John Lewis IT director Paul Coby on the challenges of Christmas

Paul Coby faces his second Christmas as IT director at department store chain John Lewis. Since joining the retailer in March 2011, after many years as CIO at British Airways, he has embraced what he calls the "retail revolution" brought about by technology, and is leading the IT aspects of the firm's "omnichannel" retail vision to combine physical and digital worlds into a seamless shopping experience. Computer Weekly asked him about the challenges of the seasonal shopping peak. 

What have been the main highlights of technology-related work during the run-up to Christmas?

Something that was really exciting for us was the launch of our much-awaited Snowman ad. As we did last year, we launched the ad on social media before it went live on TV and we found that works extremely well. We had well over two-and-a-half million views and that is really exciting to see.

We also have a rather nice John Lewis Christmas annual that we have launched as an iPad app which is downloadable free from the App store. It is a gorgeous printed annual but also an app.

The main point is we are showing how we are integrating conventional advertising with the social media world and finding that things like this do provide a new dimension in connecting with customers.

Would it be right to say that your arrival meant a new push when it comes to technology-led, customer-focused initiatives?

I wish I could say it was all down to me. I have obviously been 2000% behind our “omnichannel” retail vision and working hard to support our colleagues in delivering that. Omnichannel means that when you shop, the experience feels seamless between channels. It is about creating what we believe is a new way people will shop and not just about being in a building or online, but joining these things up.

But it isn't just me and I would not want to come across as "I saved the world". The fact is that at John Lewis it is all about changing the retail world together and I think that we are starting on that – I wouldn’t say we are there. Look at how we really integrate the Christmas experience online, on mobile, Twitter, YouTube. You see how we are talking about things in a very joined up way.

I would also say that we are leading the path in how omnichannel will look. But there is a lot more to come and my colleagues and I are working together to create a picture of how shopping will look like.

Omnichannel means that when you shop, the experience feels seamless between channels

Paul Coby, John Lewis

Can you give an example of a recent client-facing initiative that relied heavily on technology?

One of the things I can claim to be a part of is the store in Exeter. We have taken a building that is half the size of one of our conventional stores and the use of smart IT integrated with the shop experience enabled us to sell a much larger share of our assortment in a much smaller building.

We filled the wall with designs and enabled customers to go to a Johnlewis.com terminal where they could see all the assortment, colors and collect that in-store, have it delivered or pick it up later. It is a great example of how we are starting to integrate both worlds. We also put up screens around which are integrated to the product merchandising system in a very visual and interactive way with lots of information about the products.

What happens to other major ongoing back-office projects such as your electronic point-of-sale (Epos) roll-out during this time of the year?

In preparation for Christmas you stop changing things. It is not the time to make changes to anything. What I have learned is that the retail year is divided into phases. There is the first part of year when you are doing IT work, then there is the clearance in the summer, then a short window in the autumn where you can do some more IT work and after that your job is shut it all down and support the business as you go through what will be an extremely busy time.

With the Epos system in particular, we have been rolling it out throughout spring, then we stopped in the summer and resumed it in the autumn when we had some stores going live. We looked at our infrastructure, expanded capacity and started getting people trained. Then everyone starts getting ready for the peak.

Bank IT should play earlier compliance role, says think tank

Financial services regulation is an industry in itself with 140,000 pages of regulations published over the last two years, but organisations could streamline the process of meeting regulations by getting IT involved in the process earlier.

PJ Di Giammarino, CEO at think tank JWG-IT, said banks have thousands of regulations to adhere to and IT departments are critical in enabling them to do so, but this is being hindered because IT is not brought in at the beginning of the process to comply.

Speaking at a the recent Ovum Banking Technology event, PJ Di Giammarino said that, in the last two years, there has been over 140,000 pages of regulation published. Before the financial crisis kicked in, he said there would have been less than half the volume of regulation.

“There is so much going on that you cannot see the wood from the trees,” Di Giammarino said. “People are expected to digest 100 page documents every day.”

Mammoth compliance effort

Di Giammarino said that, due to the explosion in regulation since 2008, IT departments and their suppliers need to be closer to the decision-making processes.

“There is little activity at a bank that does not depend on IT. IT has to be at the table during impact assessment,” Di Giammarino said.

He said many IT departments are involved late in the process. “Change request come into IT late because they are not involved early on,” he said.

“IT and data are not thought of in the first instances but more of a consequence. But IT needs to be accountable across compliance projects.”

Di Giammarino said finance organisations are beginning to realise they have to change how they work.

One change could see suppliers being expected to provide support. “Suppliers play a key role because they have visibility across banks and they can share best practices,” said Di Giammarino.

Consultancy role for suppliers

Rik Turner, financial services analyst at Ovum, said suppliers will play an important role offering consultancy around compliance.

“Ten years ago, a lot of suppliers were coming out with products which claimed to help companies meet regulation such as Sarbanes–Oxley out of the box," said Turner. 

“This was clearly not the case and would not stand up today, because of the volume and complexities of today’s regulations.”

But he said suppliers in the enterprise data management (EDM) market could offer consultative services. Turner said the likes of IBM, EMC, specialist EDM players, as well as suppliers specialising in financial services such as Sungard could have a role.

Turner added that global banks will need to regionalise their compliance teams to meet the vastly different rules in different world regions.

16 of the most useful cloud management tools

One of the biggest concerns users have with public cloud resources is not knowing how much they will cost, given the pay-as-you-go model.

"IT shops are becoming cost centers for service delivery," says William Fellows, a researcher at the 451 Group. "But they're looking for ways to determine how their clouds are running, how much it's costing and whether it's a good value."

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Vendors provide some services around tracking usage. Amazon Web Services, for example, last week announced more granular data, allowing users to track their services hour by hour.

But there is a growing ecosystem of cloud management tools. Some help companies manage, track and optimize their use of public or private cloud resources. Others help companies automate and deploy cloud resources. And others act as a platform for managing public cloud resources.

Below is a list of 16 cloud management tools, broken up by category: cost tracking, automation and provisioning, and cloud management platform. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list, but rather an overview of some of the players.

Cost tracking

Cloudability: Provides cost usage metrics, as well as predictions of how much of certain resources users are consuming and which ones are under-utilized. The company's application programing interface (API) allows users to import metrics into various other tools for storage and analysis. Cloudability works across multiple public cloud providers as well.

More information: Cloudability

Cloudyn: Israeli-based Cloudyn provides tracking of cloud resources and recommendations of how to optimize cloud usage. It offers a free reserved instance calculator, which helps customers calculate costs related to reserving virtual machines in AWS's public cloud, and has a premium enterprise version that will provide recommendations of which cloud resources to use and alerts of underutilized cloud resources. The company claims that it helps customers avoid an average of 40% of their costs by optimizing their cloud usage. Cloudyn recently announced a partnership with Scalr to help customers automate the provisioning of cloud resources based on recommendations from Cloudyn's analysis tools.

More information: Cloudyn

Cloud Cruiser: Venture-backed Cloud Cruiser provides cost tracking and optimization analysis across a variety of IT platforms, from on-premise systems to colocation to private and public clouds. The Cloud Cruiser system allows users to measure usage and allocate costs, creating a chargeback billing model within an IT organization. The company was founded in 2010 by Dave Zabrowski, a former HP enterprise division vice president and general manager.

More information: Cloud Cruiser

Raspberry Pi gets an app store

News of the store opening was announced at the Raspberry Pi website. "Today, together with our friends at IndieCity and Velocix, were launching the Pi Store to make it easier for developers of all ages to share their games, applications, tools and tutorials with the rest of the community," the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation wrote at the website.

"The Pi Store will, we hope, become a one-stop shop for all your Raspberry Pi needs," the announcement adds. "Its also an easier way into the Raspberry Pi experience for total beginners, who will find everything they need to get going in one place, for free."

Twenty-three free titles will be part of the store's initial inventory, including LibreOffice, Asterisk, Freeciv, OpenTTD, and Iridium Rising.

The makers of the diminutive Raspberry Pi began taking orders for the computer in March and immediately sold out the first run of the product.

Raspberry Pi is essentially an uncased motherboard with 700MHz ARM processor. It's designed to run word processing, video applications, and Internet access, and includes connections for data input/output, display support, and networking.

The basic unit ($25) includes 250MB of RAM, a micro USB port, Blu-ray support, HDMI port, two USB ports and RCA video and audio connections. Ethernet support can be added for $10.

Linux flavors supported by the device include Fedora, Debian, and ArchLinux.

Rivals emerge

Since the Raspberry Pi's introduction, several other single-board, low-priced computers have been introduced to the market.

The $60 Cubieboard appeared in September. It has a 1GHz ARM processor and 4GB of RAM, and runs Android as well as Ubuntu and Linux.

At the same time, the $89 UG802 appeared, which runs Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) by default. It has a 1.6GHz dual-core ARM processor, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of onboard storage, USB ports, HDMI connector, and microSD slot.

Another unit arrived last month, the $57 A13-OLinuXino, which has a 1GHz ARM processor, a 3D Mali400 GPU, and 512MB of RAM.

Meanwhile, developers continue to find interesting applications for Raspberry Pi. For example, researchers at the University of Southampton encased one of the units in Legos and made a Minecraft server out of it.

Facebook to offer Snapchat-like 'self-destructing' message app, says report

Facebook is working on a messaging app that will allow users to send each other "self-destructing" messages and photos, according to reports. The app could expand Facebook's growing portfolio of mobile apps within weeks.

The app would be very similar to Snapchat, which enables iPhone and Android users to swap photos privately and set a time frame limiting access to the content. The files are then deleted from the users phones and Snapchats servers. Among other uses, Snapchat app seems to be very popular with sexters swapping photos.

A report from AllThingsD expects a similar Facebook app to surface within weeks.

The unnamed Facebook app would reportedly work much like Snapchat. You select one or more friends you want to share a photo with, and chose the amount of time the photo will be available for viewing (ten seconds or more). You could also see a list of current messages that weren't set to self-destruct.

So how does such an app fit in Facebooks portfolio? The social network has vastly expanded its mobile offering this year already, with a new Messenger app similar to WhatsApp and Instagram-likeCamera app (after it bought Instagram for $1 billion). In addition to a reworked and faster mobile app, Facebook also has a separate app to manage brand pages.

An app that allows users to set messages to self-destruct could improve Facebook's image as a privacy-challenged social network, since it gives users some additional control about how they share. However, its unclear whether the app would allow actual anonymity, or the degree of privacy.

If you would want to swap inappropriate images with strangers, you wouldnt use your Facebook identity and profile; for actual anonymity, an app should let you create a separate, private identity. If this isnt the case, and a Snapchat-like app for Facebook requires use of a Facebook ID, then perhaps the self-destructing messages would be more useful implemented simply as a feature within Facebooks current Messenger app.