Posts by Dale Vile, Freeform Dynamics

Chinese whispers

Hello everyone - Dale here from Freeform Dynamics - we conducted the research reported here.

I understand some of the concerns expressed in this thread, and apologise for what I think is a case of Chinese whispers. The study focused on early adopters of DevOps so the data is skewed towards those that have been more active in this area (bear that in mind when considering the percentages reported). The caveats and footnotes associated with this did not make it through the release and news reporting process leading up to the article we are discussing (which was all out of our hands). For a more complete view of the study findings (including the methodology and its limitations) we would encourage you to download or view the research report from the Freeform Dynamics website (here).

In the meantime, regarding some of the sentiment coming through in this thread about DevOps being an intangible marketing concept as opposed to anything real or specific, it's worth remembering that the DevOps movement originated from the grass roots IT practitioner community. Sure, the marketing guys have since hopped on as the bandwagon started to roll, but as we discuss in the research report, there are a lot of tangible specifics in play here. Admittedly they are not all new (indeed most aren't at all), but I think that misses the point. DevOps pulls together a bunch of established and emerging ideas in a way that tackles a lot of traditional delivery challenges.

Hope that helps.

The Freeform Dynamics perspective

@thegreatsatan Good to see people looking closely at the origin of content and the funding behind it, but this really is straight up research and analysis based on Reg reader input. If there is something about it that you think is vendor biased, then you’ll have to be more specific. If it’s just a general objection to the concept of sponsorship as a funding model, then fair enough, but that horse bolted a long time ago.

@AC With respect to emerging OSS / scale-out options, this is something we have been looking at very closely at Freeform Dynamics recently. Our conclusion is the same as Trevor's in terms of readiness for prime time. In most cases you still have to be willing to get your hands very dirty with design, config and integration – fine if you are large scale service provider implementing such options as part of your core business, or a corporate IT department with an obvious need and resources to spare, but not really mainstream at the moment. If you go sniffing around the project sites and discussion groups, you’ll see that a lot of features many enterprises would consider to be ‘core’ are still designated as ‘work in progress’ – it’s all out in the open if you look. Having said that, players like Fujitsu with its Ceph-based scale-out offerings, and various other big vendors (usual suspects) with their efforts around producing enterprise-friendly incarnations of Openstack, for example, are helping things along in mainstream, so it’s all moving in the right direction.

In the meantime, the key message from the research is that just because your storage environment has served you well over the last 10 years doesn’t mean you are sitting pretty to deal with the needs of the next 10. Requirements are changing, and this mandates different approaches and different technologies. Tony Lock’s article was an attempt to walk through some of the specifics behind this as a reminder to some, and a ‘wakeup call’ to others. The full research report linked to in the piece goes into a lot more detail.

Cheers, Dale (Freeform Dynamics)

Sanity check

The report actually says that 70% of employees *are allowed* to use their own devices for work, which is a bit different to them being expected to pay for their own kit.

Furthermore, even though the methodology section of the report actually says very little about the the research methodology itself, I infer from the uneven distribution of the sample than this was a web survey. If that is the case, the sample will be heavily skewed towards those with stronger opinions or a higher level of enthusiasm for all this stuff (due to self-selection), hence the numbers looking implausibly high. It's the same with the Reg surveys we run, which is why you always see a self-selection disclaimer on Reg research reports.

Lastly, on a specific point, we know from our own research that 'being allowed' to use your own equipment for work is not the same as there being a formal BYOD policy in place. This is probably why some of the wording in the report is a bit woolly around expenses - e.g. the assertion that some respondents "would" claim for WiFi costs, which has an implied "if they could", so in reality means they probably can't.

Bottom line, this survey report has some interesting stuff in it, but you need to be careful not to take it on face value. See my Survey Survival Guide for more tips on interpreting surveys, especially those designed primarily to drive PR:

Survey Survival Guide: http://researchbeat.com/the-survey-survival-guide/

Whoa - massive unsubstatiated assumption here

I realise the covering piece is there to provoke a reaction, but this phrase is extremely assumptive:

"But some organisations have decided to trust the user and claim big savings in productivity by deploying BYOD"

The implication is that productivity gains are a given if you can overcome some of the risks and practicalities associated with BYOD. There are arguments and experiences that go both ways on this. The first point of order is that just because a user 'feels' they are more productive with their non-standard personal device doesn't mean they actually are. People tend to accentuate the positives and conveniently forget the hassle factor of working around inconsistencies and incompatibilities. Even if they are somehow more 'productive', the lack of cohesion if you have too much diversity within a team or workgroup means lots of time reinventing the wheel, dealing with round trip document editing issues (when different editors are used), and so on. Productivity at an aggregate level is rarely considered in the BYOD discussion, but it should be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it is all bad, just that even if you overcome the risk and support related challenges, it's not necessarily all good either from a productivity perspective.

In my experience, when people start quoting the benefits of BYOD, most (if not all) of what they tell you are benefits of mobile computing. I guess if you can't afford the cost of deploying mobile technology in a fully supported manner, then the two are essentially the same. My feeling from having talked to a lot of people on this, however, is that you are generally going to get a better result by giving people what they need to do their job. There are enough good devices out there that are enterprise ready and very desirable, so it's no longer a case of business phone must be crap and personal phone sexy.

Sure, BYOD is here, and it probably makes sense to look for ways to accommodate it, e.g. for borderline cases or VIP users wanting to connect up their optional bling. But if a mobile device is really going to have a big productivity impact, wouldn't you be better to supply as an essential tool and make sure it all hangs together at a team, workgroup and company level?

Bottom line is that I would like to see the following discussion point added to the agenda for the live chat:

"Are productivity benefits really a given with BYOD?"

Cheers

Dale

Got that wrong then :-)

It's obviously a lot worse out there than I thought. The article (or non-article as the case may be) was I admit a bit of a rant against what I thought were a bunch of contrived and unhelpful videos. The point I was trying (and obviously failing) to make was not about training in the full-on formal sense, it was more about the number of ways in which users will be provided with a nudge to get them going with an updated UI.

From what you guys are saying there is a high chance that consumers will buy a new PC without ever seeing Windows 8 demonstrated, then miss the in-yer-face hints about corner and edge menus during setup, ignore the one page quick start card that comes in the box when they get stuck, and have no one around or on the end of the phone to give them the hint they need to get going. Fair enough, I’ll take it on the chin for the phrase “this almost never happens” being a bit of an over-statement, but I am not sure I would concede that it *always* happens as some are suggesting.

Re the work side of things, of course people are plonked down in front of PCs without training, and there's always going to be exceptional situations like the guy firing up a new OS for the first time from the other side of the world, but isn't there usually at least someone around or on the end of the phone that users can ask on a basic UI question like “what’s happened to the start menu?”

Again, I am not talking about formal training or support here, which is clearly lacking in a lot of organisations, just someone who can say the words "try moving your mouse to the corners of the screen and see what pops up", and perhaps offer a couple of other basic UI tips.

We've been through this before with XP, and some have been through it with Vista and Windows 7. Everyone moans and groans because they don't like change, and some get stuck on some things initially until ask someone, look it up or work it out through trial and error. And it's not just Windows. I have even seen people struggle when you put a Mac in front of them for the first time (in my experience, people who spend shed loads on Macs often trivialise the learning curve). There’s then Android, which for most people involves a hill to climb too with regard to the UI, but people do get hints from various sources and are obviously getting on with it.

Perhaps iOS is an exception in terms of out of the box usability, and hat tip to Apple for that. Even so, it’s easy for experienced iPhone and iPad users to forget that someone in the early days probably had to show them the ‘press and hold’ trick to move and delete icons, and more recently how to use multi-tap gestures for things like task switching (assuming they know about them even now). Or maybe they consulted some source of help?

The bottom line is that you could put all sorts of new and unfamiliar things in front of your Dad with no hints and clues about how to get something done and get a similar result. What I take issue with is inferring from such stunts that the new thing they are struggling with is inherently flawed, and that’s exactly the inference of the Dad test videos.

I would be interested in whether people out there who have given Windows 8 a proper go really do think it’s as impenetrable as these videos would have us believe. It’s not my experience, nor that of the people I have introduced it to. Whether you like the changes to the UI or not, the effort/intellect needed to figure how it works (especially if you are a desktop user) is not that different to other UIs. But as someone said in a previous comment, that’s just anecdotal.

OK, shutting up and going away now. Apologies if anyone feels I have wasted their time.