is driving the first; they aren't moving for the "Apps," they are moving for the mail. The impetus behind that is no surprise, either: cost and the reduction of complexity (which is really just a different kind of cost). I think if there is anything in the whole scenario that surprises me, it is the element that the recent announcment of Outlook support plays into this decision. On second thought, it shouldn't; people like things that are familiar, and Outlook is familiar, even if the more powerful aspects of the program are left to languish without the Exchange server backend they require.

Something else that jumped out at me was a quote from the IT director of the company in the case study, Brent Hoag of JohnsonDiversey. "E-mail is critical to our work, but we're trying to simplify IT." I often hear e-mail referred to in that fashion, as a mission critical system, but I also see exactly how it is typically used and the problems it causes and I question the assumption (which, incidentally, I have never seen proven, not in the same way that other critical operational support systems have to be ROI justified). If Gmail is causing CIOs to question the conventional wisdom of running in-house mail servers, I can't help but wonder: will Google Wave finally cause them to seriously question exactly what good e-mail provides and how those benefits might be more efficiently achieved by other means?

On the first read-through of this New York Times' article on IBM's plans to entice the enterprise with cloud computing offerings, you might be pardoned for simply assuming that Big Blue has decided to do what so many other businesses have done lately, which is to simply take their latest server or web-based offerings and slap a "Cloud Computing!" sticker on the side for the buzz value. As with most things related to IBM, though, I've come to believe it's more complicated than that.

I think the big clue to the confusion the company exhibits when it comes to cloud computing can be found in this quote from the article:

I.B.M.'s cloud strategy, the company said, is the culmination of 100 prototype projects with companies and government agencies over the last year, and its research partnership with Google.

Yeah... difficult to pull together a coherent strategy out of that many disparate environments. And it shows. Some of the products that IBM will be offering up today fit the general mold of cloud offerings (Business development and test environments, for example) while others are pretty conventional web-based services (virtual desktops) and others yet are internally hosted services for companies who want to get on the cloud bandwagon but don't actually much like the idea of a cloud... and those aren't really cloud-anything coming from IBM, just consulting and hardware sales on enterprise projects, which is hardly a departure for the company.

Om Malik is fond of talking about the "cloud will eventually morph into many clouds, each tailored to specific tasks. " But a "cloud" with a specific task isn't a cloud, it's just another SaaS offering. That's a fine thing in and of itself, but if that's what IBM is choosing to call cloud computing (edit: I understand their preferred term is actually "hybrid" computing... yeah, that doesn't mean anything to me, either) it doesn't instill much faith that they actually understand the concept.

That understanding is neither here nor there for potential customers; you either trust them or you don't, and if you have a specific business need they can solve, it doesn't much matter what they call it. The danger is to the larger marketplace; as the Times, and most other commenters so far have pointed out, IBM is the gateway to legitimacy for concepts seeking to penetrate the enterprise. The PC became legit for business because IBM rolled it out; Linux became an accepted alternative under Big Blue's auspices (at least according to one narrative; other arguments could be made that the utility of these technologies was such that they would eventually have found favor regardless of sponsorship). Cloud computing, with its anemic adoption in the enterprise, then, could become the next beneficiary of IBM's largesse.

But if IBM is simply shopping around some sales, consulting, and SaaS offerings and calling them cloud computing, what does that do for the actual concept? Does it gain legitimacy without any real test or enterprise traction, simply because of the labeling? Or does the basic idea, that of easily purchased, off-premises, generic, repurposable utility computing and storage power never really see the light of day because everyone in the Fortune 100 thinks it's something else suddenly?

I think it's an interesting question, assuming the "IBM as gatekeeper" trope is correct. I'm not so sure that it is; I think the concept of cloud computing is strong enough and useful enough on its own that, whatever label is slapped on it, we'll all end up using it in whole or in part as it matures.

I posted a couple of weeks ago a reference to a recent Gartner study showing that some 40% of companies engaging in SOA projects do not associate ROI metrics with those projects. I posited at the time that perhaps this wasn't quite the travesty that it seemed, or that other commenters held it to be, since the benefits of a functioning SOA are mostly downstream and secondary, and can be difficult to assess without a correspondingly larger measurement effort which may will cost more than the benefits could accrue.

Today Joe McKendrick comes to the rescue with a list of metrics that Gartner proposes to evaluate SOA project success.

1. Improved efficiency, particularly with respect to business processes execution
2. Lower process administrative costs
3. Higher visibility on existing/running business processes
4. Reduced number of manual, paper-based steps
5. Better service-level effectiveness
6. Quicker implementation of processes
7. Quicker time to market
8. Shorter (overall) project cycles
9. Overall reduction in the total cost of application development and maintenance

Those metrics all seem reasonable to me; but accurately establishing them as the result of the architecture changes is another matter, which gets back to my original point. Are you going to attribute all your decrease in process administration costs to the SOA implementation? How do you single out what SOA contributes versus other efforts? Or do you shut down every other cost-saving effort in these difficult times just so you can see how the SOA is doing? Is SOA the only thing affecting your application development and maintenance costs? Can you control for all the other factors? How do you really know that any of these things are coming about as a result of your SOA effort?

I suppose the real point is that you have to look at the general conditions and take some things on faith (if your costs go down consistently after you implement SOA, there must be a relationship, right?), but I'm not sure if that really counts as rigorous ROI measurement... or if it is in fact much different from simply launching into the process with no more than a gut feeling. To me, ROI metrics should be solid, or you shouldn't waste the time on them. You need them exactly when the effects are too fuzzy to ballpark or guesstimate; when they themselves are simply guesstimates of their own, I'm not sure I see the value.

If you're going to wing it, at least have the courage of your convictions... don't come up with funny numbers to support the effort.

I would rate the Apple WWDC splash this year as "about average." In other words, not a lot of the unexpected, nothing really revolutionary, and not much in it for business users. The new iPhone looks nice, but the much touted speed and MMS enhancements are inapplicable or delayed on the AT&T network that all US users are saddled with; the new unibody Macbooks were a face-saver more than anything, after the story broke last week that the old white Macbook was outperforming them, and although the price drops across the product line are welcome and possibly even overdue, they aren't the deciding factor for businesses accustomed to evaluating products in terms of TCO. The iPhone encryption enhancement is important for a certain subset of business users, sure, and the built-in Exchange support in Mail is also welcome... but Exchange really only shines if you're using it with Outlook. Why buy a Mack truck and then use it only to haul your weekly groceries?

The biggest impact for business users may have nothing at all to do with Apple, and everything to do with Microsoft and Windows 7. Apple, you may recall, is also planning to release a new operating system version this year, Snow Leopard, a couple of months before Microsoft rolls out 7 in early fall. While the operating systems are as incomparable as Windows and Mac operating systems always have been on the utility and productivity fronts, they are both incremental upgrades. Neither is particularly revolutionary; both simply improve marginally on existing products already deployed and paid for.

For the privilege of moving from Vista to Windows 7 (which in any sane and logical universe would be free, as an apology and atonement by the manufacturer for having inflicted Vista upon us in the first place) you'll probably fork out around $100, based on recently leaked pricing information (enterprise licensing deals will, of course, come in at something less than that depending on the specific terms negotiated). If you happened to be moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard? Thirty bucks.

As analyst Michael Gartenberg put it dryly after the Apple announcement yesterday, "Apple's announcement is a much more realistic assessment of how an interim OS upgrade should be priced."

You have to admire Microsoft's chutzpah, though; knocked around, operating system business threatened from all angles, they're still out there demanding more money for less compelling products. You go, girl!