HP's Liz Roche on why enterprise technology strategy must move beyond the 'professional' and 'consumer' split

Summary: When you’re a broker of IT services, which is what we teach our customers to be, you are providing not just IT support, nevertheless you’re as well providing new cost models for business process enablement.

The past several years have ushered in a changing set of expectations from users as they engage with research and services as both consumers and workers. The sense is that they want to get as much ease of use and productivity from enterprise innovation as from their smartphones, social networks, tablets, and cloud-based offerings.

How can IT adjust to this shift?

So how can IT adjust to this shift? What must they do differently, or more importantly, how must they think differently? This is the type of problem that a product or innovation itself cannot address. It requires a comprehensive and methodological perspective, one that impacts consumers, business goals, and behaviors around research use and adoption.

We’re here now with an innovator and leader in HP's Research Consulting group to learn how enterprises can tackle and exploit such complex challenges as developing a prosumer strategy. The discussion with Liz Roche, a Director in the HP Research Consulting organization, is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Gardner: It seems that the adoption of innovation now seems to be moving at the volition of the savvy consumer, not the IT director.

Roche: If we look at some of the economic trends, you’ll start to see that folks who went to college 20 or 30 years ago got out of school with the expectation of working their way up a corporate ladder and adopting research and tools that were provided by the corporation. The folks who are coming up these days have been weaned on innovation.

Actually big mega-trend is that our workers of today

A actually big mega-trend is that our workers of today and tomorrow, not us who are already in the workplace, those folks coming up, are going to not just demand innovation that will enable their work and their life, however they will expect it and in point of fact may not be able to function as then without it.

Mega-trends include the consumerization of IT. At HP, we’re calling it the Instant-On Enterprise, where everything and everyone is connected. Immediate gratification and instantaneous results are mandatory. There is this notion of 24×7, always-on commerce. We could go ceaselessly, nevertheless I think the big trends are in that general category, anyway as pertains to the prosumer. [To connect furthermore with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.]

Roche: It’s funny, because in many ways it has become a numbers game. Some of these applications or businesses price their products at low or no cost — with the objective being conversion to paid, either subscriptions or paid services and advertising, nevertheless also the value of the connection, the value of the social network as part of the business model.

Organizations or enterprises today are going to be taking philosophies of that sort and applying it to more traditional goods and services in the marketplace, where the value isn’t necessarily on the initial transactions. It's not about a 99-cent Angry Birds [app]. It’s about what happens once you’re using the innovation, the product, the service, the relationships that you form, the advertising, and the knowledge that can be shared.

Roche: A bunch of things. Let’s start with the big picture. Organizations that are in fact instant-on enterprises are those that serve their constituents, clients, employees, partners with whatever they want and need instantly, at any point in the course of time, through any channel. So organizations that are instant-on, and those are the kinds of organizations that we need to evolve to, are going to explore better ways to run business and government by designing new process and methods, by building flexible systems that interact with greater personalization.

The latest videos

I’m not just messing around on YouTube because I like looking at the latest videos. I’m working You Tube, because that’s where our HP Channel is. It's one of the places where our HP Channel lives and it’s one of the ways that I communicate with my customers. The same thing with Twitter and Facebook, and in fact even this podcast, speaking with you. These are prime examples of things that we at HP place a very high value on and our research infrastructure has been overhauled to support that.

There are the folks that are in the mainstream, and at the time there are the stalled IT organizations that look to deliver IT support, in other words than moving to enable the business with IT and to have a seat at the table and to be not just a provider however an actual broker of services.

Broker of IT services

When you’re a broker of IT services, which is what we teach our customers to be, you are providing not just IT support, nevertheless you’re as well providing new cost models for business process enablement. You’re looking at things like service delivery in one of three ways: traditional, which is in-house or outsourced, private cloud, public cloud.

Gardner: So we’re crossing chasm of consumer to business. You actually need to have nearly a behavioral, empathetic, sympathetic approach to bringing people into change. It’s not easy to change.

The cool thing about this whole instant-on enterprise approach that we are taking is that we do in fact have a taxonomy for change, and the taxonomy is both social and innovation, and it deep down is a way to connect all these different constituents to meet their needs.

The taxonomy itself says

The taxonomy itself says, if you’re going to transform to an instant-on enterprise, the first level of the taxonomy is looking at the business and government requirements. Within IT, the best practice today seems to be all about alignment, business IT alignment.

We think that it’s in effect not about alignment, nevertheless it’s about taking that straightway step towards empowerment and empowering the business with IT. That means becoming a strategic service broker. That’s the third level of this taxonomy.

Gardner: How about some examples of how this can work when it’s pulled at the same time properly, when you have the alignment of services, consulting, research, business buy-in, when all is said and done forth?

Roche: We to tell the truth have several great success stories with customers and I’m going to start with one client, Black & Veatch. We worked with them recently to deploy a unified communications solution from Microsoft that, for them, is going to pay for itself in 18 months, which is pretty amazing when you consider that we did this, deep down creating a virtual environment to help Black & Veatch solve their client's problems.

The client to design a unified communications solution

We worked with the client to design a unified communications solution and configure the architecture. We set up an infrastructure, including servers and load balancers and the like. We tested our Unified Communications software and voice, and we clearly are using voice over IP.

After we put in place new converged technologies like IM and Mobile Access and desktop sharing, we replaced their phone system, and we gave them integrated fax and voicemail and email. We ended up reducing the risk of their outages through lots of built-in redundancies. We did this all in about 20 weeks.

We as well worked with them to provide automated client case-management innovation. I’m speculating a little bit, because some of the decisions haven't totally been made, nevertheless imagine nurses walking into patient rooms carrying HP TouchPads, for instance, to put it more exactly than lugging the big heavy carts that nurses today do when they are doing automated medical records. It’s as a matter of fact cool stuff of that sort, yet again speaks to the whole nature of the prosumer.

Roche: Thoroughly. To tell the truth, I might even go so far as to call it an economic imperative. You talk about a harbinger of things to come, and I would say look at this whole reemergence of this prosumer trend. When I say reemergence, I’m talking about back in the ’80s when Alvin Toffler first made up the idea that there is a convergence. He wasn't calling it a professional, however he was calling it a producer and a consumer.

But as we see innovation continue to increase in its velocity, as we see more and more innovation adopted into our homes previously and more deeply embedded into everything we do. That's where we are going to see the future go.

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market technology, and consulting firm. Gardner, a leading identifier of software and cloud productivity trends and new IT business growth opportunities, honed his skills and refined his insights as an industry analyst, pundit, and news editor covering the emerging software development and enterprise infrastructure arenas for the last 18 years.

Gardner tracks and analyzes a critical set of enterprise software technologies and business development issues: Cloud computing, SOA, business process management, business intelligence, straightway-generation data centers, and application lifecycle optimization. His specific interests include Enterprise 2.0 and social media, cloud standards and security, as so then as integrated marketing technologies and techniques.

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