If you have not already become aware of IP Version 6, believe me you will. IP Version 6 will become a cause celebre in almost the same way that Year 2000 became a cause celebre – the major difference being that Year 2000 was an immovable deadline, whereas IPv6 is a creeping upgrade to the Internet, which will sooner or later create a stampede of implementation. So what is it?

For those of you who do not roll up your sleeves and probe the intricacies of network routing, IP stands for Internet Protocol and an IP address, which looks something like
194.169.11.242 – i.e. four numbers, each smaller than 256 separated by full stops, but in practice a 32 bit number. These four numbers were intended to uniquely identify every computer in the world when the protocol was created and also to act as an address, so that messages could be efficiently routed between computers. Unfortunately because of the way they were allocated and the dramatic growth of the Internet, 32 bits was not enough. Indeed pockets of IPv4 address exhaustion have just now started to appear.

So IPv4 is about to be replaced by IPv6, which is 128 bits and should last us at least until we start networking our computers with other planets in other solar systems in the universe. This address space is a large enough to assign a unique address to every proton in or on the planet earth.

You could say that IPv4 was the PC Internet – an Internet, which connected together hundreds of millions of PCs and many millions of servers. IPv4 was also used within organisations for internal networking – such networks being isolated for addressing purposes from the Internet. IPv6 is, in theory, the long term answer to the addressing problem and possibly a number of other problems. It is not a quick fix for an addressing problem but a genuine evolutionary upgrade to the protocol.

Consider security. You do not need to do much investigation to conclude that the big bad network out there is awash with hackers and crackers and various other bad guys, all of whom would like to engage in nefarious activity with your network.  IPv6 provides two security enhancements, which will act as obstacles for them. Under IPv6, an Authentication Header prevents unauthorized hosts from sending traffic to some destinations by obliging the sender to securely login to the receiver. This enhancement allows implementers to define the authentication algorithm. IPv6 also employs an Encapsulating Security Header enabling encryption of traffic between two hosts. This is also algorithm-independent. Security is regarded as being so important that you might not have to wait for IPv6 to get it – the IPv6 specifications allow the same features to be added to IPv4.

IPv6 is also provides for Mobile IP, which means the ability to assign a unique IP address to every mobile device. In actual fact it does this by providing autoconfiguration capabilities, which is good news for anyone who spends time configuring networks. IPv6 offers “stateful” autoconfiguration allowing servers to dynamically assign unique addresses to computers on request using a range of reserved values. For mobile it offers “stateless” autoconfiguration which allows servers to generate globally unique addresses by concatenating the local link address with an additional number.

IPv6 is also going to be able to be more aware of the traffic that it carries, being able to distinguish between, say, real time video feeds and regular email and hence able to select the right quality of line and error correction procedures for the traffic.

Very little of the technical story is going to be of much interest to the typical IT user, but the consequences of it all, will. If you just imagine a world of hundreds of millions of connected wireless devices (laptops, PDAs, MP3 players, etc.) and billions of connected things (cars, fridges, security cameras, etc.) and then imagine all the applications that might run between any of these devices involving or possibly without the involvement of human beings and the millions of servers out there then you have the landscape if not the detail.

Many of the applications of the future will simply not work over IPv4 and in time, the software producers are not going to even attempt to accommodate it. For this reason,
IT Departments cannot wait for IPv6 to happen to them, they need to plan for the future before it arrives and, as with the Y2K problem, this means all IT Departments. Also, just like the Y2k problem there will be a cost and there will be no immediate benefit to dealing with the problem beyond the fact that you’ll be able to continue to operate. Oh, and the consultant will make a killing…. I suspect.

The following interview took place some time in 2001,as the bubble was bursting.

Q: My company is thinking about developing a commercial web site. When  developing a commercial site – is hosting in-house a wise thing for a  company to do or should we consider co-locating with an ISP, or outsource  as much as possible. If we do go in-house, what are the costs of providing adequate bandwidth?

This question is unavoidably contextual – but the answer will most likely be to outsource as much as possible. A general set of principles apply here. First you have to work out what service level you intend the web site to provide and how much traffic you are expecting to regularly visit the site. But please note most people get this wrong. If you estimate the service level too low then you have no choice but to throw money at incrementing it if it causes problems to your business and a low service level on a web site always does. And if you guess the traffic wrongly then, of course, the service level dives. So the intelligent solution is to outsource to a large scale provider that can simply increase the service level to suit the business requirement and the traffic level.

There are a number of such ISPs. It is, of course, possible that your site is as large as that of such providers and that you have the same operational capability as a large ISP. In which case keeping it in-house becomes an option. As regards the question:  what are the costs of providing adequate bandwidth? The question needs to be rephrased, from its how-long-is-a-piece-of-string format. In general the unit costs fall as the bandwidth rises but this can depend on your precise geographical situation.

Q: I’ve heard all the messages about IT getting closer to the business drivers. I hold my hands up and say message received loud and clear. However, my next job is to convey this to my footsoldiers who deal directly with users. Can you offer any advice, for example – five clear guidelines.

Here are five suggestions/guidelines:

1. Find out what the true business drivers are, if you don’t already know. Then send an email to the whole IT department telling them what they are.
2. I get bad feelings about this expression: footsoldiers who deal directly with users. Make a list of all the people in your department who don’t ever deal with users. Now find out how your department has managed to create such insular jobs and work out whether it really should be that way.
3. Explain to your whole department, including the cannon fodder you referred to above, that IT is a service department that sells its services to the rest of the company. Run a marketing campaign to the rest of the company on this basis, but do it subtly on the basis of “fostering customer care”.
4. Follow up the marketing campaign with an education campaign based upon your staff helping other departments to understand the business advantages of intranets, extranets, the internet and all the other joys of IT. Anything where IT makes a difference. Advertise these as regular liaison meetings for idea exchange, but really they are training sessions.
5. Appoint users on to all development projects including any that are outsourced. If the users are any good, make them the project manager, or at least joint project managers. That way you’ll infect some of them with It knowledge and you may save on staff costs.

Q: A year from now our company is going to amalgamate two offices into one  central location in Derby. As head of IT, what sort of strategic plans should I be making in preparation for this – I am thinking of things such as my role in change management and staff retention. Isn’t this a golden opportunity to dispose of the old and bring in the new?

It could indeed be a good opportunity to burn some dead wood, but naturally that depends on context. If your own staff are involved then you need to do two things immediately. Identify quickly who you don’t want to lose and find out what their attitude to the move is. Then get ready to replace those who aren’t going to move. The reverse applies to staff you want to lose. Find out how to discourage them via legitimate means. In the meantime, there can be little doubt that you have a logistics project on your hand.

I’d be inclined to appoint a project manager at once so that a budget can be determined. There may also be another opportunity here. Some IT Directors have problems convincing companies to spend on IT infrastructure (even though it is a necessary expenditure), so it is often less healthy than it should be. Here is an infrastructure spending necessity which definitely isn’t IT’s fault. It’s time to get the company to buy the things that are normally difficult to justify.

Q: I keep hearing about knowledge management and I can see there is value locked away somewhere that has to be harnessed. We are looking at KM from a standing start and practical advice seems to be very vague. I don’t just  want to throw money at a project that will give us an extra layer of information to deal with. Is KM an IT issue or a cultural issue? Can you give me at least three clear points of advice about how to approach KM adoption?

The problem with knowledge management is that it is a hype term, which a whole host of vendors have grasped and attached to their products. Because of this, Knowledge Management cannot be taken as referring to any specific technology and neither can it be taken as delivering any specific benefit. As such KM is neither an IT issue nor a cultural issue, but a hype issue. Here are some points of advice about KM.

• Don’t even think about adopting a buzz word.
• Research the KM product space to see what benefits the vendors are promising and can deliver and see where that fits within the three major areas of IT:
  a) transaction processing,
  b) business intelligence,
  c) work flow.
  You will probably discover that the so-called KM products fit either with b) or with c). In either case see how they fit with existing systems, existing technology and existing projects.
• Get your list of business drivers and critical success factors for the company and see if any of the technology can make a difference either at corporate level or departmental level. If none of it does ignore these products and move on to something useful.

Q: My company has expanded its global operation over the past year with several acquisitions overseas. As we get bigger, I must come up with an IT/e-business strategy that sits as comfortably in the UK as it does in Thailand and Spain, for example. Can you suggest areas that I should concentrate on? Will I encounter problems trying to work around all the regional laws that exist? Should I follow a laissez -faire policy that embraces all cultures?

The major point here is to distinguish between the general and the contextual. Despite the fact that the web tramples on geography it doesn’t destroy it. Neither does it destroy cultural differences. The general has to do with common systems and common data. Try to get the maximum possible buy-in from every territory for the implementation of a common strategy for systems and data, while allowing separate contextualisation (i.e. the user style and interface) for each area (this means that each geogrpahy designs its own web site, but uses common applications). Beneath this you can hopefully work out a common strategy for infrastructure and on top of it, a common strategy for support. These both tend to be general with some contextual bits.

Q: I’m under pressure from the board to facilitate a strategy that reduces users time on personal e-mails. Obviously, I am aware that users should have a degree of freedom to use the e-mail for non- work related matters. Can you give me practical advice on an IT solution that will strike a balance between users wants and company rules.

If you are going to allow personal email at all, then you must place a constraint on it that is workable and you must also have the ability to monitor users accurately. And while you’re at it, you may want to cover internet usage as well. Here’s an idea. First start monitoring so you know the extent of the problem. Don’t do anything until you know the true picture. (and by the way, how does the board know what it claims to know?) Then agree a policy with the board based upon a large reduction in usage and have this declared openly. (No more than an average of one email per day, or no more than three named receivers of email, or whatever). Pick off the abusers of the rules one by one: a good way to achieve this is to pick the worst offender and start automatically copying their emails to their manager after sending an email to the manager explaining why you have done this. If they do not act, then escalate.

Q: ERP users within our company have been complaining for the last six  months that the users do not have adequate competencies and that our organisation offers inadequate levels in training. As a result the improvements in productivity that were expected from the investment hasn’t occurred? The user group has made it clear that they believe it is our responsibility to ensure that both initial and update training is provided on these systems. We do not see ourselves as trainers, nor do we have the resources to do this, but at the same time HR claim IT training is not within their remit. To make matters worse, our company’s performance is not what it should be and management is not sympathetic to making sums of money available for training. Anyone have any suggestions on how we can get ourselves out of this quagmire.

You should probably bite the bullet. This is someone’s fault. If it’s yours then admit it and go cap in hand for the money. If it is someone else’s fault, then pin it down and tell them to go and find funds. If no funds appear then the only solution is to fund it from existing resources or by cunning. One possible get-out-of-jail-free card is a “new support desk system” that just happens to have remote training capabilities. Buy one, claiming massive savings from this brave initiative (and there should be some unless you already have an excellent system). Now tie the two problems together by implementing the new support system on the ERP software first and make training an invisible part of this. If none of this works then turn to the job pages.

2001 was a bad year for the IT industry – about as bad as it gets. For the chip manufacturers it was abysmal with the final count likely to show a drop of 35 percent or so in global sales. This was spread across the board, with falls in chip sales for computers, networking devices and communications equipment. Even the embedded market appears to have suffered a dip. The PC industry, historically the main motor of the IT industry, looks as though it too will show a dip in sales – of 6 percent or so – when the figures are in. In the previous year, it grew by 14 percent.

Much of the software industry was moribund, with only a few companies bucking the downward trend put in train by the US recession. It is too early to say whether Windows XP or .Net will make a difference to anything. Linux continued its inexorable march forward, but only IBM has yet learned how to generate significant revenues from Open Source (you use it to sell mainframes).

The plight of the IT industry has been compounded by the collapse of the communications industry. As the year 2000 dawned, the communications industry was on a high and everyone’s expectation, including my own, was that it would drive the next major upswing. It may well still happen, indeed it is hard to imagine that it wont, but exactly the opposite happened in 2001. The European Telcos had shot themselves in the collective foot by bidding absurd amounts for G3 licenses with no prospect of early revenues and no absolute guarantee of revenues in the long term either. The chickens came home to roost in 2001 as the debt piled up, revenues slumped and share prices sank to the floor. North America told a similar story, without the excuse of G3. AT&T, Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies posted multi-billion dollar losses as sales volumes fell like a stone, and the share prices followed suit.

The IT industry and the communications industry, which are clearly in the process of converging are now also in the process of rationalising. The surprise of 2001 was the yet-to-be-resolved attempt by Hewlett Packard to acquire/merge with Compaq. In retrospect it looks logical, if not inevitable. The PC market was in retreat and margins were thinner than ever. All the PC giants were hurting and smaller companies were disappearing from the scene. What made it worse was that Dell was pushing prices down hard, winning market share in the process, but even it ended up laying off staff.
So, what of 2002?

The Internet will proceed to do what it has been doing, which is to extend its reach and bind things together. This year should see a growth in the uptake of DSL lines in Europe and this in turn could stimulate the Internet entertainment industry. DSL lines are already heavily used in US metropolitan areas. The immediate benefit of having one is that the Internet can be “always on”, like a television or radio. The longer term possibilities will see the development of specific devices that take advantage; Games Internet machines, Digital TV based machines, sound systems, etc. This spells the end of the mass market for PCs in the home, so that any revival of the PC market in 2002, if it happens at all, will be short lived.

However there is still no natural replacement for the PC in the corporation and until one appears and proliferates, this market should hold up. The problem here is that it is becoming a replacement market. Newer faster PCs provide little of benefit to the business outside niche areas such as CAD. So why replace them? Not just for Windows XP, surely?

There has been growth though in the use of mobile technology. The conundrum here is “who owns the market?” Compaq has made a very sensible pitch for this market with the iPAQ, and has taken the wind out of the Palm Pilot’s sales. The Blackberry too, which has recently made an appearance in the UK, has gathered a slice of the corporate market. The problem is that Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola would like to own this market, and between them they do own the cell phone market. They have the numbers on their side and if they have any sense they’ll simply copy successful ideas from the PDA market and undercut the competition. The mathematics is helpful, but victory is not assured. We should see this market mature in 2002.

The trend that I expect to see drive the industry in 2002 is the trend to consolidation of IT resources. This trend is already in play – as evidenced by the revival of mainframe sales and the growth in the sales of large servers and SANs. The destiny of the Internet, as has been pointed out many times by many people, is to become an “information utility”. In order to do that it needs to build operational economies of scale, in one way or another. Consolidation of computer resource is the name of the game and it happening with ICL (Fujitsu), IBM, EDS and many others managing larger and larger facilities. It is happening in the growth of ISP data centers and ASP operations like oracle On-line. It is also happening in the large corporates.

This is interesting in many ways, but I guess it’ll still be quite a while before we buy “virtual PCs” in the same way that we buy use of the telephone network. Not this year any way.