CoffeeLingo1

Contents
1–TECHNOLOGY
+ BUSINESS
2- Migration
+ Imagination
3– Obstacles
+ Velocity
4– Hierarchy
+ Communication
©2011 ASTADIA EBOOKS. all rights reserved.
published in the united states of america by
astadia ebooks. astadia is a registered trademark.
Edited by John Miller and Jon Obermeyer
Photos by Chris Thompson and John Miller

COFFEELINGO – TECHNOLOGY + BUSINESS
What we want to talk about today is taking the next step beyond the incredible
enabling technology that we’ve seen in the last two years to now what?
It’s been pretty interesting to see the transition over the past four or five years, but
even more so over the past couple of years, to see the shift from the Cloud being a technol-
ogy story to being a business story.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Arizona talking to the CIO of a large pharma com-
pany, and I asked him, “What are the three key things that are making you want to invest in
Cloud more and remove the shackles of the old IT structure?”
And he said, “The three things are velocity, velocity, and velocity.”
Did he say it quickly? (laughs)
Ultimately for him it wasn’t really about any element of cost or fewer servers or less
infrastructure. It was really about how his team and the business were going to get focused on
the problems they’re trying to solve, and velocity was a real enabler for them with force.com
and the platform.

It has become
appallingly obvious
that our technology
has exceeded our
humanity.
Albert Einstein

One of the irreducible truths is that it takes four years before you have four years
of experience. It’s only been the last two to four years at the most that we’ve really been talk-
ing seriously about a general-purpose application platform here. Only now are people able to
say with the benefit of that hindsight, “We spent so much time on the cost justification of
this Cloud platform adoption,” and it was so irrelevant over the four years that followed — or
sometimes over the four weeks that followed — that they immediately realized that they were
now getting things done in time frames of days and weeks rather than quarters and years. So
the business benefit on the upside of that acceleration and that adaptability completely dwarfs
any incremental cost reductions of centralization hardware; which is so insignificant in the big
picture.
Four or five years ago that was a big driver for teams.
It continues to be because they hear people talking about technologies such as virtual-
ization. They’ll be very excited about the idea of a 30 percent economy or about improving
the utilization of their servers from, say, 60 to 80 percent. Servers are becoming essentially
free. They cost as much to power and cool over their four-year lifetime as it does to buy the
hardware itself. They are in the rounding error of what it’s worth to be first to the market.

The handier a piece
of equipment, the
more inconspicuous
is its existence:
it disappears into
usefulness.
Martin Heidegger

I had a CIO say to me, “I don’t want to talk about where my data’s going to be.” That
was a conversation I had not had for a long time. He said, “Look, I get it, I don’t want to talk
about where you’re going to keep it, I want to talk about what you’re going to help me do
with it.” Wow, that really forced me to rewrite my playbook for doing CIO dinners.
Data has come to the forefront again. The thing about data is that IT stops spend-
ing money on data during hard times because it is expensive and they can’t find a champion
for data and analytics verses, the core mission critical systems that kept the lights on.
But now people are realizing that data-driven processes, service provider orchestra-
tions between those data-driven processes that lend themselves to much smarter, more flex-
ible business processes.
It becomes about the user experience at the end of the day. I think now we’ve reached
the point where there are really a lot of different applets and mini-applications. The iPad and
the tablet market are good indicators of this. When you go to these marketplaces and you
buy these little apps, you expect them to work. I think businesspeople are starting to have an
expectation around the user experience being like really oriented towards “Hey, I don’t need a
big huge monolithic thing that took you two or three years, right? I want the composite com-
ponent and I want that for my business functions and not just my consumer functions or my
entertainment functions.”
That shift is going to make the user experience and the UI and things like HTML5 a
focus for IT and businesspeople over the next couple of years. And it’s going to lend itself to
that much more focus on getting the strategy and the conversation right up front and not just
getting something installed from a technology-focused implementation.

Some of them were
dreamers. And some
of them were fools.
Who were making
plans and thinking
of the future. With
the energy of the
innocent. They were
gathering the tools.
Jackson Browne

There are two things I’d like to riff on with you, if I may. Number one is that someone
said the other day, “It’s a mistake to call an iPhone an upgrade of your phone. It’s not. It’s a
replacement of your phone.” He said, “Think about tablets not as necessarily things this big.
An iPod touches a little tablet.” But his point was so many things that we used to do by buy-
ing a device that did one thing we will now do by buying an app that runs on an appropriate
tablet. You will probably see tablets the size of cufflinks, that’s what Nick Negroponte at MIT
used to talk about. He said, “You’ll know we’ve gotten there when your left cufflink is talking
to your right cufflink.” I’m not sure what they’ll say. Something like, “Tell the left hand to put
the phone down, we’re driving,” I don’t know.
Yeah, me neither. We need those science fiction writers to tell us that.
Yeah. So, that’s number one: the number of apps that needs to get written or that
can be profitably written and brought to market. You think we’ve got a lot of apps now. The
number of apps that can and will be written is going to grow, because the number of apps
that you can afford to write and that you can afford to deploy, or if you’re an ISV, for which
you can afford to find the market of ten thousand people in the whole world who would
want it, but would really want it a lot, is growing exponentially. Wow, there’s never been a bet-
ter time to get good at doing this.

The machine does not
isolate man from the
great problems of
nature but plunges
him more deeply
into them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

COFFEELINGO -migration + IMAGINATION
We see that what is more and more demanded is an IT leadership that’s focused on being
imaginative and innovative and not just focused on kind of migrating platform stacks or tech-
nologies.
The question that is asked so often, the question that is presented to me is, “What should
I migrate to the Cloud?”
And my first answer is, “Is it working now?” “Yeah.” “You’re getting acceptable ROI
from it now?” “Yeah.” “Could we possibly talk about the two hundred things you wish you
could have done over the past few years that are limping along on a spreadsheet and e-mail
work flow?”
Because you can’t, but you thought you couldn’t afford to build an app, and really
the problem is we’ve been using this label of IT for so long. We really have to kick ourselves
in the head not to be technology centered and to use the new kind of nomenclature that I
believe you formalized as Cloud Map, where you say “We’re not here to talk about a server
refresh.”
We’re here to talk about a business plan reassessment that looks at what you want to
accomplish instead of thinking that our role is to talk about a technology adoption. That’s not
the beginning of the conversation.

Men have
become the tools
of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau

COFFEELINGO – migration + IMAGINATION
Let’s flip it around. You remember Systemantics by John Gall, where he adopts a very
stuffy and formal academic language to talk about just the sheer cussiveness of how things
fail? One of his comments is, “If Detroit builds it, it must be an automobile.” and he goes on
to say, “Does anyone remember that what you actually wanted was transportation? You didn’t
actually want to own a five-figure capital hardware artifact that meant you needed to find
a garage at home and pay for parking when you were at work and worry about service and
maintenance.”
People who live in cities increasingly don’t own cars. My oldest son and his wife live in
the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area, probably one of the least car-ownership-friendly places
in the world, and they have a Zipcar subscription. I don’t know when they’ll buy their first car;
I don’t know if they will bother at all. Increasingly, it’s an entire consumer economy that’s less
and less about owning stuff.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to own a really great stereo system. No one really
wants to have racks and racks of CDs anymore. What they want to have is a great library.
It’s just a different mentality that doesn’t think of ownership of assets as a measure of
your worth but instead just thinks about the experiences to which you want to have access
and now we’re seeing that as the attitude of business. They are starting to talk in an unself-
conscious way about, “What’s the experience we want to deliver to our customer? What’s the
experience that’s going to enhance our brand and defeat the trends towards commoditization
in so manymarket places?” That’s what brands are.
They’re an upraised middle finger in the face of commoditization that says, I’m
going to prove to you that we can deliver something. Brands were originally created to say,
“Oh, yeah, this isn’t just that junky wheat with the sand in it, this is the bag of wheat with
this brand on it that makes a statement about its origin and its standards.”Iconic brands like
McDonald’s work that way. It may not be the most exotic thing you’ll ever get, but you know
what you’re getting.

Brand is an interesting point because I think we’ve heard a lot around the social
story and the social enterprise, and there’s a lot that’s talked about in terms of speed to mar-
ket and holistic enterprise strategy.
What do you see as common traits of the people and companies accelerating that story?
It used to be that someone became a CIO when they’d been the IT manager long enough
that they had to find a way to promote the guy or gal, and they came up through the technol-
ogy ladder. Over the past few years I have increasingly been meeting CIOs who essentially
were VPs who were assigned to go bell the cat.
They were VPs of business units, and the barons got together and picked one of their
number to go slay the dragon. And they moved him or her from a business unit over to be
the CIO, not with the job of being the custodian and steward of technology, but of being the
representative of the barons to the soldiers and say, “It’s not about your server uptime.”
“It’s about your ability to get us into this marketplace, it’s about your ability to imple-
ment this customer initiative.” I’m not saying that they’re hostile to the shock troops of the
technology, but they are relentless in saying, “I don’t want to hear about your technology road
map. I want to hear about your plan to respond to the business need.”

Through literacy you
can begin to see the
universe. Through music
you can reach anybody.
Between the two there
is you, unstoppable.
Grace Slick

There’s a pulling back of the curtain the past few decades and I think that IT people
generally benefit from this.
I think one thing that’s interesting about that is that the role of the CIO morphs from
traditionally what it’s been, like you said, a technology based job, into more and more a CIO
role which is demanding business acumen, business innovation, new strategies for revenue or
cost containment that you would traditionally see, in a business leader and not a CIO.
The CIO is responsible for making sure the engineering specs were built so that the
floor of the server room wouldn’t collapse, right? That shift is pretty powerful for IT folks; it
gives them a chance to matter in a different way. Ultimately the interesting thing in my career
has been seeing how powerfully adept IT people are at really knowing the business process of
their companies.

This does not mean that I think it’s an advantage for a CIO coming over from a line of
business unit to be ignorant of technology. There are science fiction writers who say, “The
only reason I can write this amazing stuff is that I don’t know what’s not doable and so I
write stuff that ten years from now won’t seem dated because I wasn’t trapped by the conven-
tions of what was actually possible.” I’m sorry, among CIOs this is known as inflight maga-
zine effect, where the CEO reads an article on the transpacific flight and lands convinced that
we need, you know, to do X, Y and Z, none of which is actually beyond the level of research
laboratories right now. Their idea of voice-response systems comes from watching Knight
Rider. Their idea of just in time delivery comes from Star Trek Transporters.

Look, it’s okay to take driver’s ed training, but if you turn the key and the en-
gine doesn’t even turn over, you should know enough to say that looks like a battery problem.
Whereas if the engine cranks, but doesn’t catch, you should know enough to say that looks
like a fuel problem. You need to know one layer deeper than the layer where you usually live,
or you are going to be completely clueless when again to quote John Gall, “most systems
spend most of their time in partial failure mode.”
You can’t just be able to run things when everything’s working. You have to be able
to function in a role where most of the time at least one piece isn’t quite handling things and
you have to adapt to that. Conversely, CIOs were once challenged to do IT business align-
ment, which meant, “Come to the meeting and find out what we’re trying to do so instead of
thinking about your hardware, you can think about supporting us.”
I suggest that that’s too timid a vision because today a good CIO comes up to the
head table and says if not in so many words, “You idiots, you’re solving the problem and pur-
suing the opportunity that existed a year ago. Let me tell you about where our customers are.
They’re out there on Facebook and Twitter, not calling our 800 number. Let me tell you about
our supply-chain partners. They’re using RFID, not looking for a better way to fill in a form.”
And so IT business alignment today is still a good phrase, but it means IT telling the business
to get aligned.

Once a standard
is established,
competition
comes at once and
violently into play.
It is a fight; in order
to win you must
do better than your
rival in every minute
point, in the run of
the whole thing and
in all the details.
Thus we get the
study of minute
points pushed to
limits. Progress.
Le Corbusier

I like to say that organizational charts are Isaac Newton’s space. Space is rigid.
You have your position in that space, you are connected to certain things in that space, and
that’s it, and Chatter is, if I may overwork the metaphor, Einstein’s space, where when you
move you change the shape of the space around you. This is where I can be connected on
many different dimensions, only one of which is my formal reporting relationships, but
within salesforce.com if I had to go through hierarchy and talk to the guy who approves my
expense reports every time I wanted to have an interaction with legal or sales or operations or
technology development, I think my productivity would fall by a factor of probably ten.
Or perhaps more than that because my boss is doing these multilateral communi-
cations as well and you need to begin with the human question of, “Am I prepared to cre-
ate an environment in which going outside the chain of command is not merely tolerated
but praised? And in which I have well-enough defined goals and objectives that I can say I
achieved this objective?”
Remember, an objective is not merely something you want to have happen, it’s a
statement of the resource envelope within which you will get it done and the schedule enve-
lope within which it will be produced. That’s an objective. Otherwise it’s just a wish list. Well,
if you’re prepared to have a good discipline of stating objectives, if you don’t get what you
want, it’s probably because your objective was poorly stated and that’s a learning loop that
more organizations need to build.
The old mantra was what’s measured is what matters. My mantra is what’s rewarded is
what’s repeated.

Everything you can
imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso

COFFEELINGO – obstacles + velocity
I tell people, “You’ve got two choices: you can adopt the Cloud in a disciplined
governable audible way or you can have it adopted.”
“Oh we don’t do that Cloud stuff here,” is this century’s version of “Oh, no, we don’t
have any of that Wi-Fi stuff here.”
As soon as you could buy a router and fries for fifty bucks, you had Wi-Fi. .
I talk to a lot of CIOs who are pleasantly surprised at the amount of governance they
have.
Yes, all they see is consumer Web apps and so they don’t realize enterprise Web includes
governability and security, because that’s what the market demands.
And if you don’t have that you don’t have customers. The problem is that they have
these Microsoft applications and applets that run so much of their business and they have no
control or visibility. A platform like Force.com gives them more control, balance, and man-
ageability and ultimately that’s a pretty eye-opening experience for IT leaders.

Blind man running
through the light
of the night
With an answer in his hand,
Come on down
to the river of sight
And you can really understand.
Neil Young

I love having that conversation because when the light goes on, they say, “I’m
worried about the security of my data in the Cloud.” I say, “Let’s talk about the business pro-
cess that you have now.” Someone e-mails a spreadsheet. That’s a message in a bottle. It goes
bobbing off on the waves, you have no idea what’s going to happen to it. Someone needs to
look at one or two or a dozen of a thousand records. They download the spreadsheet. At that
point, you have no visibility into what was being done, whereas if you are all hypothetically
an army private working for, I don’t know, a government agency that maintains a database of
250,000 highly sensitive messages and you download all 250,000 of them on one afternoon.
I think I could detect that in an environment like database.com in a way that I would not be
able to detect it and something like a big hypothetically wiki leaks fiasco would be headed off
at the pass. You have interfaces that can be instrumented. You have interactions that can be
logged. You can generate reports of abnormal use in a way that’s almost technically impos-
sible and certainly from any practical point infeasible in traditional IT environments.
Those obstacles are things that we traditionally heard over the past few years and
are dispelled quite well when people are looking at these kinds of solutions. What obstacles
are you seeing out there now that you feel like are confusing the marketplace or the buyer?

A huge obstacle is people who believe “I’m not allowed to do that.” In the past
eighteen months, the tenor of my conversations with CIOs has completely changed on this
subject. They use to express to me their doubt that I was a secure or as high availability as
they needed to be. No longer do they have that doubt. Now they have a belief that they’re ei-
ther prohibited by regulation or prevented by misperception of their stakeholders, their Chief
Financial Officer, their Chief Operating Officer, their best customer who they fear might
think that were just trying to do things on the cheap. They’re using external storage and what
they are asking me now is not for proof but for ammunition that they can carry up their food
chain and say, “Look, here are the things that you need to understand.”
One of them is obviously things like professional certifications, one of them is things
like defense and depth and literally multicontinent diversity of location. We didn’t lose a single
cycle in Japan in the new data center that is fully built out; that data center went through the
earthquake and tsunami fiasco. Why? Because we’ve done this before.
Not only did we make sure that the machines would stay running, we made sure that
the delivery of diesel fuel to power the backup generators would be robust as well. We looked
at the failure mode upon the failure mode upon the failure mode because it was those second-
ary modes that gave them the problems they had with the reactors.
So, that’s one. Another is, “I’m not allowed to do that.”
I maintain that if you’re looking for an excuse not to use the Cloud, for whatever rea-
son, whether it’s going to be a threat to your job security or whatever, you will be able to find
the excuse, but if I can persuade you that your future promotability is greatly enhanced by a
successful Cloud adoption and then we start talking about “How do we make this work,” we
will find a way.

Everybody gets so
much information all
day long that they lose
their common sense.
Gertrude Stein

I think it becomes a business, cultural issue.
Acceptance is the hard part. And at that point the momentum builds. These things grow
by contagion. As soon as a VP finds out that you got that app built and deployed in two
weeks, all the other VPs will want one and they will find a way to make it work. They’ll say,
“Can I take one of the people who is on my head count and let him work with your people
for a while?” Especially once they discover how much of app construction is configuring the
services rather than writing the code. You will get that process, but it’s a profoundly social
process to make this happen within an organization.
And it becomes a difference of culture and people, right? The people element is what really
drives it: your ability to take tools and technology and really take your business process and
optimize it in a data-driven way. Where is the limit for yourself in terms of how far you and
your team are going?

Don’t worry, be
crappy. Revolutionary
means you ship and
then test. Lots of
things made the first
Mac in 1984 a piece
of crap—but it was
a revolutionary
piece of crap.
Guy Kawasaki

Let’s go back to velocity. Where are we going to see velocity, and how do you think
it’s going to be coming about in ways that are meaningful?
Where aren’t you seeing it? What market has not been redefined in terms of the
speed with which change is now expected to take place and in fact must take place to be
competitively flexible? Look at the time it takes to bring a new car to market. Look at the time
it takes to bring down a government. Look at the time it takes to put the stability of an entire
regional currency into question. These are phenomena that use to take years and now take
place in weeks or days.
When you bring it down to a commercial level for companies I think that you’re seeing it best
with people who have been business or IT leaders and who are focused on trying to figure
out how their teams might adapt to this technology. The pragmatic part about that is get-
ting them trained, giving them an environment where they don’t have to fear sort of, taking
on this new technology, and applying it in different ways that maybe nobody has thought of.
Practicing, testing, having experts around to help them when they need it, and those are the
folks are seeing the benefit of the velocity. It’s the reality of what people are able to do with
the platforms when they get focused on each other.

Do not make plans. Absolute garbage.
The world is complicated and changing
too fast; nothing will turn out and work
the way you anticipated. Instead, try
something new. And make fantastic
mistakes and learn from them. Daniel Pink

COFFEELINGO – HIERARCHY + COMMUNICATION
It’s a big shift in terms of how IT and business work together and bring their solutions
to market together, and ultimately there’s a lot of that. The human element for me, that’s
pretty interesting. You know, we’ve talked before about how it’s not really the hierarchy, but
it’s about how you communicate.
Yes. Chatter is the death of hierarchy.
When we implemented Chatter we saw our e-mail drop precipitously in the first
week.
We routinely see 30 to 40 percent drops within four to eight weeks of adoption.

Computing is not
about computers
anymore. It is
about living.
Nicholas Negroponte

It’s really interesting for leaders whether they’re business or IT to orient themselves
around internally and externally communicating differently. We’ve heard a lot about how bad
is the linchpin of building a customer profile that impacts your brand much differently this
week. When you look at the CIO, what are common traits that you see in CIOs or in their
staff that are enabling communication differently with their business or their IT peers? The
powerful change about the Cloud is that you take all these different roles and you smush ‘em
back down into a classical sort of program or analyst IT role.
Well, I’ve certainly seen organizations where hierarchy was everything. It wasn’t a
pretty sight.
But here’s a great story: Robert Townsend, when he was running Avis, said that they
had a policy that every single employee of Avis had to spend two weeks of the year on a
rental counter in an airport. (He claims that the PhD who ran their IT literally ran away the
first time a customer approached.)
You know, everyone in a company should be able to say, “My job is, we make pills, we
sell shoes, we deliver theme park visits, not I run the servers —not “I do the networking. ”
Last year at Dreamforce I was introduced to a social media manager who told me her
informal title in the company was Mistress of the Twitterverse. She got her job because one
day in an idle moment it happened to occur to her to go out on Twitter and Facebook and
look at what, if anything, people were saying about SunTrust Bank. What she found galva-
nized her, if that is the word, perhaps it would be better to say terrified her to the point that
she brought it to her management and in a very short time found herself turned into the
person tasked with doing social media for the company.

Today the level of sophistication of what’s required to be a viable competitor in this
space, is that you need to be prepared to understand the mere existence of something like Ra-
dian 6, let alone digesting what it can tell you. You need to be conversant with the differences
between the demographic and the psychology of a Twitter versus a Facebook and with the
gaming environment. And now, of course, you’ve responded this in kind of your own way,
and you are saying to people, “Look, rather than invent this expertise internally, let us come in
and do a social media assessment for you because now this is a form of expertise that it’s not
obviously cost effective for me to own. It’s great for me to be able to call you guys and say,
come in and tell us where we are. Where are the dragons around us that are going to eat us if
we don’t do something about it?”
My mantra : if someone wants to sell you a resource that is not a Cloud conversation, but
if someone wants to sell you a result, then it has the potential to be a Cloud conversation.

Never trust a
computer you
can’t throw out
a window.
Steve Wozniak

If you come to a fork
in the road, take it.
Yogi Berra

Peter Coffee is Director, Enterprise
Strategy at salesforce.com. He is known
for his experience in evaluating information
technologies and practices as a developer,
consultant, educator, and internationally
published author and industry analyst.
Mike Lingo is Chief Technology
Officer and SVP, Sales Engineering at
Astadia, where he helps companies use
the Cloud to transform their businesses.
Lingo is an international speaker and
author of Hey! You! Get on to My Cloud.

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