I’ve posted before on the emergent confluence between business and IT.  I’ve also discussed the shift from Business-IT Alignment to Business-IT Convergence as an aspect of increasing business and IT maturity.  I’ve noted (Goodbye, Shadow IT – Hello, Shadow IT) that ‘Shadow IT’, often viewed as a problem to be solved might be more appropriately recognized as embodying the clues to the new reality of business-IT convergence.

The always-impressive Dion Hinchcliffe sums it all up perfectly in his post, “CoIT: How an accidental future is becoming reality“.  Hinchcliffe repurposes Computerworld’s Scott Finnie’s use of ‘CoIT’ as referring to the ‘consumerization of IT’ to a new term, ‘Cooperative IT.”  I’d like to humbly suggest yet another interpretation of CoIT as a shorthand for “Converged IT” – referring to a world where much of the work of the IT organization has converged with the business as a deeply embedded capability.

A Vision for CoIT

Hinchcliffe suggests some aspects for the vision of CoIT as embodying:

• Decentralized (or at least distributed) governance
• IT support that scales up to the new app/device proliferation
• Business led IT solutions with an enabling infrastructure

I think these are appropriate, though many details and realities to be yet worked through.  And, I believe, while the IT leaders who are most proactive in leading this shift will make some mistakes, they will also be the first to figure out the new realities and will ultimately make less mistakes and learn more quickly than their ‘ostrich’ counterparts who either believe this will all blow over, or that they can figure it out down the road.

What do you think?  Do you agree with Hinchcliffe’s vision?  What are you doing to exploit the emerging ‘converged’ reality of CoIT?

Digital Art: ‘Convergance’ by Wilby  courtesy of Iasos.

Every so often an idea comes along that seems to get a lot right, and you’re left with little to do but sit by the sidelines and watch, hoping that it thrives and makes its way to your neck of the woods. San Francisco’s new SFpark.org project is one such idea. Here’s the overview video from their website:

If this works as intended, there’s a lot to like. From the end-user point of view, it’s almost nothing but upside: being able to check online for spot availability, having an increased likelihood of finding free spots on every bloc, and saving money by parking in less-popular areas. All of this is made possible by using technology to add a market function seamlessly into something that people are already doing; just by going about their business and parking, they’re generating information that makes the system better for everyone–themselves included.

While it remains to be seen if an approach like this will be profitable for the city, some tweaks could be made to their market algorithm so that the average price of a parking spot remains what it is now, keeping revenue where it is. Even if the program doesn’t generate money hand over fist, though, it still benefits the city and community as a whole, with reduced street congestion and pollution as mentioned by the video.

I especially like solutions like this one, as they enjoy the benefits of mass collaboration without actually requiring any additional effort on the part of the mass collaborators, and ample data is generated that can be further studied to try push the parking system to be that much more efficient. Everyone wins.

Bureaucrats of Toronto, take note!

The U.S. Army will discuss plans for integrating cloud computing into its enterprise architecture and broader IT transformation, during an InformationWeek Government Webcast on Weds., June 23. It's a unique opportunity to hear one of the world's largest IT user organizations share its strategy for the emerging cloud model.

I'm at the Structure 2010 conference, where panelists on the "Cloudonomics: Economics of the Cloud" session were focused on what they are seeing happening in the cloud, from their customers' perspectives.

The recently released beta of Firefox 4 shows off some new features and boosted HTML 5 support. But the biggest surprise is how much the redesigned Firefox interface looks like Google Chrome.

The National Health Service in Britain isn’t universally admired for its IT efficiency. But Miles Gray, the urbane hardware solutions architect for the NHS, said at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London that if carefully implemented, the cloud can help the service gain effectiveness and save expenses.

Fast, inexpensive primary storage that can store all your files and host all your applications that you don’t have to have in your data center sounds like nirvana, but it may be coming sooner than you think. In some situations it is ready now.

A UK pest control company with an international presence has standardized on Google Gmail and Google Apps as a way to tie together a diverse company in 50 countries. "This was never about cost reduction. It was about collaboration," said CIO Bryan Kinsella at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London.

Despite the fact that most of the underlying technology of cloud computing is based on open source, much of the current wave of cloud computing platforms are closed. But a new open source initiative is hoping to fully open up cloud computing.

Last week I read a few interesting articles about storage in desktop virtualization, VDI in particular. The consensus is that this storage belongs on local disk, not the SAN. One industry expert even says you can use SSDs locally and still get away for less money. I beg to differ.

There's a new kid in town when it comes to open source code in the cloud. It's Rackspace's OpenStack, based on both Rackspace's and NASA Nebula's existing cloud engines. Wasn't there already sufficient open source code in play? Why do we need this initiative on top of those already afoot? Actually, we need 3-4 such initiatives.

Google on Tuesday is adding two new features to Google Docs: The ability to translate documents into one of 53 languages and the ability to remove smartquotes.

Google's announcement Monday that it was formally releasing a version of its application suite for government doesn't just represent a Google sales push, but in some ways also indicates that although the federal government is stepping up its cloud computing push, much work remains.

In June, Red Hat moved its Deltacloud open source project into the Apache Software Foundation's incubator. In July, Rackspace made its Cloud Files code open source and will collaborate with partners in the OpenStack project. The Open Cloud Standards Incubator at the DMTF is producing another set. Isn't this just too much open source?

Hadoop, the system that takes advantage of a large cluster for sorting masses of data, looks like a rapidly evolving piece of cloud software. Cloudera, the company that includes original Hadoop author, Doug Cutting, issued a Hadoop front end and deployment system to make it easier to use recently.

nGenera has been thinking about, writing about, and doing primary research about collaboration long enough to understand that “collaborate” is not a command, it’s a culture, a climate inside an organization that requires more thinking about what really needs to be done and the outcomes than just more doing stuff together (the doing is the result of the thinking). A good example of collaboration, IMO, is the USAF Knowledge Now Program, where 300,000 people (about half the Air Force population) voluntarily contribute both knowledge and questions and answers across time zones to accomplish “the mission,” which means both the overarching mission of the Air Force and whatever specific mission needs to be done (building an armory in the middle of Iraq).

Most of roles I’ve ever had in organizations have been, on a day-to-day basis, collaborative, so, in my experience, collaboration is not something new, despite the current popular urgency around it. What seems to be the chief hang-up for organizations is that collaboration is a “soft” activity that’s hard to measure and thus hard to justify putting resources into. We at nGenera have done some good research on collaboration ROI and how to measure it, but I have a suggestion: Stop looking for new metrics and measure what’s actually going on now in your organization. Your workforce is already working together, you just aren’t paying attention to the right things.

After more years of working than I want to acknowledge (my “career” is only anecdotal data, of course), I know that the vast majority of people want to share what they know (because that is often reward enough), collaborate every day with colleagues (though they might not label it collaboration), and are more than willing to surrender some control or autonomy in the expectation that others are doing the same and the outcome is better than anything they could do alone.

I think the “data” will show that your collaboration culture only needs some room to breathe; it’s already there in many parts of your organization and one good way to show it is in stories told by the people who are doing the work. Randy Adkins, who helped get AFKN off the ground, says AFKN success “metrics” are found in the stories people tell of how working together accomplished the mission. “We survey our community owners regularly, but the best impacts result from an award program that we have in place where communities tell their ‘stories,’ many of which demonstrate significant productivity gains. While it is not possible to roll them up in an overall number, the individual facts are very compelling.”

Does this make sense to you: finding, paying attention to, and measuring the collaborative activity that’s already going on in your organization? Looking for stories of collaboration as proof of its value?

But, if you must measure, here is something I found this week, a blog post on Cisco’s site that references studies on collaboration ROI: http://tinyurl.com/37kj5ty. I have not been able to find the Salire Partners report, but the Frost & Sullivan report, sponsored by Cisco and Verizon, can be downloaded here.

Full disclosure: I posted pretty much this same message last year on the nGenera internal site. I still believe it makes sense.