Foremost among the positive aspects is convenience. Equipped with a smartphone, employees literally have everything they need in the palm of their hand. The ability to access data wherever work takes them means employees can not only get closer to customers, without the physical barriers. This is a distinct plus.

BYOD Trends and Trade-offs
For enterprises the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) boom can be traced to two converging trends: the desire for employees to be responsive to customers and colleagues in a global, always-connected world still wrestling with time zones; and the desire to save money by not replicating a device that employees may already own. Mobility brings a significant advantage to productivity, but as with many advantages, there are certain trade-offs.

First, there’s the issue of users’ expectations. They expect a mobile device to be reliability and then, encountering frustration with some of its features, expect IT to solve the problems on a device with which it may have little experience. Then there’s the fragmentation of the smartphone marketplace. It’s not just the plethora of operating systems and devices (Apple iOS, Android, Windows Mobile etc.) it’s the permutations. For instance, the open source character of Google’s Android operating system allows manufacturers to tweak it, adding security or connectivity capabilities that may not appear in other Android devices. Furthermore, to truly support BYOD, IT must be able to accommodate the very latest versions of these operating system as well as the earlier ones. This leads to complexities in technical support issues.

From interim solutions to standard capabilities
One of the major concerns regards the data on mobile devices: How do you make sure employees are using proper security measures when they access public sites and applications, so as to avoid infecting the device with malware that in turn impacts corporate data? And how do you make sure that, when employees leave the company, IT can erase all vestiges of corporate data without affecting personal data? Add to that security and connectivity issues, the major challenge when it comes to wireless and mobile access to back-end corporate data.

Device manufacturers, software developers and companies like Accenture are working on solutions to overcome BYOD’s biggest drawbacks. Users are already bringing mobile devices into the organization (just as they have done with laptops years ago), demand connectivity and support. Therefore I will discuss the 7 ways BYOD may work for your organization in my upcoming blog post. From creating Enterprise Application Catalogs to narrowing the set of devices to support by offering designated Supported Devices. Some of them may be interim solutions; others may be long-term advances that become industry-standard capabilities.

Mobile health (M-Health) offers such a shift by essentially supporting movement of health-related information instead of health-care people, who are generally costly and scarcely available.

Applications
M-Health is an innovative application of ICT to the healthcare sector consisting of providing medical services by using mobile devices (such as tablets smart-phone, PDA, etc.)  to carry health-related information.

Mobile health is expected to improve quality of life for people with chronic diseases (asthma, diabetes, hypertension, congestive heart failure, etc.), who require ongoing monitoring and treatment. For example, the usage of a portable glucose monitor pluggable into a smart-phone reduces the physical contact of a diabetic patient with his doctor and allows the continuous verification of the patient’s conditions without the traditional daily checks at the hospital. Even more interestingly, industrialization efforts are being put into M-Health applications allowing to reduce the risk of mortality for patients affected by chronic cardiovascular diseases. Such applications allow patients’ continuous monitoring by using wearable electrocardiometers connected to smart phones communicating with health centers.

M-health applications have also a great potential for developing countries, where patients at high risk of mortality have scarce access to community hospitals and landline connection services are much less developed than mobile ones. For example, the ChildCount+ platform has already helped child survival and maternal health in sub-Saharan Africa by sending periodic messages to community clinicians and allowing remote registration of health conditions for children and pregnant women.

Challenges
The challenges for the development and spreading of mobile health applications are quite aligned with the generic ones valid for the Internet of Things. However the most specific aspects to highlight are:

• A reliable software system architecture, like the recently proposed m-Hippocrates, ensuring connectivity everywhere anytime for some specific patients. For example, a patient with congestive heart failure should be monitored also when waiting at a metro station, where the 3G signal is probably unavailable, or in other remote places.
• Global coordination of resources. According to a recent World Bank report, innovative development in the m-health area is driven by many different pilot projects which lack of global coordination and can cause waste of resources. Therefore, driving this field cannot be left only to adept technologists, private enterprises and non-governmental organizations, but it needs to be coordinated at larger scale.
• Interdisciplinary coordination. Designing a mobile health application is not just an “IT thing” but needs interaction between engineers and clinicians. User interfaces need to be designed in such a way to be usable and intuitive for the specific type of patient investigated. For example, an interactive application for pregnant women would need to be designed in such a way to enable addressing various stages of pregnancy and possible complications that may come up.

What’s next?
The main question is probably when these applications will be industrialized and be affordable for consumers. Without waiting too long, nowadays every person with a smartphone can measure his hearth beat rate while doing sport activities and determine his calories expense pattern and level of fitness. But if everyone could monitor and take action upon his own health conditions, what would be the right amount of decision-making to shift from doctors to patients? In other words, is there a right level of “do-it-yourself” that patients should be empowered to have?

Our research shows that this is a fundamental trend. According to the research by the Accenture Institute of High Performance among 4000 employees from 16 countries and 300 –IT and non-IT– executives shows a new way of working in which 27% of employees use non-corporate applications to improve productivity at work and 32% actively recommend good consumer applications to their colleagues. The research titled “Consumerization of enterprise IT” concludes that almost half (45 percent) of surveyed employees find personal devices and applications more useful than the tools and applications that the IT department provides. With these numbers, it is not surprising that people prefer to bring their own technology.

Freedom to choose and use personal IT
Employees want the freedom to choose their own preferred technology. They find the IT resources provided by their business not as flexible and enjoyable to work with as the hardware and software they use in their private lives. Employees all over the world are using consumer IT at work for a variety of reasons and often regardless of official company policies. 66 percent don’t even worry about the organization’s IT policies because they just use the technologies they need to do their work. Employees are even willing to pay for their favorite technology also allowed for business use. They choose not to deploy it, with or without the consent of their business.

Although employees do have concerns about data security and IT protocols, one in four (23 percent) employees use their personal devices for work regularly. This group believes that these technologies improve productivity and innovation, and increase job satisfaction.

Adoption is greater in Emerging Markets
The study also shows that the use of and attitudes towards the use of private technology differs per region. In fast growing (emerging) markets such as Brazil, China, India and Mexico the adoption of consumer technology is greater than in other markets. The global average for the adoption of consumer devices in corporations is 23 percent and 20 percent for applications that employees routinely use in their work. In countries such as China and India, this percentage is above 40. Employees in emerging markets not only use consumer IT at work more than their Western counterparts do; they also view such technologies as vital to enhancing their innovativeness, productivity and job satisfaction and believe that the use of consumer IT can increase their competitive advantages.

As emerging markets seek to continue the high growth they have enjoyed over the past couple of decades, consumer technologies could be one of the key drivers of that effort. Now that the consumer IT is here to stay and will play a growing role in employee satisfaction and productivity, businesses need to identify strategies for managing the IT consumerization to balance risks and opportunities. This will attract the best workforce and sharpen the competitive edge.

This week Accenture published its Technology Vision 2012, an annual outlook of the most important emerging technology trends that are predicted to have a critical impact on businesses; a distillation from the experiences of our research teams and the input of our clients. The emerging technology trends are outlined so forward-thinking CIOs will use these to position their organizations to drive growth and high performance, rather than just focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency improvements.

Technology Vision 2012
In Technology Vision 2012 Accenture identifies context-based services as one of six key trends, predicting that a surge in context-based services is imminent. This is enabled by the convergence of and easy access to many sources of contextual information, including soaring smartphone usage, the expansion of cloud computing, an explosion of social media participation, and the development of powerful tools for aggregating and analyzing multiple forms of data.

CIOs and other IT leaders who have started to leverage contextual data to build a deeper understanding of consumer preferences and habits are establishing themselves as strategic players within their companies. They are teaming more effectively with functions such as sales and marketing and leveraging contextual services to drive new revenue and deliver more value for their businesses. It will be the CIO’s job to frame for the C-suite the opportunity of contextual services—pushing the executives to “dream bigger” and identifying what new products and services are becoming possible as context becomes key.

Other trends
The other trends in the Accenture Technology Vision 2012 include:

• Converging Data Architectures: It is not just the rising volume of data that will challenge organizations, but rather developing new data architectures for effectively handling both structured and unstructured information.
• Industrialized Data Services: Related to the data architecture trend, the true value of data will be realized when it is shared freely. To do that, data is being decoupled from applications and no longer owned by a single business.
• Social-Driven IT: social media are becoming powerful catalysts that are changing the ways customers, employees and partners use technology to interact with the world around them. Most enterprises have yet to catch up to that reality and almost none take full advantage of it.
• PaaS-Enabled Agility: the report emphasizes the importance of the agility of the platform in concert with market viability and a focus on the complementary collection of business services also provided by the vendor. PaaS providers will increasingly offer three additional components: reusable business services, integration capabilities, and extension capabilities.
• Orchestrated Analytical Security: Companies are more “connected” than ever—not only through the Web and mobile devices, but through other non-traditional routes, most notably in the physical world. Think about how connected automobiles and industrial controls are to other systems. Consequently, the risks have increased and how organizations assess the risks is changing.

It is time to focus on technology as a driver for growth and take the bold decisions to move beyond IT’s legacy constraints—constraints that make it too difficult to change, too costly to pursue new opportunities. These trends raise some of the thorny questions about IT skills sets and IT organization structures that need attention now.

The recently published Accenture Technology Vision 2012 poses a challenge to all CIO’s and their IT departments: it is time that the conversations between CIOs and business colleagues should revolve around what the organization needs IT to do—not what IT can and cannot do. Technology and business enablement have become so interconnected that businesses can no longer afford to wait for IT to catch up. So IT departments need to decide which role they want to play and where needed embrace external innovations and capabilities to support the business.

Research by the US Department of Energy has shown that the shift from preventive and corrective maintenance to predictive maintenance offers a number of advantages, such as lower maintenance costs, downtime reduction and increased production. However, it requires quite an investment in time and money to realize vertical integration of the current systems.

Vertical integration
As my colleague discussed in his blog post “Information technology will displace DCS”: On average, an engineer collects his data from ten different systems in order to establish the condition of a machine. However, since data is approached differently in every plant and the insights of the engineers might differ, the effectiveness of determining this condition is not the same. One plant might have started with predicative maintenance, while another still operates on an ad-hoc basis. By integrating existing systems, such as DCS and condition monitoring systems, the condition of the machine park can be uniformly determined. By using the ISA95-standard within multiple systems, it is possible to integrate data within a data historian. However, the links are often not available as standard.

In order to be completely vertically integrated, the use of analytics can integrate the data from all applications and databases to one (single) database. Analytics are already being used extensively in financial markets and by governments, but only to a limited extent within the industry. Statistic and failure models are available already, however, they can only be improved by increasingly collecting more data, applying models, and checking these with reality. These data can help to gain more insight in terms of –for example– reliability, failure frequencies, and degradation of machines.  But the reliability of these models will only increase if more information becomes available, and more analyses can be made.

The use of ‘analytics’ can be a solution, but applying analytics and processing large amounts of data is not something that can be done by every company. By using the ‘cloud,’ it is possible to store, process, analyse, and present enormous amounts of data. Huge storage and processor capacity is available, which is necessary to create complex analyses and make predictions. Within the cloud, four services are possible: business process outsourcing, infrastructure service, application service, and platform service. Particularly for analytics, the application service and infrastructure service are required. The infrastructure service for sending, storing, and receiving large amounts of data; and the application service for the analytics application that processes the data and presents the analyses via a web portal.

The future is ‘Central support’
The introduction of these applications, solutions, and models does not offer a company anything yet. They will only help if the company changes its infrastructure, organisation, and processes in such a way, that all presented data can be used. A concept for doing this, is the central support organisation (or central control room) where all data and reports are sent and can be presented via portals. Using this, the maintenance, reliability, and integrity engineers can make decisions regarding when and what needs to be done on every machine. The link between operations and mechanics is necessary. A wireless infrastructure will  not only help acquiring additional data, but also helps bringing the information to the factory, for calling upon services and for coming to the right solution and prevent failures.

By centralizing knowledge and automating more, it will also be possible in the future to further improve factories and machines, and increase or optimalize the production. By making optimal use of these technologies, it is possible to take a step forward in the availability and reliability of the current production facilities. As a next step, multiple factories within a certain region will merge and more data can be analysed, which will make models more reliable. The data integrity will also increase. There will come a time that the OEMs give their machines an ID, which will help the systems to extract all sorts of information, such as OEM, type, function, serial number, and capacities. The data of the machine immediately helps improving models, analyses, and maintenance programs.

There is also a downside: the engineer will become more of an IT administrator and becomes obsolete during technical difficulties.

Looking forward now, market analysts expect this trend to continue. Enterprises will increasingly deploy Open Source solutions in mission critical scenarios, at a service level that must be equal to or even better than closed source alternatives. Additionally, these solutions are being adopted increasingly by conservative IT organizations, driven by risk mitigations and cost considerations. Typically, organizations adopt the Open Source software stack bottom-up, that is they start on the system infrastructure level (eg. LINUX) and then move up the stack to application infrastructure (think applications servers) and to business applications.

Gartner published the report “Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2011” on august 9th, 2011) which perfectly illustrates the expected adoption patterns of Open Source technologies by enterprises. Looking forward to the next 2 years, Gartner expects high benefits from initiatives that enable mission critical workloads on LINUX and LINUX on IBM Z-series. Additionally, benefits are expected in the next 2 years from initiatives that help organizations adopt Open Source DBMS, E-learning systems, messaging systems and Portals.

It is interesting to note that these areas are very strongly aligned with the Accenture Open Source Offerings. The Accenture Open Source substitution offering migrates proprietary solutions to Open Source solutions on the Operating System level (AIX/Solaris to LINUX), on the database level (eg. Oracle to MySQL/EnterpriseDB) and application server level (eg Websphere/Weblogic to JBOSS). For all solutions mission critical architectures are available to meet todays requirements in a very cost-effective manner. It helps clients to realize business applications using Open Source. A few good examples in this area are Portal solutions, Document and content management solutions, E-learning solutions and E-commerce platforms.

The adoption of Open Source in the Dutch market has clearly started, and we believe over time the usage of Open Source will become a “no brainer” for a number of areas. While many organizations might not do a stand-alone “Open Source” project, many large scale infrastructure transformation programs heavily use Open Source. The usage of Open Source technologies can also be a good step towards Cloud Computing in a number of cases over a longer term.

While system testing is increasingly professionalized, the subject ‘Test data’ remains often underexposed. When there is too little attention for test data during the planning phase, the need for data and administration during the preparation and execution of different tests can vary greatly, and the general description in the test plan is not sufficient enough. The lack of proper planning and approach in test plan or strategy leads to inconsistencies and errors in the data correction, with major consequences for effort and duration. In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice of test levels and data, Accenture developed a model that helps to get grip on the required test data to better control the preparation and execution of a test program. The model consists of a description of test data along two axes: data types and data-life cycle.

Three types of data and lifecycle phases

In every information system (and thus in each test phase) there are three types of necessary data: system configuration data, master data and transactional data.

• ‘System configuration data’ controls the operation of the system. Decisions and logic within the system are often determined by the configuration. An example of configuration data is the decision rules in a rules engine.
• ‘Master Data’ acts as a reference to all other data in the system and gives meaning to it. This data often has a uniform meaning for the entire organization, low rate of change and a long duration. For example: customer information, vendor information or product information.
• ‘Transactional data’ is created or transformed during the use of a system. This data has a high frequency of change and creation, often a short validity and occurs in high volumes. It’s often used in management reports, because it is a reflection of what is currently happening in the systems (and thus the organization). Few examples are: order data, invoice data, payment data and accounting data.

Regardless of the type of data, or test level, all the test data during test preparation and execution go through three major phases. These three life stages include identifying, generating and managing the data. Identifying is the stage where the main features of the data will be determined (e.g. consistency between systems and required volume). When the test data is identified, it can be generated. The required data is created or copied from a source. To generate data, there are many possibilities; It can be created manually based on test conditions, copied from a production or test system, generated by a tool, or a combination of these options. When all questions regarding identification and generation are answered, the final phase is managing the data.

Test data management model

By placing the data types and management phases against each other, a model will be created with which the test data requirements for each kind of test can be investigated and recorded. By applying this model it will be clear what specific data are needed in the process during the planning of a test program. Therefore all activities around the test data, in both the preparation and execution of the test project, can be planned in more detail. This results in fewer surprises during the project.

For more information about Test data, please read the published article here (in Dutch).

In partnership with Vision-Box, Accenture already has successfully implemented similar automated border crossing programs at airports in the UK, Portugal and Finland. By deploying self-service systems, it is possible to limit the large amounts of travelers in a fast, secure and customer-oriented manner. For this project in the Netherlands, Accenture is supported by Vision-Box and Capgemini to develop and implement the solution. This partnership is also responsible for trainings, support and maintenance of the electronic systems.

“Border crossings over the world are now busier than ever by the increasing number of passengers and increased complexity of required documents and visa applications. Together with our partners, Accenture has extensive experience with electronic border systems at various international airports.” – Richard Camman, Senior Executive at Accenture Health & Public Service

For further information about biometrics and integrated automated technologies, please have a look at our showcase ‘Accenture Automated Border Clearance‘.

ChromeOS is an custom built version of Linux that basically is nothing more that the Chrome browser we use on our desktops. Even thought the ChromeBooks have internal storage there is no filesystem, actually there is no local anything. Local storage is used for caching only. The concept behind ChromeBooks and ChromeOS is that everything happens in the Google cloud. The applications you use, the music you want to listen to, the files you store, everything. Even though Google has a decent set of applications available and an application store to get more this concept does provide some limitations. Because not everything you may want to use is available (yet). So where is the appeal?

What ChromeOS does is downgrade the hardware to nothing more that a vessel for the moment. By doing everything in the cloud you can log on to any ChromeOS machine with your account and all your stuff is there. No syncing, no installing, no nothing. Within seconds you are online and good to go. This opens a lot of opportunities for consumers and maybe even more for businesses. With ChromeOS you do not need to be tied to any location as everything you need is an internet connection. Even without a connection HTML 5 enables you to work of of the last version it has offline until your connection comes back up. The hardware, to an extent, has become disposable. If you have issues with your keyboard, screen, or whatever, you can go to tech support and simply get a new one. Again: no syncing, no installing, no nothing. You just get the new piece of hardware and you’re good to go. The hardware currently on the market caters to strengths of the OS. ChromeBooks tend to be lightweight, have long batterylife (8+ hours) and there are models that have a built in 3G modem so you are online wherever you are.

This concept of disposable hardware also extends to how you purchase the hardware. Google envisions a subscription model where you pay a monthly fee to ‘own’ a ChromeBook. The nature of the OS enables this because nothing is stored on the device so returning it has no impact.

But do all these benefits cover for the fact that a lot of applications aren’t available yet? For most common tasks it definitely does. And for the rest Google has one last trick up it’s sleeve. In the next update (expected in August 2011) it will include a Citrix client granting access to virtualized systems in all their variations.

ChromeBooks offer an interesting proposition that becomes increasingly interesting with more and more applications becoming available in the Cloud. What do you think? Are ChromeBooks here to stay?

Over the last year you may have heard of HTML 5. Within the IT community there is a lot of buzz surrounding it. The most prominent is probably Apple no longer wanting to support Flash on their mobile devices in favor of HTML 5. So what is it and why should you care?

Let’s start with the boring background. HTML (the HyperText Markup Language) is the language that is used for webpages. It’s a fairly simple and limited text markup language. The hypertext name comes from the ability to use hyperlinks to jump to other parts in the text or other pages. The HTML ‘code’ is parsed by the browser and that results in the webpages we all know and love. HTML originated in 1993 and has been the de-facto standard for pages on the web. While initially the standard developed quite frequently, the latest version (4.01) was released in 1999. So the last update was 12 years ago. An update seemed long overdue.

HTML has mostly been focussed on text and labelling the contents to allow for easy reference. Apart from text the HTML spec also allowed for images and “objects”. With the popularity of the web and it’s various uses the text focus proved more and more limiting. Through various plug-ins some of the HTML limitations have been overcome (with Flash being the most popular). However with these plug-ins additional requirements were added to the browser that needed to display page. This resulted in a growing dependency on what specific browser you were using. This, on it’s turn, resulted in a movement back towards the formal HTML specification and associated webstandards to regain the freedom for the user to choose what browser to use. However using no plug-ins showed (again) that HTML itself does have it’s limitations and with more and more functionality moving to the web an update was really needed.

With HTML 5 this update is finally here. When referring to HTML 5 usually more than just HTML 5 is meant. HTML 5 is used to indicate the new HTML 5, CSS3 and Javascript specifications. So, what kind of changes is HTML 5 bringing that make it so relevant.

• The best known example is the addition of the video tag. With this tag it’s now possible to display video without the need of an extra plugin like Flash or Silverlight. With the popularity of video on the web this step greatly simplifies the requirements for adding video to a webpage. There is downside however, the browser will not display just any videoformat. It needs to support the one provided on the page. This has caused some new rivalry amongst browser vendors but hopefully this will be resolved quickly.

• The next major addition comes from javascript. And it enables webcontent to be stored locally and offline. This is useful because it allows online applications to continue functioning even when your (mobile) internet connection is down. This means continuing reading your mail, editing your blog or viewing your calendar when there is no connection. When your connection is restored your offline copy will be synced with the online one so you will be able to continue your work on any other platform.

• There is also a major improvement on the text front. HTML 5 (or CSS3 to be exact) now allows for custom fonts to be displayed on webpages. Before HTML 5 if you wanted to display text in a certain font that font needed to be installed on the user’s computer. This severely limited the options for website developers. Basically they were confined to a very basic set of system fonts. This limitation also became apparent in online document editors that had the same limitation. It would take too much time to go into all the new changes here but they are plentiful. If you want a good overview check out the following website that is completely built in HTML 5: http://slides.html5rocks.com. Be sure to open it in a HTML 5 compatible browser though.

HTML 5 is enabling HTML to catch up to progressively online world we live in. It allows a better compatibility of online applications across platforms. With smartphones, tablets and even tv’s going online this cross-compatibility is far more relevant than it used to be. Interestingly enough the HTML 5 adoptation has been stronger in mobile devices than on desktop devices. All major mobile platforms already support HTML 5 and have done so for the last year, but only recently Microsoft released it’s first fully compatible desktop browser (IE9). HTML 5 seems to be the definitive breakthrough in making sure browsers will follow the standard. Enabling users to view content on the browser of choice. Be it on a desktop computer, a gaming console, a smartphone or a tablet. Any HTML 5 compliant browser will provide them with the same feature rich functionality they expect.

So why is HTML5 relevant for you?