SaaS meets Old Skool

I was in a meeting recently between Google and the OU implementation group involved in the rollout of Google Apps. Google has flown in Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Product Manager and Sam Peters, Business Development Manager (Europe) and the OU had representatives from all the big areas of the organisation. I’ve had meetings like this several times in the past but I was struck by the chasm between the Google view of Enterprise change process management  for implementing SaaS (software as a Service) technology versus the ‘old school’ view of implementing services and systems with paid for 3rd party service suppliers.

For example the OU would like to spend a period working with a senior technical person from Google about how the Google suite gets implemented against existing technologies. Sitting around a table and whiteboarding scenarios and coming up with a implementation plan. With Google it’s a case of switching it on. They say they can provide eight weeks of technical support around the launch window ‘but we’re unlikely to need that’.  I visited the University of Westminster when they had just ‘switched on’ the Google suite and I can testify that Google make the process painless. UoW’s head of ICT said that they spent ten days internally with Google mapping their authentication services and sorting our the passthrough of information to their Google Apps environment and that was it!

At the meeting on Friday I was struck by the different world views. The people from the OU (myself included although I may think of myself as a little more enlightened) were discussing about how you’d provide a stable environment for students and roll out tools. Google said they just add ‘feature sets’ and have a quarterly release cycle so it’s a case of benefitting from new things and providing them as you see fit. The OU has however a different demographic to other UK higher education institutions and we have a fair share of ‘silver surfers’ and some technophobes to consider.

I think it’s a very different mindset coming from a more traditional 80′s or 90′s style view of systems and services where you have total control, holding you full architecture stack within your business in a single place (or multiple places within your control) and having a total internal structure and staffing mechanism to keep things going to moving to allowing things to be controlled by others and to have services that are provided for you (and that you don’t even pay for) but that your organisation benefits from.

This lack of control is obvious and moving to the cloud is undoubtedly a very positive step but when it finally starts to become reality you can almost smell the fear. Knowing that Google provides services to governments, pharmaceuticals and other organisations that have serious data control concerns doesn’t make it any easier. Our students ARE our business and even a 1% drop in students would make a huge impact so we need to make sure we do this right. 

Yes lets just switch it on…but after we’ve planned and made sure that our students will be switched on to it.

Change is good?

Martin Weller has written an interesting post about the restructuring of our institute. I have to say that I was suprised by the outcomes which suggest we split the unit into two. I, like Martin, am going to avoid the big political hot potato that are my thoughts about the review process itself although I did like meeting the reviewers and in particular Don Williams from Microsoft. Don really changed my view of the type of people who work there since he seems to be genuinely enthusistic about our work and values it. What I will say is that when change happens then the process of change management is important, I’m no expert but I do wish that more organisations would hire dedicated people with change management expertise to guide organisations through restructuring processes.

Why is it important? well because a bit like software development it’s not necessarily what your requirements are (the review outcomes) but rather what system is delivered (the new structures). These can be very different. I welcomed the review and despite a few misgivings about the outcomes I feel that overall this represents a catalyst for change which has been long overdue in our unit. I run a team that struggles with the complexities of dealing with the myriad of calls on our time. We pick up the things that other people cannot and we have no way of filtering or ‘focusing’ on the strategically important. I hope that the new units give us a chance to do that.

I have seen restructuring going horribly wrong, staff get demotivated and the best ones leave. Recruitment is difficult or impossible and the unit struggles under the weight of work that must continue to be done despite all the reorganisation taking place.

I have seen restructuring done really well through a well managed transition period with a reasonable set of targets (very low expectations for the first two years then rising to achieve full success indicators by the third year). This was done with relatively informal processes for migrating staff and building capacity. People moved gradually into new posts or areas and were willing to take on extra stuff as time progressed. The unit was seen as a new entity and treated as such, people were given a sense of ownership and a sense of purpose within the new unit. It wasn’t perfect but it was good.

So I have been involved in restructuring twice before with mixed results, is this third time lucky for me?

I think I’ll conduct some user testing once this is done to check that the system is robust and meets the requirements specification. In the meantime it’s business as usual for me, different structure but the same issues to grapple with.