Archive for the ‘Distinguished Lecture’ Category

Tuesday 6th March, Imperial College Business School

By Antoine Vernet

Anthony Finkelstein, dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at UCL and a professor of Computer Science was at Imperial College Business School on March 6, to give a talk entitled “Engineering Challenges of the Digital Economy”. His talk addressed discrepancies between technical issues of software development and the necessity to address consumer demand and to build sustainable business models for software companies.

The discipline of software engineering needs to rise to the challenges presented by the digital economy. In his talk, Anthony Finkelstein addressed 10 challenges facing software engineering in the digital economy. These can be roughly separated in two groups: first, those that have to do with software architecture, software design and software requirements. Second, those, perhaps harder to overcome, that concern software development tools, modelling and middleware.

The risk is that the influence of software engineering as a discipline on practice will decrease. If software engineering wants to train the next generation of software engineers, it needs to address those challenges.

1. The question of the evolution of architecture needs to be explicitly stated. Software architecture has been addressed predominantly in an ad-hoc way. The relation between requirements and architecture needs to be clarified and studied more formally.
2. The discipline has to move to an evidence-based practice and rely less on anecdotal and quasi evidence-based practice. It needs to encourage reproducibility, and reorganize the curricula to reflect an evidence based approach.
3. Scalability. Problems of scalability need to be addressed and studied in depth, not just approached on an ad hoc and in a learning-by-doing fashion.
4. Reconcile web standards and software engineering standards: w3c and OMG. This is a major challenge and work on the technical side as well as negotiation to set new standards are necessary.
5. Resources estimation. Probably the main challenge mentioned in Anthony’s talk: there is very little we know about estimation of development cost and time. Getting a better understanding of cost and time estimation for system development implies studying programmer productivity in depth, along with rethinking of curricula in software engineering, making business models an important object in software engineering.
6. Software as a service: the challenge is in maintaining quality of service and allowing for interoperability. Clients also need to have a clear idea on how to walk away if they want to change provider. Data hosting, security and ownership are critical issues here.
7. Think about apps as channels. More and more, apps needs to be thought of and conceived as channels capable of evolving and changing what they deliver. Another step is to use apps as building blocks for user-side customization of apps through personal combinations.
8. Adaptive system. We need to develop ways of building systems that account for themselves.
9. Reconcile business and software engineering.
10. Inter-product and inter-supplier dependencies are not properly addressed: the field has to move away from a “garage” approach to development to supply chain or software ecosystem thinking.

Finally, Anthony Finkelstein ended his talk by stating that, in his opinion, the biggest challenge was to reach a point where business model and software would be co-designed simultaneously.

An MP3 of the talk may be found here, and the slides from the talk may be accessed here.

Wednesday 8th March, Imperial College Business School

By Richard Foulsham

Lem Lasher, as Group President of Global Business Solutions and Chief Innovation Officer of CSC is in a unique position to assess the influences upon and potential future direction of the digital economy, having both the analytical capabilities of a leading edge consultancy and a business that’s involved in the day to deployment of IT around the world within his remit.

During this lecture he shared with us some of the “points of view” that his organisation has developed around “next practice”, likely developments that clever players in the IT market can use to gain an advantage, and identified some of the areas that he thinks will grow and become important as the digital revolution gets underway.

This revolution in technology has been brought about by the growth of the internet. Mr Lasher predicts that we are barely into the foothills of this revolution with another 20 years of change ahead of us. This development will consist of  a relatively predictable advance in the technology, but Mr Lasher sees the real source of disruption being the development in business models that will take place in this new, connected environment.

The drivers of the current market as Mr Lasher sees it are globalisation and everything that overworked word entails – increased competition, the rise of China and India – but more interestingly he also identified a consistently difficult regulatory environment as being something that is affecting companies ability to differentiate their products. One interesting thing to ponder is whether the technological revolution and the  process of globalisation are really parallel or dynamically entwined. It is hard to imagine the economic growth of India without the business space that has been opened up by technology. Equally, the globalised markets that are the bain of many democratic politicians’ existence have grown up around the opportunities offered by a digital market place.

Organisations have responded to these challenges by becoming more complex and adopting a greater variety of forms than has been the case previously. Mr Lasher identifies a process that could be described as a “democratisation of technology” which has affected the way technology advances:  technologies are available at low enough cost and can be operated by non-experts – the iPad and the child are given as an example and anyone whose watched toddlers playing Angry Birds will find it hard to disagree – meaning that public bodies and private corporations cannot dictate to the market, but rather they have to respond to the market in a way that keeps revenue intact and minimises risks from regulation.

These effects are not consistent across sectors, and Mr Lasher then went on to describe a matrix for predicting the degree of business model disruption likely to result from these changes in a particular industry. He identifies two major predicting factors: whether the organisation deals in physical product or data, and the degree of regulation in the industry. This model has a remarkable predictive power which two examples will suffice to illustrate. The music industry – no physical product and little regulation (or at least little ability to enforce what regulation exists) – has gone through an exceptionally torrid time recently, whilst banking, dealing largely in data, but doing so  in a highly regulated environment, has itself suffered little in the way of disruption whilst, ironically, wreaking havoc on the rest of the economy.

Mr Lasher ended his presentation by describing a number of specific areas that he sees as likely to become increasingly important in the future. Some are predictable, others more of a surprise.  There was also a list of things that may prove to be the downside of the bright, shiny digital future that glistens enticingly at us from the cover of a thousand company brochures.  Whatever happens, it’s not going to be boring.

You can access a recording of Mr Lashers presentation here.

Driving New Business Development: From Insights to Innovation

18:30-19:30, 22^nd November 2011, Imperial College Business School

Blog by Richard Foulsham

The world has changed. A company like Ericsson cannot rely on developing its current technology to generate income in the future. That was the message that Magnus Karlsson, Director, New Business Development & Innovation at Ericsson left us with when he came to deliver a distinguished guest lecture at Imperial College Business School. We are moving towards a networked society. It is becoming cheaper and cheaper to connect ‘things’ to the internet and along with this diversity of things come a far wider number of participants and a consequent breakdown of traditional industry boundaries. To work in this world requires openness, partnerships, knowing your organisations place in the value chain and, seemingly most important, a more market and user centred approach to innovation.

Innovating in the networked world

So how does a company like Ericsson, with its distinguished track record in networks and systems, adapt to this new environment? Traditional R&D departments are no longer the sole answer as they cannot hope to cover all the areas where opportunities may lie.  The answer that Magnus described was to introduce a diffuse culture of innovation throughout the organisation. This was designed to be a combination of both top down – a new CEO took the opportunity to introduce a new mission statement – and bottom up initiatives that aimed to get people within the organisation thinking about what might be “the next big thing”, and importantly also to capture those ideas for Ericsson when they occurred.

The top down process involved the development of a number of scenarios based around what a customer might need in 2020. These provided a strategic focus for the entire enterprise. Interestingly these scenarios were not only analysed through good old-fashioned SWOT analyses, but they were also illustrated using narratives and games to provide insight into the user requirements and broaden the scenarios impact.

The bottom up process captured ideas for innovation at all levels of the organisation through an “ideas funnel”. This was a multi-party entity tasked with receiving, analysing and, potentially, developing ideas from all sources. An important way that the sources of ideas were diversified was through the introduction of ‘ideas boxes’. These boxes provided categories for innovative ideas. Each box has a manager whose job is to capture and champion innovative thinking. Once captured, the idea is examined by the members of the ideas funnel and, if judged to be worth investigating, the originator of the idea is given the time and “a small amount of money” to develop the idea. Not all ideas become operational and a transparent feedback mechanism providing reasons why ideas are not selected, or indeed if they had already been attempted and failed, is an important part of the innovation process.

Catching ideas

People always have ideas, but Magnus identified the creation of a culture of innovation within the organisation as one of the most difficult aspects to instigate. The new CEO helped as already mentioned, but there were other mechanisms. A source of tools and information – the Ericsson Academy – was developed. Identification and education of a leadership community who appreciated the value of innovation to the organisation, and who know what to do when they see it, was an important part of Ericsson’s approach. These activities had the additional advantage of creating a common language of innovation which allowed ideas to move around the company and reach people who were able to assess them and assist in their development.

And the result? Magnus said that the scenarios generated resulted in a number of new partnerships, and more generally, around 1 in 40 new ideas were eventually implemented. The diversified ideas base had not resulted in a great change in the origin of innovative ideas.  The sources of ideas were still dominated by already existing networks and contacts, with further innovations coming from other companies. The ultimate test will be whether Ericsson continues to be a force to reckoned with in the new, networked world.

‘Fast and Happy’ - The Google Viewpoint

Matt Brittin, Vice President, Google- Northern & Central Europe

18.30 – 19.30, 10 November 2011, Imperial College Business School

Blog by Andrew Fletcher

Moving towards a world where everything will be connected all of the time; it will undoubtedly become more common to see presentations streamed from the cloud. However, Matt Brittin decided to take a high risk strategy by relying on internet connectivity on his phone and web browser to do a series of live demos of Google’s products. The result was certainly impressive. Frequently reciting the mantra ‘fast and happy,’ Matt explained the guiding principles behind one of the world’s largest brands, where even experimenting with different shades of blue for text links can shave fractions of a second off our searches.

We’ve certainly come a long way from 13 years ago when Yahoo was manually indexing the web. In a world with over a trillion URLs, it certainly wouldn’t be possible to do that now, or we wouldn’t be where we are now if the ‘maths project’ that was Google hadn’t changed things beyond recognition. Now Google predicts what we are searching for right from the first few keystrokes, adapting what it shows via region and to continually adapt based on what it subsequently shows we were looking for. Helping us find what we want fast to keep us happy.

Mobile certainly underlines the power that search can give when connected to what we type, tap, photograph and say. Just photographing the book or the advert takes us straight to where we want to go, and ‘conversation’ translation means you can talk with anyone in any language – provided you have internet access of course. The potential to link to other markets is also staggering, though, and Matt cited the example of the Scottish kilt manufacturer being able to target their advertising based on the locations that were searching for keywords, in whatever language and consequently had already shown that they wanted to buy. Evidence is now certainly in the hands of the many.

Matt finished by making the world’s Sudoku fans very unhappy. In a world where simply photographing a Sudoku can automatically solve it, perhaps there are times when pleasure can be taken in doing things slow.

You can read an interview with Matt and watch the lecture here.