At the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC 2017) in Oulu, Finland this week, 5G technical and policy experts from across Europe are meeting to discuss the remaining open issues with the imminent 5G communications standard before its ratification in 2018.

Deutsche Telekom’s Antje Williams explaining the 5G Triangle

The fifth-generation mobile networks (5G) standards represent the next generation of mobile telephony subsequent to the current 4G LTE technology now prevalent in mobile devices around the globe. Public 5G networks are set to launch at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, with commercial rollout in 2020, leading to full market penetration by 2025.

With the 5G standards nearing ratification, the current state of the art consists of scattered 5G-like deployments around the world, as well as 5G test networks – most notably in Oulu, this small city in northern Finland a short distance from the Arctic Circle.

Yet, while the standards themselves are nearing completion, there remain several relatively minor areas of contention, as priorities differ across Europe, the US, and Asia. Working out these remaining issues is largely the focus of attention at the EuCNC conference.

The greater challenge surrounding 5G, however, is understanding the disruptive nature of the technology. Given the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G is well-positioned to be the standards framework for global communications platforms that support real-time interactions with IoT sensors and devices at massive scale.

Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/06/14/transformative-5g-standards-near-completion/.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

TactoTek manufactures a variety of electronic devices by incorporating the electronics directly into injection molded plastic.

The company places printed circuitry, computer chips, as well as a full variety of sensors onto a plastic substrate, which it can press into any shape and then place in an injection mold.

The result is lighter weight, easier to assemble, and more durable than traditional alternatives. For example, an auto manufacturer can replace a heavy assembled dashboard component with a lightweight, modular unit from TactoTek.

Given the increasing importance and variety of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices, along with the inexorable miniaturization of electronics generally, TactoTek produces increasingly ‘smart’ objects that provide usability and durability for a wide variety of IoT applications.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

Each year, a San Diego-based company releases its product up to 45 times. The company develops several new releases concurrently and, as you would expect, each release is subject to extensive testing and compliance requirements.

But this isn’t a software company I’m talking about. This company’s product dates back thousands of years: beer.

Stone Brewing is one of the largest and oldest craft brewers in the country. Craft brewing has become a fast moving and highly competitive market, so the company releases as many as forty-five new beers each year.

This pace of new development and the need to compete in a fast-moving market led Brian Andrews, the company’s VP of IT, to turn to ServiceNow as a platform that could help him automate critical business processes. Beyond merely increasing automation, he saw an opportunity to use the platform to drive the organizational transformation of the business itself.

This story, however, is not limited to one company or one industry. Leading companies are increasingly turning to ServiceNow as a means to drive organizational transformation. It is an emerging trend that business and IT leaders should be watching.

Overcoming Organizational Inertia

When John Lee assumed his role as the head of innovation for Canada’s TMX Group (best known for The Toronto Stock Exchange), he knew that one of his greatest challenges would be helping the organization’s employees realize that they couldn’t keep operating as they always had.

Image credit: Joseph Morris

“As the world gets more and more rapid, the pace of change is only going in one direction,” he explained at Knowledge17, ServiceNow’s annual customer conference. “The traditional ways of doing things are not sustainable. Being able to collate and automate business process — and to re-evaluate them continuously — is a key business capability for us.”

He set out to find an automation platform that could help him change this mindset by exposing people to what was possible.

“You can’t start by running. You have to crawl first,” Lee shared. “From a cultural change perspective, we needed to lay the foundation both from a data and technology standpoint. It lays the foundation to start looking beyond IT and looking at the business processes.”

Building Political Capital from the Outside In

For both Andrews and Lee, the key to overcoming organizational inertia was starting not in IT, but with the business imperative.

“When we brought in ServiceNow, we put the business applications first and put IT on the back burner,” Andrews explained. “We knew we had to deliver for our customers first.”

Image Credit: Four Brewers

When he joined Stone Brewing nearly four years ago, he found that a number of the business units needed more advanced automation solutions if they were going to be able to keep up with the increasing pace of change. The plant maintenance, facilities, safety, and marketing teams were all actively looking at new automation solutions.

By starting with these functional units — rather than deploying ServiceNow as an IT solution — he was able to demonstrate the value of having everyone on a single platform. More importantly, he built the political capital necessary to help drive deeper and more strategic organizational transformation within the company.

The success of this effort became evident when the company moved the entire beer release management process to ServiceNow. The various functional teams each manage their piece of the project in their own workflows, but can rapidly share information and manage each new beer release at an organizational level.

Andrews concisely summed up the success of the effort thus far: “We’re getting more beer out the door.”

Moving Up the Transformational Food Chain

Significant changes in any organization create fear and resistance. Overcoming this challenge requires that teams understand both that real change is possible and that the results of the change will be positive.

Organizations like Stone Brewing and TMX Group are turning to ServiceNow as a platform to help them power these transformative changes, because it enables them to deliver incremental change that lays the foundation for further and more impactful transformation down the road.

“Being able to drive automation and drive accountability and traceability is critical for us,” Lee said. “The real value comes from eliminating the manual hand-offs and being able to more effectively manage our data and ensure its reliability. We started by seeing ServiceNow as a tool for workflow automation. But then we realized that it could enable us to drive our business transformation more quickly by allowing us to continually experiment and prototype.”

In Andrews’ case, those early successes created a groundswell of demand as other functional units saw the advantages of an integrated platform, in particular, how it could help them move more quickly and collaboratively.

“All the core groups are now fully entrenched and asking that we roll the beer release tool out to our facilities in Virginia and Berlin,” he said. “It’s really all about the partnership. The CEO fully backs this and wants to get the workflows in the various departments lubricated and expand ServiceNow across those departments to get them unstuck.”

The Intellyx Take

It’s tempting to discuss digital transformation only in the big picture context. But while transformation is a strategic endeavor, the actual act of transforming often requires smaller and more incremental activities. Moreover, transformation cannot occur without first winning the hearts and minds of employees.

Companies like Stone Brewing and TMX Group have found that they can use ServiceNow as more than an automation platform — and instead, use it as a transformational platform. While the transformation may begin with simple activities that look decidedly non-transformational on the surface, such activities lay the important groundwork of helping their teams understand that change is necessary and that they play a critical role in leading it.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. ServiceNow is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Because GPS doesn’t work indoors, some alternate technology is necessary for providing location information to mobile devices while inside.

IndoorAtlas uses magnetic fields for this purpose. Based upon the steel within a structure, IndoorAtlas’ technology can create a unique magnetic fingerprint that can precisely locate a user’s device within a structure.

To create the magnetic map, the building owner must upload detailed floor plans, and then someone must walk around the structure in order to coordinate the magnetic fingerprint with the floorplan.

End-users must then either download an app or use an existing app that has the IndoorAtlas location service built in in order to use the mapping capabilities.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Bittium brings its years of experience in the radio communications industry to a range of hardened and secure technologies, primarily for military and public safety uses.

The company is one of the few mobile handset manufacturers outside of Asia, and leverages its hardware expertise to incorporate encryption chips into specialized devices that provide military-grade security as well as rugged form factors that can take heavy abuse.

Bittium has also been expanding into the IoT arena with a line of wireless medical devices. For example, it offers a heart monitoring device for emergency responders, and a wireless mask-like device that can detect brain irregularities like strokes, thus accelerating the critical timeline for patients with such conditions.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Haltian combines a deep bench of talent in electronics design and productization with product design and software expertise to create and manufacture a range of IoT devices, under its own name and on behalf of its OEM customers.

Its product line includes a variety of wearables, both in wristband as well as ring form factors. It also offers noise-canceling earplugs, which come in a combination carrying case/charger that demonstrates Haltian’s attention to detail.

For enterprise customers, Haltian offers an IoT platform it calls the Device Operations Cloud. Because of Haltian’s deep knowledge of IoT devices, this platform is able to integrate more deeply with devices than competing IoT platforms, for example, to optimize power usage.

Haltian also acts as a contract design, engineering, and manufacturing service provider, helping entrepreneurs bring their IoT ideas to market.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Tosibox has leveraged its hardware engineering expertise to reinvent the virtual private network (VPN).

Its hardware-based solution consists of a simple home router-like device and USB key. Setup is as simple as inserting the key in the box, as the hardware generates a random key pair automatically. At that point, the user simply plugs the key into their laptop, enters a password, and the two pieces of hardware establish a secure network tunnel.

Mobile devices simply need an app, rather than a USB key to establish the VPN. For enterprise applications, a rackmount device at the home office or virtual device in the cloud supports multiple users, as well as Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

In fact, while simplifying the VPN without compromising security is an important benefit in itself, Tosibox’s ability to secure large numbers of IoT endpoints is the real story here. Such devices either plug into a local Tosibox device to establish secure communications, or device vendors can also incorporate Tosibox software directly into their devices.

In the latter configuration, Tosibox secures both the data feeds from the devices as well as establishing a secure control path to each device – an important capability competing IoT platforms generally do not offer.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com

5G – the fifth-generation mobile networks standards – promises to disrupt both enterprises and the telecommunications world, as it will enable blisteringly fast communications among people and devices with virtually no latency.

Pekka Soini, Director General and CEO of Tekes, speaking at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC 2017) in Oulu, Finland.

Given the broad significance of 5G, the last place you’d expect the center of global 5G innovation to be is Oulu, a city of 200,000 people near the Arctic Circle in Northern Finland.

How Oulu became the ‘Silicon Valley’ of 5G innovation is a remarkable story, as any Silicon Valley wannabe requires three essential elements: talent, money, and an ecosystem of vendors and support services that facilitate rapid innovation.

Oulu has all three.

Oulu’s Mother of Invention: Nokia

Oulu’s role as innovation hotbed owes its heritage to Nokia. While Nokia’s headquarters are in Espoo outside Helsinki, it centered much of its research and development in Oulu, largely because of the presence of Oulu University with its strong radio engineering program.

Nokia also built several factories in Oulu, including facilities for assembling mobile base stations for service providers as well as Nokia’s handset business.

Then in 2014, Nokia sold its handset business to Microsoft, who soon found it didn’t have the stomach for manufacturing smartphones – or perhaps it acquired the business solely for Nokia’s handset patent portfolio.

Regardless of the cause, Microsoft shuttered the handset business in Oulu in 2016, laying off a few thousand top-notch radio engineers and other professionals who quickly swamped the small city’s employment base.

In response, the governments of Finland as well as Oulu stepped in to ease the transition, bringing money and business creation services to the city.

In fact, investing funds in innovation is a strategic priority for the small Nordic nation. “The Finnish government wants to see our country pioneering and being among the first,” explains Anne Berner, Minister for Transport and Communications for the Government of Finland.

For the typical factory town, the shutdown of a major employer quickly depresses the local economy, as the supply of unemployed workers exceeds demand well into the future.

But not Oulu. The combination of government support as well as the high level of training and expertise of the workforce led to a sudden explosion of entrepreneurship.

Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/06/16/the-eye-of-the-5g-innovation-hurricane-is-in-the-last-place-youd-expect/.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. BusinessOulu covered Jason Bloomberg’s travel expenses to Oulu, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.

Even though Finland-based Nokia unloaded its mobile handset business on Microsoft in 2014, it remains the second-largest mobile equipment manufacturer in the world after Sweden-based Ericsson. The company has about 100,000 employees after its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent in 2016.

The Nokia factory in Oulu, Finland: the ‘Home of Radio’

Microsoft shuttered the handset business a scant two years after the company acquired it, freeing up hundreds of skilled technical resources, especially in Oulu, as I discussed in my last article.

In spite of these disruptions, Nokia still employs over 2,000 people in this small city near the Arctic Circle. In fact, the company still operates a factory there, manufacturing mobile base stations for telco service providers.

Given that 5G, the next generation of mobile telephony, is right around the corner, it makes sense that much of Nokia’s R&D efforts are focused on the new technology.

Touring the base station factory, however, concluding that Nokia’s innovation centers on 5G is a classic trees vs. forest mistake. In reality, the real innovation story here is the factory itself.

Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/06/18/robots-managing-robots-nokias-digital-factory-of-the-future/.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.

I’ll never forget the day that I first encountered the Internet. It was 1989 when a friend who worked in aerospace showed it to me — and I immediately ignored it.

I wasn’t alone. Almost everyone missed the true impact it would have on the world. I originally told this story in my first book, The Quantum Age of IT: Why Everything You Know About IT is About to Change and went on to explain how this encounter had precipitated the three market forces that had changed everything.

These three market forces were:

• The consumerization of IT — how consumer technologies changed the expectations and perceptions of technology consumers
• The criticality of IT — how technology moved from a back-office focus to powering every business process, every customer interaction and virtually every element of the customer experience
• The competition for IT — how with the rise of cloud technologies, IT’s consumers now had the option to go around IT and purchase IT services directly

Today, these three forces (and others) are rolled together under the banner of digital transformation and then boiled down to two primary impacts: the transformation of business models and the primacy of the customer. While there are a large number of factors that led to this point and many secondary disruptive aftershocks, it is hard to not identify the rise of the Internet as the ultimate disruptive source.

Like me, many industry leaders and industry-leading technology companies completely missed the significance of the rise of the Internet, even as it gained steam. Some were able to turn it around and get back in the game. But for many more, the rise of the Internet, and their failure to adapt, only rendered them irrelevant.

The question that matters today, however, is not the disruptive impact of the Internet, but rather, what similar massive disruption is coming next and how can you prepare for it?

Is Blockchain the Next Massive Disruptive Force?

Despite Jason Bloomberg’s recent Forbes article explaining why many skeptics think that blockchain is overhyped, there is a very real chance that blockchain is, in fact, the next major disruptive force — having a business and societal impact on par with the Internet’s.

The reality is that it is the job of industry observers (including us, at Intellyx) to be skeptics and hype killers (when we’re not creating it!). As a result, a chorus of skepticism preceded every significant disruption from the Internet to the iPhone.

While I agree that it may be too early to anoint blockchain as the next big thing — for all of the reasons that Jason pointed out — the fact remains that once everyone figures out that something is the next big thing, you’re already behind the curve.

The reason that I (and many other industry observers) think that blockchain has the potential to be the next Internet-level disruptive force is its very far-reaching implications. Much like the Internet before it — and unlike almost any other emerging technology — blockchain has the potential to fundamentally alter most of the operational underpinnings of our society.

Blockchain’s ability to enable peer-to-peer transactions — financial or otherwise — that are simultaneously secure, indelible and almost instant has the potential to disrupt massive segments of society that are built around these kinds of interactions, including healthcare, financial services, real estate and almost anything that requires a transaction between two or more parties.

And like the early days of the Internet, it is hard to imagine the full impact, the myriad use cases, and entirely new business models that will eventually emerge as result of blockchain’s adoption. But that is mostly a reflection of our lack of imagination, perspective, and foresight — not of the potential impact of the technology.

Recording artist Imogen Heap recently penned a Harvard Business Review article that did a fantastic job of taking blockchain from an abstract concept to a real-life potential use case — and explained its real-world impact and benefit to all those who participate in bringing a piece of music to the market. Notwithstanding the challenges that Jason shared, as you extrapolate these potential use cases across the spectrum of business and society, it is hard not to see the possibility of blockchain to be a massively disruptive force.

Disruptive forces like these, however, are a bit like waves forming off-shore. As any surfer will tell you, some waves pick up steam and continue to grow over time until they crash onto the beach with a thunderous roar. While other waves look promising, but fizzle into nothingness without having any impact whatsoever.

So the question isn’t whether or not blockchain is the next big disruption. The real question is, “If blockchain is the next massive disruptive force, what impact will it have on you and your organization and what are you going to do about it?”

The Uncertainty Capability: The Secret to Preparing for the Next Disruption

Answering this question is important on both a personal and organizational level — and regardless of whether you are a technology company or an enterprise. The reason is that the critical capability is not the identification of the next disruptive force, but rather the ability to rapidly adapt to whatever disruption may come.

The reason that many industry leaders missed the significance of the Internet is that we are all subject to something called the “curse of knowledge.” Coined by a Stanford graduate student, it simply means that once we know something to be true, it becomes very difficult to both imagine that anybody else doesn’t know this truth and to break free of the box that the knowledge creates around us.

The current incarnations of Internet-fueled technologies have become our new reality. We understand how it works, we have made plans for the future based on that understanding and are therefore naturally hesitant to accept anything that may challenge that preconception. It is the curse of knowledge in action.

This inherent bias is why the ‘what to do about it’ question is so important. If answered honestly, it forces us to step outside of that box, accept the uncertainty of the future and break the curse. Done continuously, it builds a broader capability: the ability to deal with uncertainty.

The Intellyx Take

As industry observers, it is our job to help you imagine future possibilities — and to try to pop the balloons full of over-hyped frothiness. That is because we understand that both stagnation and wanton chasing of every “next great thing” are of equal evilness.

The dirty little secret, however, is that we are as unable to predict the future as you. None of us really knows what will happen next. The future is made up of an incredibly complex mixture of technologies, possibilities, and events that come together in ways that no one can truly predict.

The answer, therefore, is not to attempt to predict the future. But instead, to prepare for an uncertain future by building organizational capabilities that allow you to anticipate and rapidly pivot, respond and react to any change that the market may throw at you.

There is, however, one prediction that I can make with confidence: there will be another massive disruption — and your ability to cope with the uncertainty it brings will dictate your future.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: sagriffin305.

By Cindy Riley

It’s a term most would agree has outworn its welcome. “Digital transformation” has been tossed around for quite some time, but the term isn’t actually about digital technology.

“The core idea behind digital transformation is that we are in a unique period of time in which we are transitioning out of the industrial age and entering something altogether new,” says Charles Araujo, principal analyst with Intellyx and founder of the Institute for Digital Transformation. “This new time has been called the Digital Era, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and about a hundred other things. But whatever you call it, the underlying message is that the rules of the game — the ones we have been taught, by which we have played and have built our plans around — have changed. You can count on nothing.”

Read the entire article at http://www.futureofbusinessandtech.com/business-solutions/capturing-the-true-essence-of-digital-transformation

By Ivan Seselj 

Providing Needed Structure

Charles Araujo, principal analyst at Intellyx, expressed a similar sentiment in a recent whitepaper entitled The Innovation Map: How to Create Disruptive Innovation in a Complex Digital World. In it he notes, “It’s not a lack of creativity that stifles innovation, but rather fear, vagueness and ambiguity. When team members are unsure of how things work, they hesitate to take risks or suggest new ideas.”

In fact, organizations actually need to provide a certain level of structure for teams in order to promote and encourage innovation, as counterintuitive as that might sound. After all, how can teams improve the ways they do things if they are unsure what the existing process is, where to find that information, how to suggest improvements and where they should direct their improvement suggestions?

Discipline Creates Clarity

Araujo went on to say, “Many people erroneously associate discipline with rigidity. Focusing on process for the sake of process, they fail to stay focused on the desired outcomes, resulting in rigid, bureaucratic processes. Adopted properly, however, discipline creates consistency and clarity — two key, albeit underrated, enablers of creativity.”

Ideally then, processes should be dynamic, easily accessible and integrated into an employee’s day-to-day activities to make it easier for teams to collaborate around process improvement and constantly innovate.

Read the entire article at http://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/tame-the-anarchy-of-innovation-with-a-process-driven-culture/

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

While cloud providers have made moving to the cloud dead simple, building complex, enterprise-class cloud-based applications requires extensive knowledge and expertise that many enterprises lack.

To meet this need, Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) offers extensive cloud-based professional services for a wide range of enterprise clients.

CTP’s expertise falls into four core areas: architecture, Agile/Lean development and DevOps, experience design, and compliance. Each of these competencies presents complex challenges for enterprises, so by bringing the combination to its customers, CTP can provide value on far shorter timeframes than its customers might be able to achieve on their own.

CTP’s most strategic offering, however, is its digital innovation capability. CTP works with its customers to build cloud-based solutions that provide strategic advantage, including solutions for the Internet of Things, application modernization, and big data.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

There’s an old saying in computer science that there’s no problem harder than properly configuring a cache. Getting caching right is especially difficult when we add of flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) to the mix, as they are faster but more expensive than traditional disk-based storage.

Avere addresses this challenge with an appliance (both physical and virtual) that uses local SSDs as a write-back cache. Via sophisticated network-attached storage (NAS) optimization algorithms, Avere is able to achieve a remarkable 98% hit rate for typical big data uses of storage.

A cache hit rate reflects what percentage of requests can be served by the cache, as opposed to the underlying, ‘root’ data. As a result, the higher the hit rate, the better the performance.

Avere’s near-100% hit rate positions it as being as effective as a content delivery network (CDN) at bringing big data interactions to the edge, with one important difference: since Avere implements a write-back cache, it enables bidirectional edge computing beyond the capabilities if today’s CDNs.

Avere specially configures its appliances to squeeze every bit of performance out of its software, but its software also works well in the cloud as well, for example, by leveraging Amazon’s elastic block storage (EBS) on flash-based SSDs.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

As with most emerging markets, the exploding low-code and no-code segments are fraught with confusion. Even coming up with useful names for the offerings in these categories is a challenge.

The big analyst firms aren’t much help. Forrester lumps low-code and no-code together into the Low-Code Development Platform and Mobile Low-Code Development platform market categories, emphasizing mobile vs. some nebulous not-mobile (would that be stationary, perhaps?), rather than breaking out no-code into a different segment.

Gartner isn’t much better. It forgoes the low-code and no-code terminology altogether, instead touting the Application Platform-as-a-Service and the High Productivity Application Platform-as-a-Service market categories.

For Gartner, therefore, on-premises alternatives aren’t salient to the discussion, as both alternatives are strictly cloud-based. Furthermore, products that fall outside the High Productivity aPaaS segment are, what? Low productivity? Why would anyone buy one of those?

Enterprise buyers are left scratching their heads, as the low-code and no-code terminology remains remarkably persistent, in spite of Gartner’s exhortations to the contrary. Even so, these more popular terms are themselves laden with confusion of their own.

It’s time to clear things up.

Low-Code vs. No-Code: It’s not about ‘Code’

As a boutique analyst firm, Intellyx doesn’t deign to name market categories. Instead, we listen to our enterprise audience and seek to gain insight into the direction emerging markets are headed.

Based on many such conversations, we find that the following definitions have moved to the fore:

Low-Code – Next-generation rapid application development that accelerates and streamlines the work of professional developers.

No-Code – Self-service application assembly for business users who become ‘citizen developers.’

In spite of the word code appearing in both labels, therefore, the distinction between these market segments isn’t about whether someone is writing code or not. The more important distinction is the intended user.

In fact, the question of whether you need to write any code or not is more of a red herring than anything else. In fact, it’s possible for developers to build sophisticated applications with low-code platforms like OutSystems without writing a line of code – although there are certainly reasons to write code on occasion as well.

Furthermore, most no-code platforms allow citizen developers to write code if they like, although coding is certainly optional for any platform that belongs in this category.

Additionally, whenever a citizen developer is creating an application on a no-code platform that requires integration with existing enterprise apps, they usually have to call someone in IT to help with such integrations. That techie will likely have to write some code to implement such an integration.

The Differentiated Value of Low-Code

If the point of using a Low-Code platform for professional developers isn’t about the code-writing bit, then what is it?

Spend a few days with such an engineer, and you’ll soon find out. Even when they’re building applications using more traditional tools, only a part of their focus is on cranking out lines of code. These pros’ broader role includes working within the overall context of the application architecture, understanding and modeling requirements, and ensuring applications are secure and high quality.

There is also an additional enterprise context to the work of software developers. The applications they build are rarely stand-alone, greenfield apps. In the far more likely scenario, any application they build or modify must integrate with many other applications, as well as middleware and other infrastructure for on-premises deployments and the self-service cloud environment when the apps go into the cloud – or both.

Layered on top of this enterprise architectural context is the broader business context, including multifaceted compliance considerations. Seasoned software engineers must navigate the hazards of PCI, HIPAA, or other industry-specific regulatory contexts, the enterprise’s security and privacy rules, as well as established policies and procedures for building, testing, and deploying software in their organization.

Enterprise low-code platforms facilitate, streamline, and accelerate all of these mundane, time-consuming tasks, freeing up developers to focus on building great applications. True, they have to write less code than traditional application development methods require, which also saves time.

But the real win for developers using low-code platforms is taking care of all the cruft surrounding the code that slows them down.

The Hidden Pitfall of No-Code

The no-code value proposition clearly has appeal: non-technical users are able to rapidly assemble business applications using lightweight, visual, drag-and-drop tools. As such no-code platforms mature, the types of business applications these citizen developers can create become increasingly sophisticated as well.

Just one problem: enterprises have been down this road before, folks. Remember Microsoft Access? A database-centric application creation tool simple enough for even the least technical business users to use – and use it they did. In droves.

Typical OutSystems interface – For the pro, but not about the code

In a few short years, some organizations had thousands of Access-based apps running under desks, performing important or even mission-critical tasks, entirely off the radar of IT.

It’s fun to pick on Access, but in reality, there have been dozens of such tools over the years, and they have all contributed to Shadow IT.

The causes of Shadow IT are well-known: the IT organization is too slow and process-bound to respond quickly enough to the needs of lines of business, so business users go around IT and buy – or build – their own apps and other technology.

The problems of Shadow IT, unfortunately, are also quite familiar: without proper oversight and coordination, security vulnerabilities and compliance violations can proliferate, with no one at the helm to address such issues. Furthermore, these citizen-built apps can be redundant, obsolete, or otherwise low quality.

For modern no-code platforms, this Shadow IT pitfall looms large. Certainly, some of the more mature no-code platforms tackle the Shadow IT issue head on, providing lightweight ways of ensuring that apps on these platforms are adequately secure, compliant, and address ongoing business needs.

Far more common, however, are less mature no-code tools that don’t adequately deal with these pitfalls – common because no-code is a rapidly emerging market, and numerous startups are frantically rolling out their wares, putting Shadow IT considerations on the back burner.

The Intellyx Take

No-code platforms certainly have their place in the enterprise, but any manager considering whether to purchase one should take care to understand the potential pitfalls of such tools, as well as the tradeoffs between no-code and low-code platforms.

For stand-alone apps that don’t require sophisticated integration and also don’t present security or compliance risks, no-code can be a cost-effective means for opening up application creation to a broad business audience.

Once an application requires a greater level of sophistication, however, no-code platforms tend to fall short. Not necessarily because they lack requisite functionality, but because getting security, compliance, and integration right requires technical skill sets beyond those of a typical citizen developer.

For all but the simplest of applications, therefore, managers should consider the low-code option – not only because the apps developers can build with them can be more varied, powerful, and responsive than no-code apps, but also because enterprises require the expertise of professional developers to build their apps property, even when code-writing itself is at a minimum.

At that point, the decision isn’t low-code vs. no-code, but rather low-code vs. traditional, hand-coded development. Given the numerous benefits that low-code platforms like OutSystems offer professional development teams, such a decision is an easy one to make.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. OutSystems is an Intellyx client. At the time of writing, none of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx clients. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. Image credit: OutSystems.

By Babur Ozden

Then, in just the past two weeks, two industry-leading thought leaders and analysts in Industrial IoT and disruptive technologies have published formal validation of Maana’s knowledge-centric approach. First, Jason Bloomberg from Intellyx published a paper entitled, Digital Knowledge Technology™: Augmented Intelligence Beyond AI, in which he highlights the importance of going beyond data to capture human expertise for driving the most value from digital transformation initiatives.

Read the entire article at https://www.maana.io/2017/06/maanas-ground-breaking-invention-unique-technology-getting-industry-validation/

Ever since Amazon.com announced it was acquiring Whole Foods earlier this week, the pundits have been jumping on the story, each one theorizing about Amazon’s motivations for the acquisition.

Amazon’s problem with perishables: $75 and up for a gallon of milk, with an 18-day delivery window.

Some guesses make more sense, in particular, that Amazon wants to expand its grocery business. Others might leave you scratching your head, like the theory that Amazon wants to be more like Walmart.

Upon closer analysis, however, even the more popular theories have weaknesses, leaving us to wonder whether Amazon is essentially taking a $13 billion crap shoot – or making the biggest blunder of CEO Jeff Bezos’ career.

Peeling Back the Layers of the Whole Foods Onion

Our starting point: the official Amazon party line. “Millions of people love Whole Foods Market because they offer the best natural and organic foods, and they make it fun to eat healthy,” crows Bezos in the official Amazon press release. “Whole Foods Market has been satisfying, delighting and nourishing customers for nearly four decades – they’re doing an amazing job and we want that to continue.”

Bezos is clearly playing his cards close to the vest here, as he is saying nothing that would indicate why a global ecommerce leader would be interested in a supermarket chain. In fact, this statement appears so baldly disingenuous that one wonders whether a committee of PR wonks actually wrote it, rather than Bezos himself.

Nevertheless, the most likely explanation for the acquisition is that Amazon wishes to expand its grocery business – not simply by adding bricks-and-mortar supermarkets, but by expanding its core ecommerce efforts in this category.

The question then is: why Whole Foods, rather than a more mainstream supermarket chain like Kroger or Albertson’s? After all, Whole Foods’ business model is fundamentally broken in many ways: its ‘whole paycheck’ prices are too high, its selection is poor, and many of its products are based on quackery, targeting a gullible customer base who believes, for example, homeopathy is something other than pure nonsense.

Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/06/23/amazons-whole-foods-strategy-its-not-what-you-think/.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg, from Amazon.com.

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

IT and business executives must now grapple with two competing demands that threaten their very survival: the need to secure the enterprise and the need to transform it. Ground zero for both is the same — their employees. Until now, however, organizational leaders have had very little data with which to monitor their employee’s behavior.

Teramind recognized that in this fast moving world, enterprise organizations need to monitor employee behavior to identify and stop potential security breaches, ensure regulatory and policy compliance, identify employee productivity gaps and expose transformative opportunities at a business process level.

Their software enables company administrators to capture, record and index every user interaction and to trigger a wide range of alerts, notifications and other automations based on those user activities. Enabling administrators to both engage in real time (in the case of a security incident) as well as retrospectively, they offer enterprise leaders a comprehensive view into user behavior that both enhances their security posture and enables them to guide their organizations into the future.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.

By Jason Bloomberg

Read the entire article at https://forbesjapan.com/articles/detail/16701

As the market value of a single Bitcoin comes down off its lofty all-time maximum of over $2,800 to a still-bubbly $2,500 or so, aficionados and skeptics alike wonder whether the Bitcoin speculative bubble is finally popping, or whether the recent downturn is simply a profit-taking opportunity on the road to even loftier heights.

And speculative bubble it certainly is, as a non-negotiable, software-constrained supply runs headlong into greater-fool demand. As even greater fools displace the ones before, all participants, foolish or not, increase their focus on the central question of Bitcoin:

Why does Bitcoin have any value at all?

Tulips: the global symbol of speculative bubbles

Adam Smith’s invisible hand of supply and demand explain the market value of Bitcoin to be sure – as market value is simply what someone is willing to pay, and plenty of fools are so willing.

Strip away the drivers of extrinsic value, namely its greater-fool demand and its constrained supply, however, and what remains? The asset’s intrinsic value.

Just as gold would retain its luster, malleability, and resistance to tarnishing, thus making it useful for numerous manufacturing and jewelry purposes regardless of its scarcity, one wonders what intrinsic value Bitcoin holds.

You would think the answer would be obvious, but instead it is remarkably elusive. Never before in the history of commerce has a speculative bubble developed around an asset that had no clear intrinsic value. Even tulips – the very symbol of a speculative bubble – are flowers of remarkable beauty.

Where, then, lies the intrinsic value of Bitcoin?

Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/06/26/what-is-bitcoins-elusive-intrinsic-value/.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Maxim Peremojnii.