Those of you paying attention in Sunday School may remember this thing called the apocalypse. Earl Robert Maze II was my Sunday School teacher, and he may be the most fearsome schoolmaster ever to scratch a chalkboard. One spitwad and there was sure to be a rapture. Mr. Maze would get pretty wrapped up in the lesson of the day and we'd all have to keep at least one eye on him as he paced back and forth. Not because we were worried about being asked a question, but because as he paced and talked, he'd build up globs of white something or other in the corners of his mouth, and every so often one of them would take flight and land on some unsuspecting front row pupil's hand, to their horror.

As luck would have it, I was late to class on the day Mr. Maze deemed that we were, at last, ready for the book of Revelation; I took the last seat -- In the front row -- Right in the line of fire. Sure enough, he was so worked up by the time he got to the part about the divine apocalypse, that one of those white gobs of goop chose that moment to set itself free and was headed for me like a heat-seeking missile. There was nothing I could do! And so to this day, the term apocalypse conjures up a frightening memory for me.

Which brings me to the current situation in the client management vendor landscape. The apocalypse was to be foretold by four horsemen representing conquest, war, famine and death (if you've ever worked for a company whose business has been disrupted, as I have, you've probably met with all four!). The four horsemen before us now in the client management market in the second quarter of 2012, are:

If you think the term "Big Data" is wishy washy waste, then you are not alone. Many struggle to find a definition of Big Data that is anything more than awe inspiring hugeness. But, Big Data is real if you have an actionable definition that you can use to answer the question: "Does my organization have Big Data?" Proposed is a definition that takes into account both the measure of data and the activities performed with the data. Be sure to scroll down to calculate your Big Data Score.

Big Data Can Be Measured

Big Data exhibits extremity across one or many of these three alliterate measures:

On Wednesday, American footwear company Skechers agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission $40 million. This settlement resulted from a series of commercials that deceived consumers claiming that the Shape-Ups shoe line would "help people lose weight, and strengthen and tone their buttocks, legs and abdominal muscles." Professional celebrity Kim Kardashian appeared in a 2011 Super Bowl commercial personally endorsing the health benefits of these shoes.

This settlement was part of an ongoing FTC campaign to "stop overhyped advertising claims." A similar effort would serve the information security community well. For example, one particular claim that causes me frequent grief is: "solution X detects and prevents advanced persistent threats." It is hard, dare I say impossible, to work in information security and not have heard similar assertions. I have heard it twice this week already, and these claims make my brain hurt.

I must be direct. I never got the hype about social business process management (BPM). Sure, it's great to collaborate better when creating process models. No group could use more help communicating then the process geeks that do this work. And I used to be one. And leveraging social data -- voice of the customer -- as input into transforming processes. Well, isn't this the whole point of "outside-in" process transformation? So who can argue with that. But here is my twist on this which I am researching now --which means I really don't know anything yet. I think the killer combination is enterprise social platforms and dynamic case management. The former is a much discussed area today, and why not? (Our guy Rob Koplowitz BTW has written some geat stuff in this area.) Enterprise social serves goals like innovation, collaboration, and workforce productivity that few can argue with. Yet real productivity has to connect to core business processes and enterprise social has yet to do that. At the same time, growing interest in dynamic case management, to reform and transform processes, continues, with a growing interest in providing stronger human connection at scale -- and this is where the two can help each other. We are seeing a pendulum shift toward people needing a more "localized" and human experience to increase overall happiness (one happiness index for US residents peaked in 1956). Bottom line: we believe companies will be evaluated -- brand-wise -- on a fourth dimension -- a human and "feel-good" dimension -- not just on price, intimacy, and service. I want to examine the link between these two growing areas and take a deep look at the trajectory of these emerging areas and review the enterprise social plans of primary case management providers, but more importantly find some companies actually exploiting both.

Yesterday the folks from Black Duck published some interesting information on the use and growth of open source projects in the mobile space. Their data confirms that open source mobile projects are alive and well, even in the age of the Splinternet/App Internet. In fact, there are now over 10,000 open source projects focused on popular mobile platforms (see Figure 1). What's more interesting is the rate of growth - the number of new mobile projects with open source licenses has doubled in each of the past three years. It's hard to believe that this rate of growth will continue into 2012, but betting against hyper-growth in the mobile space seems to be a good way for analysts to end up eating crow.

Figure 1: There Are More Than 10,000 Mobile OSS Projects

Here's why you need to care about open source as part of your "Mobile First" strategy:

Driving in the snow is an experience normally reserved for those of us denizens of the northern climes who haven't yet figured out how to make a paycheck mixing Mai Tais in the Caymans. Behind the wheel in the snow, everything happens a little slower. Turn the wheel above 30 on the speedo and it could be a second or two before the car responds, and you'll overshoot the turn and take out the neighbor's shrubs.

Hosted Virtual Desktops are a bit like driving in the snow. Every link in the chain between the data on a hard drive in the datacenter and the pixels on the user's screen introduces a delay that the user perceives as lag, and the laws of physics apply. Too much lag or too much snow and it's hard to get anywhere, as citizens of Anchorage, Alaska after this years' record snowfalls, or anyone trying to use a hosted virtual desktop half a world away from the server will testify.

NVIDIA Brings Gaming Know-How to HVD
Last week I spent a day with NVIDIA's soft-spoken, enthusiastic CEO, Jensen Huang who put the whole latency issue for VDI into a practical perspective (thanks Jensen). These days, he says, home game consoles run about 100-150 milliseconds from the time a player hits the fire button to the time they see their plasma cannon blast away an opponent on the screen. For comparison, the blink of an eye is 200-400 milliseconds, and the best gamers can react to things they see on screen as fast as 50 milliseconds.

Shakespeare wrote in his famous play Hamlet,"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more." He of course was talking about the betrayal in his family but the quote is just as appropriate today in the world of cloud computing. Because in the minds of many I&O professionals, the business is conducting the betrayal.

One of the core priniciples of Agile is a realistic attitude about the unknown. We might have a rough idea of how much work it will take to complete a project, but we cannot state with the certainty of a papal bull how we're going to get to that destination. Therefore, Agile teams have to embrace Agile principles like loving plans, but abandoning any fetishistic relationship with specific, immutable plans.

Agilists learn to live with uncertainty, but they're far from fatalistic about it. In fact, the opposite is true: the truly good Agile teams assume a very aggressive posture about the management of uncertainty. In this respect, Agile software teams behave a lot like military professionals. First, they accept the inherent unpredictability that they'll face, either on the battlefield or in the backlog. They adopt maxims like, "No plan survives contact with the enemy," or concepts like friction, to describe the nature, sources, and effects of uncertainty. Next, they develop strategies, like the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, and act), to navigate through the minefields of unexpected outcomes. And finally, they adopt a great deal of rigor and discipline, plus no small amount of self-criticism, to the application of these uncertainty-management practices.

For many years, security professionals have lived by the three pillars of risk management - AVOID, TREAT, ACCEPT. These great tenets have served the profession well, enabling CISOs to build appropriately secure networks at a tolerable level of cost. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the litany of security breaches we have seen over the past 12 months, it's clear that the landscape is changing. More than ever before, security is clearly a 'no-win' game.

The high profile attackers, state-sponsored or otherwise, are one threat - but it goes deeper than this. The keys to the kingdom are no longer in the hands of the generals and policy makers; their decisions and discussions are enabled by email, IM and IP telephony, all of which sit firmly in the domain of the IT department and system admin - and stressed, poorly paid employees do not make the ideal custodians of such critical information. As an example, Anonymous claims to have access to every classified government database in the US, but they didn't hack them - disaffected system administrators and employees simply opened the doors for them, or sent them the access codes.

As the broadening gap between our ambitions for a secure enterprise and our abilities to deliver on such a vision become self-evident, the time has come to pay equal attention to the poor cousin of risk management, "TRANSFER." For many CISOs, risk transference is a topic that is largely theoretical as, even when a task is outsourced, the risk associated with a breach commonly remains with the data owning organisation. Cyber insurance offers a different solution.

SAP Gets Serious About The Large Enterprise Application Cloud:

Its Long-Term Strategy Should Involve A Triple Platform Play For The Cloud

Until now, it looked like SAP was still trying to balance its existing on-premises licensed business with the cloud alternative. But following its acquisition of Success Factors and the arrival of that company's outstanding CEO, Lars Dalgaard, SAP has become really serious about applications in the cloud, placing Mr. Dalgaard at the head of a 5,000-person development team.

SAP's new cloud strategy is all about business applications in large enterprises. SAP today announced its People, Money, Customers, Suppliers strategy -- a significant move to offer business applications for large enterprises, rather than just SMBs and a few niche cases. It's really targeting its core business users. Today's announcements show SAP combining its core strength of large enterprise applications with a ready-to-use cloud strategy for the first time.

What is really mission-critical in this transformation of SAP and its global customer base?

1. Cloud-generation business applications.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are not just rehosted traditional applications. SAP is still on a learning curve, and the infusion of Success Factors will definitely help. The upcoming generations of enterprise users expect their applications to be simple, collaborative, mobile, and very different from what they (and their moms and dads) have used in the past. SAP key's challenge is to keep their existing, conservative customer base happy while meeting the requirements of (and signing deals with) this new generation.

2. Best-of-breed application landscapes - not total replacements.

It's been three months since we published "Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement," and we've learned a lot by listening to CIO customers and industry professionals talk about the stories and strategy of mobile engagement.

The thing that leaves people scratching their heads is the mantra, Design for mobile first! "What does that mean, exactly?," they ask. "Is it about user interface design?" The industry answer is that it's about user experience design, but that's not quite right. Design for mobile first! is really about business design. Let's start with a thought experiment to re-imagine what's possible on a touchscreen device:

Imagine that your service is in your customer's pocket at all times. Imagine what you could do with that honor.

You could serve your customers in their moments of need. You could use data from device sensors and your own data to understand their context, the time of day, where they are, what they did last time, what they prefer, even their blood pressure, weight, and anxiety level. You could design your mobile experience to be snappy, simple, and built around an "action button" to (you guessed it) help them take the next most likely action.

With the right data and predictive analytics, you could anticipate your customer's next move and light up the correct action button before they even know they need it. You could serve them anywhere at any time. Not just give them self-service mobile access to your shrunken Web site or forms-based transaction system, but truly serve them by placing information and action and control into their hands.

Dan Bieler; Bryan Wang; Henry Dewing; Katyayan Gupta; Tirthankar Sen

Huawei hosted about 160 industry and financial analysts at its annual analyst summit in Shenzhen, China in April 2012. The main take-aways from the event are:

1. Huawei continues its drive for more financial openness and transparency. Huawei provided detailed information about its financial and operational performance. In 2011 Huawei grew revenues by 12% to reach US$32.4bn and EBIT by 9% to US$3bn. The main regional growth was registered in Latin America, up 40%. Although due to higher capex cash from operating activities declined, the cash margin stood at 9%. Huawei is easily able to fund its expansion and innovation activities. In 2011, Huawei hired 30,000 new staff, bringing the total to 140,000 globally. For 2012 Huawei targets between 15-20% sales growth.
2. Huawei places main growth emphasis on enterprise services and consumer devices. These market segments represent a potential target market with a combined value of about US$1.7 trillion, compared with the carrier equipment market value of about US$150 billion. Huawei repeatedly pointed out the early-stage nature of its activities in these areas. It even felt as if Huawei consciously played down its ambitions in order to downplay expectations.
3. Huawei must strengthen its go-to-market strategy for its enterprise business. With more than 40% of Huawei's current business coming from China, Huawei has to continue to fine tune its go-to-market model and penetrate markets other than China in a swift manner. Huawei also has to push for stronger relationship with their partners and increase their share in the total revenue.

The event was not marked by major announcements, but instead provided updates:

Earlier this morning, the consulting firm launched "Deloitte Digital." Part offering and part organizational change, the initiative brings together a mix of business, technology, and creative expertise to address a perfect storm of technology change. The firm will bring together five key capabilities -- strategy, mobile, social, web content, and digital ERP. Deloitte Digital will focus on mobile and social, while the traditional technology services and consulting groups will handle the strategy, web content, and digital ERP elements. The tag line for Deloitte Digital is "business led, tech enabled and creative infused." From an organizational view point, the firm has taken a page from its 2011 acquisition of Übermind and created 11 digital studios around the globe. Approximately 50% of the staff in the studios will come from a creative, graphic design, or user experience background. The rest will be a mix of engineers focused on emerging technologies and resources coming from the traditional consulting or technology services side of Deloitte. To showcase their newfound creative chops, the Deloitte Digital Team presented the pre-announcement to the analysts using paper "pitch books" straight out of the new reality advertising TV show "The Pitch."

Forrester believes that the Deloitte announcement highlights the hybrid skill model that the new mobile apps and systems of engagement will require. Deloitte Digital is an innovative approach for multidisciplinary new skills required for success. However, it is still not apparent how the firm would tackle the other key side of the mobile equation, building the broad ecosystem of software and as-a-service partners in order to quickly roll out solutions for clients.

Innovation is again the hot topic for clients, as it was before the economic downturn. Clients have a renewed interest in innovation and business growth, and they seek services partners who can help. But what is innovation in this context?

In this context, clients seek business innovation. They want a provider who delivers new ideas and insights that will change business processes to drive revenue or improve business processes (for example, through product innovation, customer process innovation, supply chain innovation). They do not mean delivery innovation or continuous improvement, where the provider improves service delivery efficiency to drive lower IT cost and/or higher quality of IT service to clients (for example, through improved delivery processes, shared services, reusable assets). (Of course, they usually do want this as well -- but this will not necessarily drive business innovation such as new products and processes.)

What do leading firms do to drive ongoing business innovation from services providers?

1) Put process around innovation. Organizations who successfully get innovation from their services providers put processes in place, from idea discovery to incubation to implementation to measurement. They also select services providers who have codified the innovation process. Ongoing innovation cannot happen by accident.

2) Use social media to collaborate at fast paces with customers, partners, and employees. Tools such as social networking sites, microblogs, and collaboration sites let firms gather ideas, evolve ideas, and rank ideas with a wide audience.

In customer service organizations, collaboration should take place around cases and content, and should involve not only collaboration between customers and customer service agents, but internal collaboration within the enterprise. Internal collaboration has quantifiable benefits as measured by increased organizational productivity and efficiency. For cases, collaboration helps increase first contact resolution, decrease handle times and increase customer satisfaction. For content, collaboration helps evolve content to be more relevant, accurate, complete, and in line with customer demand. Some of the technologies that help foster collaboration around cases and content include:

For cases:

• Presence indicators, instant messaging, and video chat. These allow customer service agents to connect in real time with subject-matter experts, supervisors, managers, or other agents having the necessary skills to help resolve a question.
• Collaborative workspaces. These allow agents and subject-matter experts to share documents and logs about the customer issue, the troubleshooting process, and the results in real time.
• Activity streams. These allow agents and subject-matter experts to subscribe to a case and receive notifications of all changes and additions to a case.
• Remote support. This allows customer service agents to invite subject-matter experts and specialty agents to troubleshoot software or hardware with a customer.

For content: