A small thought in the midst of a torrent of debate.  While vendors and users argue the merits of Software as a Service (SaaS) and oft mistakenly see this as the sole future of all software delivery (the end of history if you would for the software industry), Microsoft has been patiently promoting Software plus Services (S+S) - stressing the likelihood that smart applications will be the consumer of rich internet services in many cases, offering more interactivity and power to the user than browser based containers alone.

Note this is not to dismiss the rise of Rich Internet Applications serving many needs, but acknowledges that just as the browser grew out of the 'dialup, mostly offline' world, then perversely in a world where users and devices are 'mostly online' we can be freed from the constraints of that interactivity model. 

Gadgets and full blown applications can continuously update themselves, perform tasks, cache data and actions, all without the limits to which even AJAX and REST programming must submit.  They can offer different functional modes when offline - degrading gracefully - while spooling themselves back up to speed when connection is available again.  I refer anyone who thinks this is heresy to consider the great philosophical debate of our time - 'what should the back button do in this instance' - as the final proof that the world needs more than one user interface pattern.

In the midst of the all hyperbole on this subject, I realised that two of my favourite applications from Google are of course fantastic S+S example - namely Google Maps running on many of my mobile devices, and Google Earth on my notebooks.  While I doubt we will see headline thought leadership pieces from Google evangelists to this end, it is nice to see that pragmatic need to deliver a great user experience is providing practical endorsement ;)

At the end of 2007 I noticed an interesting trend - a number of the most respected Chief Information Officers in the UK had recently been appointed Chief Operating Officer.  This was a trend extending across government and private sector.  Now for years the 'business aligned IT' brigade had been lamenting the role of IT and the CIO, despite the evident achievement of many IT leaders in organisations large and small.  While some heads of IT have a harder time reporting to a CFO or COO and only indirectly to the board, many are making their presence felt and contributing to bottom line business value and strategy.

However, the step from CIO to COO is a major endorsement of the business insight and change management skills now held by many in the IT world.  Gartner has already pointed to the evolving character of the CIO role: in particular two flavours, the innovation champion and the process / operational master.  It is to be hoped in many industries - particularly communications, high tech, entertainment and wholesale finance - that IT evolution is driving the business model forward, emphasizing the need for managed innovation.  But it is refreshing to see that the CIO who is also delivering new processes, new products and services by wiring the enterprise and third-parties together in new ways, is now acknowledged as potential owner of all change and efficiency programmes with a key seat on the board.

Nicholas Carr may still make a case that IT in and of itself does not differentiate - in fact he is describing the 'hurdle model' of IT where firms race to keep up with the minimum levels of service and innovation to their mission - but it is clear now that new competitive edge or governmental efficiency almost always depends on effective IT delivery.  And delivery is the remit of the IT team, from inside the company and from a host of specialist suppliers, led by an effective CIO.

Will it be long before we see CIOs who have taken the COO spot finally reach CEO in significant numbers? 

Jonathan Woodward, CTO at Sungard Vivista, recently posed the question on LinkedIn - what does the role of the Chief Technology Officer look like in 2020?  This stimulated a range of response, and I am reposting my answer here.  It is an important question because it goes to the heart of the 'Future of IT' (FIT) debate, how suppliers and consumers of IT interact, and the role of CIO and CTO.

Let us assume that a key responsibility of the CTO role is to answer the 'how and with whom and with what' questions posed by the CIO or the board, who in turn have the 'why and how much' responsibilities.  This is unlikely to be changed by the passage of time irrespective of the particular technology landscape and waves of change, now or in 2020.

A very valid sub-question is then - how many, and what type of organizations will need CTOs - and this may give us more clues to the evolution of the role.

If we believe that utility computing in some form will supply a greater proportion of functionality and multi-sourcing of business processes (not just IT resources) will continue, then the role of CIO will increasingly be to contract and manage a portfolio of suppliers versus internal demand, relying on them to manage how they deliver, and choosing which differentiating areas to invest in bespoke solutions. CTOs will be critical to informing these decisions, but may be working on behalf of supplier rather than full-time at the end-user.

For supplier/ services/ IT utility organizations, they will have an increased need for strong CTOs to shape, deliver and explain their key offerings.

Only those organizations who can extract the maximum business value from a full-time CTO will support this role, and probably similar but fewer posts by 2020 than currently exist.

Hence the CTO may become more process/vertically specialised in a supply side role (e.g. development management, solution architect, functional specialist) or more generalised (enterprise architect, integration, governance etc) in an end-user position.

Likely in either regard that they will be highly valued, and demonstrate more hybrid management/ commercial expertise than in the past and less of the individual contributor career model, but be a smaller population than in 2007.

Business agility and reliability hurdles will probably be even higher than in today's IT landscape, and the challenge to the CTO will be to match or exceed these targets and communicate the art of the possible/ practical to CIO, board and users.  Proposing and delivering new solutions/ processes will be vital, and collaborating with a broader range of peers/ suppliers/ partners to deliver these will become even more important if we assume technical complexity will rise by 2020, while commoditised IT will be increasingly used (where a CTO will add no value).

Microsoft will shortly be commissioning research across European technologists on the Future of IT (FIT) and it will be fascinating early next year when the results are in to see how active practitioners see current trends shaping the IT landscape in the near future and beyond.

I have written before about one particular form of 'beyond the browser' convergence - where a new wave of interactive, appealing, web style user interfaces collide with traditional office applications.  Ultimately I believe we will stop talking about 'going online' or 'on the web' as documents, websites and applications seamlessly blur.

An immediate, 'here and now' manifestation of this prediction was very much in evidence in Denver at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.  One of my key takeways from the event was that with the latest crop of visual interface tools and languages - Silverlight, Expression, WCF - we can now build compelling, fun and genuinely empowering front ends to traditional line of business systems such as CRM and ERP.

Better yet, we can blend or 'mash up' business functionality such as business intelligence for example to create a lean supply chain planning module that can interactively rebalance stock logistics while showing the scorecard impact on customer satisfaction and margin.  This demo reminded me that we have not yet reached the limits on personal productivity while we can also expect endusers to demand much more intuitive and powerful interfaces for applications which have not previously had the glamour of games or consumer marketing projects.

Moreover, these web/CRM/ERP/BI hybrids will be dollar justified in investing effort in the last nine yards to the user as they will unlock much of the hidden value of enterprise solutions.  Systems that are used to the full deliver ROI - applications you only want to touch once a month do not.

Nearly 10,000 Microsoft partners descended on a very sunny Denver for the Worldwide Partner Conference 2007, myself included.  Been three years since I went to WPC (Toronto 2004) and the growth in the enterprise Windows platform is evident in the scale of the event and the range of partners present.  The mainstream use of Windows Mobile particularly evident.

As ever Steve Ballmer energized by the crowd, gave a great keynote.  The sizzle of this opening session was showcased by Brian Hall (no relation) with a demonstration of Silverlight in full glory, from High-Definition 720P quality streaming video in the browser with multiple picture in picture to delivering mashup applications inside a Messenger IM client.

The steak was the functional content available with 'software plus services'  delivering richer user experience and a choice of server platforms - whether installed at the customer, hosted by a partner or run as a Windows Live service by Microsoft. 

In particular, the 'Titan' custom development model for Dynamics CRM will allow rich additions to functionality including workflow to be deployed easily and safely whether on an installed version of CRM or running in 'the cloud'.  With a powerful declarative language as used by the Dynamics CRM product group, system integrators and client developers will be able to tune the product to fit customer processes - not the other way round.

At Avanade are already winning enterprise scale use of Dynamics CRM based on our ability to quickly transform ways of working - in weeks not years.  Windows Live will give customers the freedom to deploy the software where it is most cost effective internally or externally, minimize support burden and allow bursts of added user load without fixed server and storage overhead.  This flexibility will never be delivered by web only application providers.

Having spent much time recently with enterprise architects, software tools providers and large organisations planning new IT approaches it is clear to me that there is a real need to bridge the worlds of business process modeling and system / services design.

Many enterprises use sophisticated operational modeling tools to map out their current and future business models, particularly to engage in constructive dialogue between the IT department and business management.  These may even extend to simulation, typically based on Monte Carlo analysis over many random trials, to explore different scenarios and plan for future change.

In the growing sector of Business Performance Management (BPM), process analysis of existing IT solutions is using similar techniques to identify bottlenecks and optimize efficiency. 

Meanwhile systems architects are designing new applications, decomposing these as services, and planning service oriented architectures to support a variety of business processes spanning many systems and company boundaries.  As yet they do not have the tool support to model the decoupled interaction of these developments, nor link to evolving enterprise operational models.

Unfortunately these different practitioners all use disconnected tools and do not benefit from each other's effort and innovation.

Evolving common process / service / organisational models, with rich introspection of current 'as is' state and the combined perspectives of business and IT stakeholders is essential. 

Regardless of the technology generation used, if service orientated architecture (SOA) is to deliver the freedom and agility to implement new business processes blending functionality from many sources, we will need the tools and methodologies to connect everyone involved in business and IT strategy.

One of the many revelatory aspects of working for a truly collaborative company like Avanade is the chance to spend time with your colleagues from around the world. Understanding their challenges and achievements, the scale of the projects, the creativity and expertise they have brought to bear and best of all - the war stories on what works and what does not - this is the real engine that drives our growth and the hardest thing to replicate.

What began last year as a global gathering of a room full of our senior technologists - the Avanade TechSummit - has grown to be a major conference with added seasoning from many of the product group managers at Microsoft, Accenture's CTO Don Rippert and a surprise session from Google's head of enterprise products, Rajen Sheth.  But still the show stealers to my mind were the case studies from across the globe and the insights to be had from our teams gained using great technology to solve real customer problems.

Over the years I have often been asked to speak about innovation - how to foster it and how to harvest it.  And more than ever I believe the only true recipe is to take enthusiastic, able people expose them to challenging real world requirements and enable them with a culture that rewards pragmatic exploration and sharing of knowledge.  If this sounds too easy - then yes, it is if you foster that way of working as part of your corporate DNA.  If it sounds hard - it is probably because the job roles and management styles of many organisations discourage innovation in the day to day and confine it to sterile corners of the business where it will never take root.

Having spent several days with colleagues busy delivering state of the art e-commerce platforms, dynamic grids, integrated CRM and business intelligence, meaningful corporate Web2.0 solutions and service oriented infrastructure I am very proud to work in a company where all the staff bring their brains to work every day and use that collective intelligence to deliver real value.

The second Microsoft Architect Insight conference once again brought the architecture community across Europe together in Wales for workshops, discussions, technology briefings and perhaps most importantly informal networking.

My favourite moment was in conversation with two of the most respected analysts in the field, Bola Rotibi from Ovum and Neil Ward-Dutton from MWD.  For some time now I have been worried that in many organisations, enterprise architects have become detached from the development and deployment phases, concerning themselves only with strategy and design.  While these are vital functions, they must be continuously reinforced and improved by real delivery experience.  Moreover it is all too easy for tactical decisions during build phases to derail the most well articulated design.  Often finished results that have not had architect supervision function but fail to integrate or provide a platform for future growth.  Architects must ensure that IT delivers longterm business return.

Speaking with Bola and Neil we agreed that three key elements define the role of an enterprise architect: scope, stakeholder involvement and time.  And I am afraid without covering all elements, you are not conducting enterprise architecture.

Scope is probably the most obvious, many organisations use a spectrum of application, system and enterprise (or similar) to categorise the increasing scale of the solution and the capability of the architect required to deliver on the requirement.

Stakeholder involvement ensures that the architect is co-ordinating the interests of IT and the business, from technical and commercial perspectives.  And as we know well, even within the IT community the development, infrastructure and production functions need careful management to ensure business expectations are met effectively.

Time is the often overlooked element.  No architect in civil engineering would feel that their job was complete once a blueprint and bill of materials had been delivered.  This is just the beginning of the architecture process.  While responsibility will be shared with programme managers, outsourcers, operations staff and others, the enterprise architect must be involved from inception through delivery and onwards into maintenance and eventual retirement and migration.  Of course this does not need to be a full-time presence, but it must be across the whole application lifecycle.

To safeguard the contribution of IT to the business, and to provide insight needed to define IT governance, enterprise architects must fight to keep all three elements as vital parts of their day to day roles.

From recent reports a 'glitch' in the system calculating the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over emphasized the scale of market movements and catalyzed falls on exchanges around the world (see ComputerWorld report here).

In this particular case as the primary installation failed to keep pace the switchover to a backup apparently worsened the problem as it attempted to catch up with recent market data and miscalculated the index price.

The dreaded 'non-functional factors' seem to have struck again. Resilience, performance, scalability, reliability, continuity, security et al are not easy topics for enterprise architects to deal with and sadly these often run low in design considerations when teams are faced with a barrage of functional issues. 

For many of the financial platforms and mission critical systems I have worked with, far more development time was spent constructing test harnesses and revising non-functional characteristics than was spent on initial functions.  Unfortunately few estimating models and plans allow for these considerations in general systems development.  Hence the greatest weaknesses will only be encountered in production.

At Avanade we champion continuous automated testing during development, and take advantage of integrated functional and non-functional testing in the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) platform.  Providing immediate feedback to developers and architects is key to making informed decisions and raising code quality and manageability.  Moreover building systems with a view to their physical deployment and likely infrastructure requirements as embodied in Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) gives operations teams greater opportunity to create the right environment - including failover scenarios.

As this case also illustrates, planning for disaster recovery and business continuity must include simulation of extreme circumstances - after all it is likely that the trigger for these plans will not simply be localised power failure under normal operations, but systemic collapse of key systems under very heavy loads.

Civil and mechanical engineers routinely incorporate this type of simulation into their design processes.  IT architects must take the same approach if our profession is to avoid more headlines with 'crash', 'glitch' and 'failure' in large bold type.

Is user generated content really the future of mass media?  Or merely a youth phenomenon with far less appeal to the older, time poor, cash rich consumer?

If we strip away pirated material, there remains an albeit much smaller pool of truly user generated, fun content challenging notions of the mainstream creative industry.  What we are witnessing is a digital liberation of the means of the production and distribution, with even greater impact on traditional mass media than has yet been realised.

The studio system that has dominated feature film creation is rooted in the cost of celluloid, a hugely expensive resource for both shooting footage and disseminating the final results to cinemas.  In recent times, high quality digital video recording and editing equipment has revolutionised the economics of production but the 'last mile' into the movie theatre is still constrained by the cost per physical print.  And in the movie business as it stands today, digital distribution to the home, whether by a DVD or video on demand is still subordinate to the initial window of press and word of mouth generated by a theatrical release.  Hence studios which can run a balanced portfolio or 'slate' of movies, can spread the risk in an industry 'where no-one knows anything' until after the fact, and increasingly turn to private equity and hedge funds for finance.

This is more than academic interest to me at present, having helped fund an independent British movie ( see "Scenes of a Sexual Nature" ) without the help of studio or mainstream distribution company.  A romantic comedy with an ensemble cast including Ewan McGregor and Catherine Tate, we relied on an aggressive but shoestring marketing campaign and much valued promotional activities from the stars themselves to fill British cinemas in the same opening weekend as 'Borat' which boasted more than ten times the venues and huge ad campaigns.  A very respectable 7th position in the box office has now led to Sony taking up the DVD rights (see Amazon to order) and well advanced plans for a North American release later this year.

However as digital projection finds a home in cinemas over the next few years, the cost and risk of opening countrywide will be transformed completely.  Small cinemas will be able to show a huge rosta of new and classic titles, tailored to local markets on any given day.  New movies will be able to build a following with multiple channels co-existing and feeding each other - web/cable, DVD, TV and cinema - without huge budgets.

Whether we turn to the BBC, Virgin, Amazon, Google, MSN or CineWorld in future we will find a greater range of offerings, some from fledgling home producers, some from independent professionals.  All will take advantage of 'long tail' economics to reach new audiences, while also storming the bastions of the 'Big Screen' wherever the demand is strong enough.  I doubt this movement spells the end of the studio system, particularly when 'packaging' scripts, directors, sponsors and actors is reaching new heights as traditional advertising falters.  It will however deliver greater choice for movie lovers and opportunity for unbridled creativity.

The concept of grid computing has been stretched from the older notion of High Performance Computing (HPC) farms of dedicated machines crunching the most intensive modeling problems in life sciences, finance and manufacturing through to utility computing - where external resources are available on tap from third parties in just the same way as we consume electricity or water.

Let us focus for the moment on one particular aspect, which I believe will have the greatest impact, the lowly world of 'cycle scavenging'.  Across datacenters where servers are sized for peak performance but stand largely idle and on desktops (which by nature are rarely used continuously let alone at full capacity) we have precious IT assets with very low yield.

If we were to consider the sunk costs and environmental impact alone of this wasted capacity we would have a compelling argument to change this state of affairs.

Yet if we were to go further I am sure we would be avalanched if we asked the business what new calculations would you perform, what new pieces of business intelligence would you drill into, what new aspects of customer behaviour would you investigate if you were given almost free computing power at your fingertips.

By the very nature of modern IT infrastructure, the majority of unused devices run Windows in one form or another.  This realisation prompted the creation of the Avanade Grid Asset (AGA) to safely and simply distribute tasks, by taking full advantage of native Windows management features and resource co-ordination through Active Directory groups.

Organisations such as Monte dei Paschi di Siena, one of the oldest banks in the world, have seized on such grid technology initially as a more affordable alternative to extending mainframe capacity for traditional jobs, and latterly to open up a stream of new innovative applications including critical regulatory reporting for IAS and Basel II (see the bank's recent paper presented at the 1st International Workshop on Grid Technology for Financial Modeling and Simulation: Proceedings of Science Grid 2006) .

To fully usher in the Grid-frame era, we should remove the blinkers created by previous HPC scenarios, which account for a very small percentage of business needs and are largely addressed by dedicated clusters.  Instead we should begin the dialogue with our end users who want ubiquitous business intelligence and insight, what Gartner terms 'sense and predict' from realtime infrastructure, and soak up the already purchased compute power under our noses.

Most importantly - grid computing and the value it brings is for the masses - not for PhD programmers working with abstract toolkits on staggeringly expensive hardware.

NB This topic will be covered in more technical depth in a session at the Microsoft Architect Insight 2007 conference in March

Significant amounts of application functionality goes unused.  Whether as 'shelf ware' that is never deployed, hidden features that are missed by users, or assets vital to some divisions which are unheard of in other parts of the organisation.  This can easily result in 'application apathy' (see IT Week article) where the business grows to consider IT systems as disconnected from their needs and is reluctant to invest time in IT planning.  Vital inputs in design, procurement, deployment and testing all suffer as a result.

Recently I have found that bringing together IT and business champions from across large organisations for a day to share their challenges and achievements has surprising results.  In many cases the tools to solve their biggest problems are already in their grasp and used by colleagues.  In others the latest version of vendor software, which they are already licensed for, has the features they need but has not been deployed because no one has been aware.

All too often training for both technical and end-user staff occurs infrequently, for example on first mass deployment, and not subsequently.  Thereafter dialogue between users and IT is patchy around day to day needs, so opportunities to remove software and adopt new functions are missed.  Painfully IT departments can be left fighting to keep a complex system alive when it is no longer delivering any value to the business.

One new technology has the potential to deal with several aspects of application apathy.  Application virtualisation streams desktop solutions to the user on demand where they can then run in 'sandboxes' independently of other installed programs.   Microsoft SoftGrid delivers application virtualisation and can produce the reporting to allow detailed analysis of usage patterns (and redundancy) ultimately allowing cross-charging to users on an internal utility model.

Avanade has a five step guide to dealing with application apathy:

1. Uncover un-necessary expenditure by checking what tools staff are using in their own specific role e.g. are you providing individual versions of Word and Excel when a Professional Office suite would be more suitable?

2. Ask employees what they think of IT provision and where they have specific unmet needs via staff satisfaction or user surveys to highlight key pain-points

3. Revise IT training to incorporate the top under-used and forthcoming features - do not assume the IT department will be fully aware of all new functionality in server and desktop products, train them too

4. Conduct troubleshooting workshops – focus on different departments or job roles – to reveal and prioritise existing solutions that IT and end-user staff just don’t know about from server to desktop

5. Integrate your asset management, software deployment and monitoring processes and tools to ensure you unlock the value of your IT investments – evaluate application streaming technology to deliver utility solutions

No shortlist will entirely eliminate application apathy, but healthy dialogue between vendors, IT departments and users will begin the process of eradication.  Who knows, one day we may be able to write about application satisfaction.

Happy to include a well deserved mention for the second Architect Insight conference, returning to the Celtic Manor Resort in Wales once again this March.

The first conference was a great opportunity for technologists from many different sectors to mix, share experience and debate best practices.  This year features even more conference tracks with case studies, workshops and technology briefings.   Note the early bird discount below, and I hope to see you there.

Microsoft Architect Insight Conference, 5-6 March 2007

Join Microsoft on 5-6 March 2007 at The Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, Gwent for a two-day architectural retreat.  This provides a unique opportunity for senior enterprise, solutions and infrastructure architects, plus CTOs and senior IT decision makers, to meet, network and discuss industry-wide issues. Create your bespoke agenda from the seven track agenda which covers Enterprise, Real World, Identity, Lifecycle, SaaS, Collaboration and Dynamic Systems.  And debate key architectural issues with your peers and conference sponsors Avanade, Capgemini, Conchango and Solidsoft.

Register before 26^th January and the delegate price is £610 + VAT: after this date the price will be £795 + VAT.  Register now.

Each year industry analysts, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and vendors will scour the latest forecasts for IT spending across the globe.  Whether looking for the next opportunity, or to benchmark their own organisation's strategy, the trendlines are important even if the figures can never be absolutely accurate.  Whether extrapolated from history, or summarising executive confidence and intent, in many cases the overall growth has been flat or in decline despite the apparent boom in onshore and offshore job markets.  Where is the missing spend that is keeping all these people busy?  What is this dark matter that can not be seen by our analytical telescopes but must be there to keep the whole industry humming at a rate last seen in the late nineties?

The commoditising force of two new generations of enterprise technology - Open Source and Microsoft Windows - have overturned the spending patterns of corporations in the mainframe and mid-range era.  People are finally getting more for less.  Notional expenditure can decline while the number of projects undertaken increases.  More controversially, I believe the bulk of hidden value is the main accounted for by .NET based solutions.

Douglas Hayward at Ovum put this very well recently - the Microsoft ecosystem is independently flourishing irrespective of trends in the rest of the IT industry (see recent Ovum Holway report on Avanade).  What then of Linux and Java?  Certainly this stack has been the first target of many ports from proprietary Unix and AS/400 (iSeries for the younger audience) to 'industry standard' fabric (vendor speak for commodity chip sets now that manufacturer specific RISC investments can no longer keep pace with Intel and AMD advances).  Linux remains popular in edge network roles and for some dedicated computing payloads particularly in investment banking.  But on the whole these were greenfield activities without a great deal of impact on overall enterprise IT budgets.  Having recently assisted in the migration from Java/Linux to Windows on cost and agility grounds in several well known trading institutions it is also far from clear how permanent these footholds will become.

In 2000 as we emerged from the bloated shadow of Y2K migration projects and 'dot com' euphoria, enterprise IT spending was heavily depressed globally across most sectors.  Vendors of hardware and software all had to attempt to 'cross the chasm' and finally explain the value (if any) their wares provided.  I vividly remember helping IT Directors write their first ever business cases.  Up to that point spending on computing power was taken as a given, more was always better, the latest generations always immediately displacing the former and every new fad in software development was indulged energetically by central architecture teams keen to add to their personal skill sets. 

The evolution of IT had been synonymous with business progress and competitive edge.  Not surprisingly then that as the house of cards collapsed, even the analyst community had to speak out on the lack of 'business alignment', code for cries from the users of 'how come you tech guys are spending so much when our whole sector is in the mire, we are about to be bought for a song by the competition in the best case scenario, and no one cares whether our core platform is rewritten as a full n-tier architecture'.  By now Harvard Business Review articles questioning whether IT could ever add value were par for the course (See Nicholas Carr 'Does IT Matter?' or Amazon).  For those noble few technologists who had always seen IT as instrumental to their business, and could contribute to the growth and direction of their organisation, this was a depressing time but placed them very clearly in pole position.

One unforeseen blessing of the Y2K period was the acceleration of globalisation in IT services as India in particular refreshed and migrated huge legacy applications, acquired more domain skills and surged down the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) path.  Suddenly large pools of developer talent were available, and while many in finance and telecoms had dabbled with captive offshore development centres, capable offshore management and business development teams backed with venture capital were freed to actively seek new opportunities.  Where India pioneered, the Philippines, Central and Eastern Europe, Singapore and elsewhere have followed.  Certainly this accounts for some of the IT spend dark matter, but even inexpensively developed software requires infrastructure and support, middleware and management tools, all multiplying the costs.

In the bad old days, this would have meant multi-year development cycles wrestling with truculent tools followed by painful and expensive deployment programmes.  But as .NET has taken hold even in the biggest and bluest multinationals, we have witnessed real business value delivered in monthly chunks, deploying and scaling on commodity white boxes.  Finally in the last year we have learned to deploy these environments as internal utilities, 'on demand' you might say, without recourse to proprietary processor or storage solutions but through a layer of software smarts.  And this is only the precursor to the Longhorn wave of Windows Server and virtualisation to deliver dynamic systems infrastructure out of the box.

So please read the runes of IT spending forecasts carefully - while the dollars requested by CIOs each year may be falling, the number of solutions created and the value they are generating is certainly not.

In the first rush of Web 1.0, various forms of push technology emerged, predominantly focused on news and media content delivered according to topic subscriptions.  'Push' suffered an ignominious first dawn, with most users lacking the network or even CPU bandwidth to drive substantial downloads in background, and for the most part these initiatives were abandoned by the early adopters.  Remember that at this point websites were barely aspiring to be shop windows let alone transactional engines supplanting other forms of commerce.

But the race for attention in a multimedia world had begun in earnest.  As the PC slipped down the charts as the dominant web connection device and browser enabled phones shot up the list, it seemed that the one fixed point in the web universe was the browser experience, however small the screen.

Like all standards, the browser has commoditised the web and reached out to the mass of non-IT professionals, while at the same time freezing advances in the user experience of the Web.  Sure, Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and the Web 2.0 furore have extended the metaphor (largely to put traditional applications within a browser frame) but the browser itself has remained king.

However we now live with a richer web of social networks, online businesses, gaming universes, an array of collaboration and messaging channels and broadcast publishing jostling with user generated content.

Moreover our desktops and laptops, coupled with corporate or home networks, have far greater capacity to generate compelling user experiences.  The only constant is that there will never by more than twenty four hours of daily eyeball time - 'eyeshare' - to be captured by any one medium or brand.

In this world, mediating the bulk of our web dialogues via a browser just makes no sense.  With search tools at the desktop we can pre-index and navigate to content rapidly, bypassing going online to a search engine, but this is rarely the endgame.  What we want to access is often now a transaction, with a line of business solution or an online provider.  Why place a browser between us and our goal?

As anyone who attended the business launch of Windows Vista, Exchange 2007 and 2007 Office System - 'Ready for a new day' - would have seen that companies as diverse as Arsenal Football Club and EasyJet have built Vista Gadgets to go beyond the browser. 

These mini applications live on the Vista desktop, providing sandboxed, transactional connections to content and services, always at hand to push new information or take new orders.  Users will choose the most important tools and brands to occupy their desktop and take de facto priority in 'eyeshare'.  As the ultimate 'click through' channel, we now have a new means and commercial model for delivering functionality.

Already a host of authors have contributed freeware Gadgets to the Sidebar Gallery online, mostly as utilities in return for kudos.  As the media giants, led by brand gurus such as IMG, develop the medium we can expect a range of content and functionality linked either by affinity or by transactions to media, politics and commerce.  But given the 'long tail' effect, it will not only be the brand giants but many niche players taking root in our personal consciousness.

This metaphor will surely stretch to interactive TV and IPTV delivery mechanisms.  Clicking the object on screen will fire up services and offers, background information and 'segment of one' marketing.  As Windows Vista, Xbox or Media Center PCs become the prevalent platform for delivery, the chance to create compelling campaigns that range over home, corporate and phone experiences will blossom.  Xbox Live and Gamertags with interaction crossing over from games console to portal to phone is probably a key first mover in this form of multi-channel immersion.

The race for eyespace has just accelerated. 

"Gentlemen, start your Gadgets..."

In recent times the boundary between the digital domain and our analogue reality has become blurred.  Global Positioning System (GPS) based mapping is probably the most pervasive 'digital shadow', superimposing essential information on to our everyday experience of the world.  While not yet the Metaverse as envisaged by Neal Stephenson, the extension of physical objects and places has well and truly begun.

Meanwhile Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags in various guises not only track consumer goods through factories to high street shelves, but follow us as employees as we move through modern access controlled buildings.  We are already leaving digital breadcrumbs behind as we lead our lives, via both our online identities - usernames or web cookies - and our realworld features converted to biometric machine readable counterparts - think of the passenger cameras that accompany the numberplate recognition system at all the entry points to the City of London.  We quite literally vote with our feet when retail analysts assess footfall through stores via CCTV.

While technology can impinge on traditional freedoms, it will also democratize access to information - restoring some of the symmetry missing from the 20th century, advertising driven commercial model.

When any shop or attraction can easily be daubed with digital graffiti tied to a GPS co-ordinate showing the comments of all recent visitors then customer satisfaction will cease to be an after thought.  As Amazon, eBay, Napster and Wikipedia have all shown for e-business and new media, the power of recommendation and ratings - 'other people liked this too' - has transformed business opportunities and information provision.  Already the high street has become a trailer for sales ultimately consummated on the web for many types of goods.  But now the relentless pressure of public feedback can be brought to bear on cafes, museums, government offices, petrol stations, bars and monuments, roads and street signs.  Any windmill can be tilted at by an adventurous citizen with a smartphone to hand or a nearby internet cafe.

As entire cities, their local governments and businesses begin to explore the digital shadow that their realm of responsibility casts on the world they will rapidly find that this is only partially in their control.  Those that embrace the possibilities will empower visitors and citizens, extend the reach of local commerce and trailblaze public services (see the URENIO research unit for Digital Cities resources). 

Disinformation, inflammatory flames and spam will take root but need not overwhelm accurate and useful content and we already have the means to filter out the noise.  Policing will be necessary, and the online streets will need to swept clean too, but rather than Big Brother distopias we might look forward to a grass-roots swell of up-to-the-minute information that will become a 'must have' right of citizenship. 

Whether we each become a prolific critic, occasional 'angry of Acacia Avenue' or champion of great service wherever received will be our choice.  But checking the digital shadow before we enter will become the norm.

Technorati Profile

Previous generations of application development were driven by breakthroughs in the capability of underlying hardware.

Green screen VDUs went beyond the batch job and delivered the first tentative interactive steps from the bowels of the mainframe.  The first workstations conjured up mechanical engineering visualisations with graphic impact for a few privileged engineers.  The PC put flexible computing in reach of most corporate citizens for personal applications.  The local network connected and empowered entire teams, sharing files and ultimately ushered in the client/server era pooling data in relational stores throughout organisations.

Distributed computing and high speed wide area networking brought crawlers and links, browsers and search tools.  Pull then push offered up the torrent of transactions and multimedia streaming through Web 1.0.

Fundamentally though, the application fronting corporate servers, the document capturing our intellectual outpourings and the website for surfing have yet to converge.  Why?  They are governed by conventions that no longer apply in a world of vast personal computing power and almost always-on network access.  We have a range of metaphors, user frustration and a schizophrenic desktop computing experience.  All this will dramatically morph in the next two years.  Online or offline, application or document will become meaningless distinctions and computer use will mature in a way we have yet to fully understand – either technically or commercially.

We can already sample the first precursors of a converged desktop metaphor.  Anyone who has downloaded the ‘Microsoft Max’ Beta or used Windows Vista Photo Gallery has already experienced a smart client application that blends the intuitiveness of an operating system folder view, the simplicity of a browser back/forward navigation, the utility of an easy to use photo organiser slash slide show and the Web 2.0 peer to peer sharing of collections between users.  Most strikingly, the XAML interface provides a slickness more commonly associated with Apple or Flash technology, images parade themselves across the screen, rushing to rearrange themselves as the pane is resized.

Of course this is a very simple example, but also a glimpse into core functionality and user experience out of the box with Windows Vista and the future expectation level which home usage will bring to the corporate world.

More importantly, we can see the first true indicators of a Web N.0 application.  While Gadgets will entertain and enable, the Web 2.0 and onwards will not be relegated to the Sidebar of the desktop or confined by a browser page.  We will not think of ‘going online’ or ‘using the web’ when we are almost continuously online and integrated within a mesh of personal and corporate web services.

Having formerly managed teams of ‘creatives’ – graphic designers, multi-media artists, web developers – it is clear to me that the talent pool so prevalent in CGI, games and website creation is rarely harnessed and understood by buyers of corporate solutions.  From the Avanade office in the heart of London’s Soho district, we are in the midst of a broadcast media community working on the latest advertisements and much of the special effects winding their way into each Hollywood blockbuster.  While we share the same coffee shops we seldom have the opportunity to work on common projects.

However, the schism in the IT community can be healed over time, and the advent of XAML will facilitate collaboration with the user experience evolving in a loosely coupled fashion with the underlying business logic, middleware and data design.  The first MIX conference held in March 2006 was a great step to re-introducing these groups.