At a time of apps and pretty cheap software, Adobe has maintained their premium-pricing model. So Photoshop, for example, still retails at around £700. Many corporates will view Adobe’s licensing changes as good news. For about £50 a month organisations will get access to all the CC applications – InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc.

Adobe also announced these applications would be updated frequently, rather than on the 18 month release cycle that they currently adopt for CS. The pricing represents a reduction from the price of buying the whole suite – £1,300-plus, with an additional upgrade fee every 18 months. Of course, volume-licensing deals will change these numbers, but the principle remains.

Adobe say they will not release any more CS software, although there is a promise to upgrade for Windows or OS X changes, but it is unclear for how long. They offer two upgrade paths – a straight discount for one year on CC for existing users or the ability to keep using the CS version of the software in perpetuity (without new features, of course). So far, then, so good; but Adobe isn’t just a B2B company – unlike say, Autodesk, whose CAD systems have been licensed on an annual basis for years.

There are a significant number of professional and amateur photographers who use Adobe products. I am amongst the group. Photoshop is the best photo editing software available and most photographers also use other tools, such as Dreamweaver to maintain a web site, and maybe one additional product, like InDesign, Adobe’s complex and powerful DTP system that can be used for brochures and other publications. The cost of the software is high, but the cost can be manageable by skipping every other release. Users won’t lose too much functionality either, as long as they don’t mind being a release behind. To do the same under the new model now requires an outlay of £600 a year, every year, forever (if you want to read your files again).

It is this group who are very, very vocal online. Many critics have got the wrong end of the stick, and are railing at the monthly licence checkup that is completed over the internet. That is irrelevant, as most commentators know. But if Adobe do maintain the line, it will be interesting to see how many users just grit their teeth and pay up for what is being described as the “Adobe tax”, or how many switch to a different image editor.

In the corporate world, Microsoft – with O365 – has also taken a significant move in this direction. Their model switches to read only when the user stops paying, unlike Adobe, where the software just stops working. I, therefore, find myself applauding Microsoft for doing a better job than Adobe – an unusual position for me, as regular readers will know.

The real story is still playing out. Wil the corporate strategists at Adobe have predicted this and priced in the potential backlash from disaffected small users? Or will consumer power win through? This may turn out to be a significant milestone for software licensing models however it plays out.

We’re already in the digital world and its been driven by the business and our customers. As IT professionals, our opportunity is to bring our skills and experience to make sure that it is delivered with the appropriate level of guidance and security. Our role in the future will be vastly different when every ‘head of’ in business is comfortable buying IT services.

However, the reality of the world that we inhabit today is that we have competing requirements. At the same time, our board wants us to drive innovation and growth while we also drive costs down. For us to get ahead of the game we need to think long and hard about several things.

•   What kind of business organisation are we?
•   How do we manage supply and demand for technology services?
•   Within the organisation, what are the characteristics of different parts of the business?
•  Who influences the IT investments?

So within organisations IT is required by the CFO to drive costs down while marketing wants to present and new and exciting face to the world.

This means that today the CIO and the IT Leadership team has to wear many hats, or to have different conversations with different parts of the business. For the CFO being a great steward of the company assets by managing demand down, redefining sourcing strategies in the light of new sourcing opportunities and implementing the appropriate levels of governance.

At the same time, marketing is demanding greater customer insight, with a focus on ‘time to market’ and ‘good enough’. Certainly the head of marketing is doing more exciting things, using social media, big data, iApps and is our new best friend. The new normal is the CIO/CMO working together to deliver great customer insight that drives business forward.

The role for the CIO is as the value broker, managing the supply and demand of service provision, not as a roadblock but as a broker to make it happen.

This has huge implications in so many different directions.

Great leadership requires the best and if the brain pool is only half full, the result will inevitably be less than the best. Our society and our organisations lose out. Warren Buffett commented that he was successful in part because he was only competing against half the brains – the male half!

Our families are much better off when both parents are energised, fulfilled by both careers and family and take equal shares in family life.

We are much better off knowing that we are matching our potential and yes…our ambitions.  One a personal note, I remember a comment from my mother who, in her 60s finally confessed that she was envious of me and my career. She was born a generation too early and lived all her life – even though she loved us all – with the frustration of unfulfilled potential. In her time  the career choices were between hairdressing and nursing – either of which were expected to be given up on marriage or child birth. A different world then.

To be clear – this is not a man versus women argument. We need everyone engaged.

It is for us leaders to ensure that:

•  Firstly as leaders, we reach our full potential – we are the best we can be
• Secondly we cooperate to help each other, learning from the business networks that our male counterparts use so well
• Thirdly we identify, mentor and support the next generation of women leaders so they can reach their full potential and contribute to the growth of their organisations and society.

CIO Connect has invited CIOs to discuss how we can band together to achieve these aims. We’ll share the thoughts and ideas with you.

When it is not newsworthy for a women to lead an organisation or even an Information Management Division, we have truly delivered on the dream.

Instead, I settled on something in last week’s Spectator, an issue dedicated to the memory of Lady Thatcher. In a regular column which draws parallels between the classical world and the modern, Peter Jones explained how, although Margaret Thatcher is often portrayed as being divisive and this is thought of as negative in today’s world, the Ancient Greeks set up a system of definition based on opposites which was thought of in a much more positive way.

This struck me as being an interesting way of analysing the dilemmas faced by the CIO and their whole IT team every day: controlled access to agreed tools versus freedom of choice, flexibility of approach versus well defined process, customer focus versus efficiency, quick to market versus operational stability…. The list goes on.

CIOs deal with such dichotomies on a daily basis. And the positioning on a continuum of the right thing to do between the contradictory extremes is not easy in any single instance, and becomes impossible in a modern complex enterprise. But there does not need to be a single position defined. Our work at CIO Connect increasingly is pointing to the need for multiple speed IT, depending on the needs of a business unit or function rather than the organisation as a whole. And as business is not a democracy, it is possible to limit the number of positions taken to something workable. These opposing tensions can be the most appropriate way to think about the many number of dilemmas CIOs face every day.

To do this well, CIOs do need to define the opposing pairs carefully. It is all too easy to set up a false opposition – security versus flexibility, for example. Once established, it is necessary to consider the impact on the organisation in each case. A useful and fruitful discussion with business colleagues is then created around which pairings apply in any given circumstance and which trade off is needed. Risk and reward do have an influence on the analysis, but my early thinking on the subject is that risk is represented by both extremes if you define the pairings correctly; the challenge is to see where reward is maximised and risk managed in the particular circumstances being discussed. The risk will need to be acceptable within the overall risk framework for the firm, and the risk appetite expressed, implicitly or explicitly, by the board, which is where the governance framework comes in.

Of course in politics no one is for the grey between the black and the white. The grey emerges from decisions for black and decisions for white. In business and in IT that is not so much the case – the right balance, in the right circumstances is the position to seek, together, rather than by imposition. (I am struck though by the thought that consensus versus imposition is itself a helpful pairing to consider in the same way.)

The final challenge is that the developing use of technology, the availability of new services and the increasing knowledge of technology throughout the organisation – the whole democratising effect – means that over time the optimum position to be in does change. It’s a very dynamic and fluid situation where precedent doesn’t carry much weight.

So often a situation based on “a” or “b” really demands a different answer – “and”. It’s finding the point where that makes sense that is hard. Much more to come on this.

Tweet, read, respond: someone, somewhere, is probably reading your tweet, even if it’s just one person. A million active users have tweeted at least a billion times using the ‘tweet this’ button during the past three years.

At the same time, not everyone on the social networking platform is quite as active and as many as 25% of Twitter users haven’t tweeted at all.  So, how do you get people to read, respond or re-tweet?

The simple answer is to get personal. If you have an opinion, share it. If you like something, share it. People don’t respond to mindless text, but they do respond to a person and their thoughts, experiences and passions.

Barak Obama tweeted a picture of himself hugging his wife Michelle, with the caption “four more years” in November 2012. The picture was shared more than 400,000 times within a few hours of being posted, making it the most popular tweet of its time.

Now, I know no one reading this blog posting is a president and it’s also unlikely our readers have millions, or ever billions, of followers. But I do know that people responded to Obama’s tweet because they felt something when they read it, whether it was pride, relief or empathy.

I once had someone say to me “oh, you’re the faceless person behind the CIO Connect tweets.” I might be faceless but I do try to give the account a personality. I engage with people and I sometimes post – low quality, admittedly – jokes from our company Twitter account. Such tweets might not be strictly business-related, but they do help to give the company a social personality.

So, get personal with your tweets and have an opinion. Someone is reading what you’re writing – and if you’re going to post a tweet, you might as well make it a good one.

The article did read a bit like an advertorial for some migration specialist company, who had found out that only 42% of respondents to a survey had started planning migration, presumably to Windows 8, although they did mention Vista and Windows 7, too (would anyone really migrate to Vista these days?). For me, three things stuck out like a sore thumb:

1)              23% of respondents “hadn’t been asked” to upgrade their operating systems by their organisations

2)              It was stated in the article that XP “couldn’t support” BYOD and consequently organisations would miss out on the gains that tablets and mobile working brings

3)              20% of recipients still intend to use XP after support ends

The first two points made my blood boil; the third calmed me down a bit. I have muttered about job title inflation before in these posts. But anyone from “head of IT”, through “IT director” and on to “CIO” who actually is worthy of the name would not be waiting to be asked to update an operating system. For a start, how have they managed to not get a PC with Windows 7 installed? Is all of their kit 12 years old? Do they build new kit with an old XP image? Then, secondly, why would any executive committee spend a nanosecond considering operating systems? That’s the infrastructure team’s problem.

By this time, as you might tell, I was not happy. But that was as nothing to reading that XP cannot support BYOD. What a stupid comment; and you can’t get value from tablets and mobile devices without Windows 8? I think someone forgot to tell all of the millions of Apple’s customers about that, not to mention those who chose to go Android.

But then I calmed down as I read that 20% of these CIOs were planning to still use Windows XP, even though it wasn’t supported. Good on you – an operating system doesn’t stop working just because it isn’t supported. And unless you are writing leading edge software to run on the operating system, you actually aren’t likely to need that support. Of course the euphemistically named vulnerabilities won’t get patched, nor will any bugs get fixed henceforth, but after 12 years I doubt you will lose much sleep over that. And anyway if you are writing leading edge stuff, you won’t be doing that on XP any more, much as the development may have seemed racy in 2001.

But to conclude I return to the stupid comment that BYOD solves the problem of moribund organisations. It frees up people to use current hardware and software to get their jobs done. And I’m not talking about top end MacBooks or iPads, even a nice laptop from PC World for £300 is going to be an improvement on a 12-years-old box running XP and which is provided by the IT department. And my guess is there is a ton of shadow IT going on that needs up-to-date hardware and software, so throw the XP boxes away – I doubt anyone will notice.

I’m sorry but there are things going on that really open up a need to consider this question again. I was with a group of senior executives from vendor companies, and the view around the table was that the role wouldn’t exist in 5 year’s time. Now, not one of us really believes that do we? So let’s take a look at what’s going on and why some people might draw that conclusion.

The big trends of the moment are the “democratisation” of IT and the provision of “everything” as a service. Let’s take each in turn.

Democratisation of IT is similar to, and includes, the consumerisation of IT but is much more encompassing. The idea comes from Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist and is one of the central themes of his book in that Matt believes that the benefits of something come, not from the invention, but the use of technology – or even an idea.

We see today the democratisation if IT through widespread apps development and the ‘bring your own device’ trend in many corporates. Democratisation is occurring because there is a much wider knowledge of IT and a resultant unwillingness to pass control to someone else. This is not confined to corporate computing – the BBC has lost control of what people watch on TV and indeed that very phrase “watch on TV” is sounding increasingly old fashioned. A recent survey showed less than 50% of viewing hours are now watched on a TV and the number of TVs per household is declining after years of growth. The number of devices capable of watching broadcast TV is growing though, and 4G will accelerate that trend.

The fragmentation of what was once the established way is widespread and is not being replaced by a new orthodoxy; think Wikipedia where there is no single controlling mind or editor, but many thousands of collective nuggets of information make up a picture far richer than any one individual could on their own. We’re deeply into Hayek territory now.

Then there is “everything as a service”. No longer do you need private infrastructure or architecture – you just buy services. This service approach is driving the increase in “shadow IT” which Gartner has mentioned, remembering that many of the people commissioning such services are your peers not some junior person trying to get away with something. Many vendors see this fragmentation of their buying centres as something to embrace as fully as possible – others are a bit more cautious that they will be seen as part of a resultant problem, rather than a source of immediate solutions. The thing is, these vendors have noticed there is less governance about CxOs buying services rather than the CIO.

So I now want to look at this transformation from the board’s perspective, and perhaps through the eyes of the audit and risk committee. We can get new services quickly, responding to market need. We can engage with our customers through their technology on social media, and we can reduce costs as people bring their own kit in. It sounds great but there are other concerns. How do we coordinate the total spend against the agreed business priorities? What about that single view of customer we’ve been struggling to create? And do we really want the order to cash cycle fragmenting across the world. We’ve spent millions on bringing that together – pity it’s so inflexible but it’s better than the alternative.

Well, perhaps we’ll have a small IT department looking after the ERP and some sort of single reporting system, perhaps master data about products and customers too. But nothing else – they are too expensive, too slow, too inflexible and we need lots of controls to make sure they do the right thing. Oh and we don’t really need a CIO, an IT manager should be able to do that easily.

So, just dump the technology part and the controlling part that limits what we equipment we can use and we really don’t need the gatekeeper model. Get rid of the slowness of reaction to business needs – it would help a lot when they know we don’t need one of their team to interpret what we want and when we do. And is all that spend on security necessary? Although, security seems important, so maybe we should still be concerned about that.

If “those people” (I’m still a member of the audit committee, remember) made things happen quickly instead of stopping them, and if they didn’t try to control things that don’t matter, maybe we’d be better off with one of them helping coordinate all of those IT services everyone buys.

It seems ironic that at a time when information has never been more important to an organisation that the chief information officer role should be under such existential threat.

So in five years time, which is within the planning horizon of many regulated industries, we’ll need something very different to what we have today: a CIO.

And then I thought of motorway bridges – largely because I had been in a long, slow contraflow because of “bridge strengthening work”. These bridges were built to carry motorway traffic and are between 30 and 40 years old, not hundreds, yet they need strengthening (or replacing as the M4 bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead was a few years back).

So is this because things were built to last once upon a time, or were they actually over engineered? Is this a case of things being built to a price, as against being built with pride to be as good as they could be? Were the bridges built too strongly through ignorance, or alternatively engineered to a specification? The answer is: take your pick. In fact, probably all possibilities apply in some measure. But that’s not my point.

You see the thing is that in many cases an external factor was driving the engineering decisions. One such factor might be ignorance, leading to a massive tolerance being built in to be secure, which led to the bridge lasting centuries. Another factor might be cost control, which has the opposite effect causing the lifespan to be too short because the predicted traffic was never foreseen to be as great as it turned out to be. The much lower tolerance or tighter engineering to a specification meant that there was not the room for traffic growth that earlier bridge builders achieved.

You know I’m now going to draw a parallel with IT systems. And I am, but I hope not in the way you expect. My point is about ensuring the drivers for the engineering specification are about the planned work rather than allowing other external factors to dominate.

We know one size of IT, or speed, doesn’t fit all. We know that quick and dirty solutions have a habit of sticking around long past their predicted sell by date. Yet we need to build in to the project plan an assessment of the right level of engineering needed. Not everything has to be engineered to the ERP standard. And that is why end user computing is so attractive – it can be as quick as making the right key cause the right thing to happen, rather than obsessing about stopping all the wrong things happening. And that is why it is cheap and quick.

I was discussing this idea with a group of CIOs recently. As well as the usual comments about too much budget going on non-productive activity, we suggested that no system or service should be implemented without its exit strategy being defined. The discussion was about managing legacy systems and services, but it best applies at the beginning of the lifecycle. As part of the specification, the duration of the lifetime of whatever it is you are building or buying should be built in and priced in. Holding the engineering specification stable then becomes much more straightforward. Of course, it is possible that was what those motorway bridge builders did and they just couldn’t predict the future accurately, leaving their bridges too weak through increased volumes of traffic after only 40 years. There is always more than one interpretation of a situation.

Sure, you will almost certainly have to live with examples of the digital equivalent of a packhorse bridge running with one way working in future, just to extend its life longer than was anticipated. Overall, though, the conversations will be less emotional and more engineering biased.

And you might be able to build bridges with your business colleagues who sometimes just want a quick, short term, disposable service.

When something is successful, people want to replicate it for themselves. But they don’t take account of the context in which the original success was established. So, too many statements make a superficial connection that one thing should be more like something else.

I think a more interesting question is how Microsoft should be unlike other things. One starting point is how Microsoft should be unlike its current self – and that is true for Google and Apple, too. All these technology firms are doing different things and should maintain their distinctions, rather than becoming homogenised and alike. So, here are five things I think Microsoft should be unlike:

• They should be unlike an incumbent supplier that thinks it has 80% market share
• They should be unlike a staid corporation deciding what their corporate customers want – and finding out that those people aren’t really their customers after all
• They should be unlike an organisation that thinks it’s called all the big decisions of the past 10 years right so sticks with them
• They should be unlike Apple – the walled garden of hardware and software – separate from and independent of hardware
• They should be unlike DEC

I met a senior executive of Microsoft in the UK recently as part of one of CIO Connect’s think tank meetings. As the conversation continued during the evening, I realised Microsoft are not like their portrayal, but rather like a supertanker that takes a long time to change direction (a suitably unhelpful and shallow simile).

Think for a moment about how many of their customers are still running XP, and how Microsoft have tried to make Windows backwards compatible for applications – unlike Apple, whose change from PowerPC to Intel shortly afterwards dumped any non-native application with the demise of Rosetta.  Think how many back versions of Microsoft software run on Windows 7 or 8.

So why did I mention DEC? Because they are the classic case study of a good company that was producing a good product but which got totally disrupted by a new and seemingly inferior product. That is the big risk for Microsoft today – the 80% installed base of PC operating systems overlooks an inconvenient truth that they only have 20% market share when tablets are taken into account.

Microsoft are different, and they should stay that way. We need choice, we need competition. We even need Windows, if only to show how good Ubuntu and OS X really are!

Oh, and we need Microsoft Office on the Apple iPad. That is something that would show how different Microsoft really are.

Yet a large number of people still wobbled when they stepped onto the stationary escalator. The many visual clues were not sufficient to overcome the deeply learned response that requires an adjustment of balance when stepping onto or off a moving escalator.

When giving or receiving feedback, we are taught that perception is reality; that what others think is their reality. The stopped escalator shows that theory represents incomplete information. Perception can be false, too. Superficial information – a written notice – doesn’t overcome a learned response to stepping onto an escalator.

We recently featured an article in the CIO Connect daily news. It was a piece from Forbes magazine that expanded the Bring Your Own Device discussion to several other areas, such as self-service. The article argues that the control of devices has already passed from the CIO. Such a transition leads to: Bring Your Own Application – either a cloud service or perhaps a favourite app on the PC, Mac or Tablet; Bring Your Own Data – likely to have been bought or downloaded and incorporated into the organisation via Dropbox; and Bring your Own Cash – yes, cash. Forbes sources suggest people are prepared to pay for their own stuff in preference to feeling that they can’t do their job with the corporate tools.

I also read in the FT that organisations cannot operate without “functional stupidity”. Consider the alternative to see why; “dysfunctional intelligence” would mean the existence of a bunch of clever people questioning everything and never doing anything – a bit like Monty Python’s philosopher footballers. So perception is not reality. CIOs have lost control and organisations cannot operate if they are too clever for their own good.

In such circumstances, you could find: that your business colleagues have not noticed the huge strides you have made to segment the way you deal with them; that you can actually help in areas well removed from the ERP system and corporate financial systems; and that your IT staff may not have noticed the way that your business colleagues needs have changed, that the timescales they are operating in have reduced enormously, and that, along the way, many people have actually become quite proficient with IT. I exaggerate for effect, but only slightly.

We know perception and reality are different. You only have to look at optical illusions to see why that is true. We don’t always know how perception and reality differ, and it takes a strong will to overcome perception. We know that to get someone to understand something, you have to say it three times or more – not just short term repetition but over time, fixing something in short term memory, then long term memory and reinforcing it for it truly to be remembered. And as we discussed at the CIO Connect Conference in 2011, the quality of a project, or its success, is in so many ways relative; relative to the relationships of the people working at a given problem being the most important.

To being seen as a top CIO, and a valuable member of the executive team, requires more time to be spent with business colleagues. Just six hours more a week moves you to the top end, according to the research work we completed a couple of years ago.

And one final perspective for you: research has shown that at gatherings or parties, people who listen, and occasionally ask questions that demonstrate they are listening and which prolong the conversation appropriately through a demonstration of interest in the subject, are perceived as great conversationalists even though they may say little.

Are you out there listening enough to build the right perceptions about you and your contribution to the business?

Go to any car forum; there are plenty. There you will see lots of discussions about the merits of one marque versus another. Most commentators have experienced many makes of car and there can be sensible comments which are helpful to either the new or second hand buyer, as well as the more technical people looking to track down answers to faults.

Go to any camera forum; there are plenty of those, too. There you will see lots of discussions about the merits of one camera make versus another. The forums are grouped, so you’ll get dedicated Nikon, Canon, Sony and Olympus forums and many more. You will see very strong opinions about why the other brands of camera are rubbish, have no discernable merit and the people who use them are, if I choose a polite word, idiots. The posters don’t hold back though, there is no interest in “polite” comment. Yet all of the contributors, one assumes, have something in common – they are photographers. And on the same web site, a forum about photographic printing attracts nothing but helpful comment. You may be defined as a Nikon or Canon user; you are not defined by being an HP or Epson printer user.

However, both of these situations are small fry compared to the invective Mac and PC, OS X and Windows aficionados were throwing at each other in the comments about the aforementioned article. Very few people were throwing much comment at the author, rather than at Microsoft and Apple – and then at other people commenting. I don’t understand why that is.

The occasional, more thoughtful, commentator considered the perspective the author raised that Windows appears to act like it owns the PC, while OS X respects the choices of the user. Something as simple as system updates exemplifies this perfectly – Windows updates get applied as you are shutting down, clearly a good indication that the user is off to do something else, whereas OS X never installs anything without a confirmation from the user that now is a good time (and OS X is explicit on those few occasions that a restart is needed.)

The apparent respect that OS X affords its users is not reciprocated by some of the fans with respect to their compatriots who like Windows. The opposite is also true. I wonder whether this situation arises because there is no real difference between the systems (or cameras, or cars). There is no “system” cost for swapping between cars, but there is with computers (software licenses and learning) and cameras (lenses and learning). As a result, people tend to have experienced many makes of car, but not so many brands in terms of cameras and computers (and a photo printer plugs into to anything) and as such perhaps they need to justify their choice – even to absurd levels – perhaps as much to themselves, as anyone else.

I wonder why people choose to define themselves by these things? In the end, they’re just tools, yet some people treat them as more tribal than football clubs.