And so with that, on that theme, I'd like to introduce Professor Louise Newman to deliver a keynote address. Louise Newman is a Professor of Developmental Psychiatry and Director of One Ash University Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Psychology. Prior to this appointment, she was a Chair of Perinatal and Infant Psychiatry at the University of Newcastle and the previous Director of the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry. In January 2011, she was appointed as a member in the General Division of the Order of Australia. She is a practicing infant psychiatrist with expertise in the areas of disorders of early parenting and attachment, difficulties in infants. She has undertaken research into the issues confronting parents and histories of early trauma and neglect. Her current research focuses on the evaluation of infant-parent interventions in high-risk populations, the concept of parental reflective functioning in mothers with borderline personality disorder and the neurobiology of parenting disturbance. She has published in the areas of infant mental health, attachment disorders, trauma and prevention of child abuse. She is co-author of the textbooks Clinical Skills in Infant Mental Health and Contemporary Approaches in Child and Adolescent Mental Health. She is a Convener of the Alliance of Health Professions for Asylum Seekers and Vice President of Doctors for Refugees. She has been a Government Advisor on Asylum Seeker and Refugee Mental Health and contributed to the development of policy for mental health screening and response to torture survivors. She has been involved in research in the impact of immigration detention on child asylum seekers. I'd like to welcome Louise for the keynote address. Thank you very much. It's really such a pleasure to see everything at this stage. And I remember very clearly having discussions several years ago now with Kate Jones when she said, look, I've got an idea. And we were sitting down just over a cup of coffee and she had captured something that was so crucial within our work. The need to have a vision about healing and recovery for children who'd experienced such traumatic events. And things went on from there and here we are. So congratulations to everyone who's been involved. And it obviously takes a huge amount of work to get from the vision to the operationalisation of such a concept. But I think what we have here is truly a very innovative approach, a vision that says that we need to do something therapeutic for the most vulnerable children, for those most in need, for those where we know that they've suffered trauma and disruption to the extent that unless we do something it's likely to have very long-term consequences for functioning, but particularly for relations and connectedness to others and social inclusion. So there are many, many reasons. I think the evidence is actually very clear about why we should be doing exactly what Kate and others have been working on. So it's a therapeutic approach that very importantly says trauma and attachment models do have something to offer when we translate them into the sort of practices and services that we hope to have at a centre like this, where there can be a focus on rebuilding children's sense of belief in others, children's sense of trust in others and the capacity to have relationships that are meaningful, that are reciprocal and that are safe. So calling this a place rather than a clinic or an office or a building I think is actually very, very symbolic and very, very important. This needs to be a safe place for children to come to. A place where they can have a sense that this is actually a secure base if we're thinking in the terms of attachment theory. So I think the symbolism, the name, a plant that's well known for its role in healing and recovery are very important. So from my perspective essentially this is an approach based on an understanding of the rights of children. The children have a right to care and protection. Adults, communities, societies and cultures have a role in providing that. Children have a right to safe relationships and if they have been harmed they have a right to therapeutic input and they have a right to recovery. So the rights of children I think is something that underpin all these sorts of activities and the building of a model like this. But, and I think I can't resist the opportunity to say a few words about the real need in the current political climate to maintain a focus on the rights of children, all children. I think during the proceedings today we'll hear about many different groups of children, their needs, their vulnerabilities, whether that's from indigenous populations to multicultural groups and in the work that I'm involved in, children and infants who are seeking asylum and safety in this country but are not provided that at all. So I think bearing that in mind as we go forward in developing approaches to working with children is going to be very important. Okay, can you go on to the next one? Thanks. Sorry, the clicker's not functional. Okay, so we're all familiar with a very broad notions of what actually constitutes child abuse and neglect. Now we tend to think clearly within a particular health framework but we also need to be mindful of the broader aspects where societies and communities overall can fail to protect children or can set up policies and practices that actually damage children in some way. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Children, if we're thinking within a rights framework, clearly underpins this project but many activities. We look at children's rights not only for care and protection but for participation and the voice of children I think is something that's often very difficult or fairly underplayed when we have these discussions so it's very pleasing to see in this project that children will be very much seen as having a role and a voice in the sorts of interventions and approaches that they might be involved in. And I think what's fundamental to the UN Convention is that rights are universal. They don't apply to some children and not to others. They actually apply to all children, wherever they might be, whatever their visa status. Now a lot of my workers with children of this age are very young and of course when we're thinking about the very young, we speak for them. They're essentially in need of someone to think about them, to bear them in mind, to actually talk about their needs and interests on their behalf as best as we can. At the moment in the parent-infant mental health unit that I run at Monash I have an asylum-seeker mother with a small baby who's seven months of age who have come from Christmas Island to Darwin where this mother delivered to find themselves in detention in Melbourne and a mother who finds herself terrified and despairing that her baby will be sent to Nauru or potentially worse to Madison Island. She's one of a group of mothers who are currently in deep states of despair as you may have heard about. In the middle of this really complex debate I think maybe what's being forgotten are the rights of children to care and protection.  He's not growing, he finds it difficult to eat. He's very small, for those of you who understand baby's issues he's under six kilos and he's seven months of age. He's a very thin, sad, despairing baby with a despairing mother. When we look at situations like this I think it's very important that someone thinks about child development, the rights of the child, the need to protect children and the vulnerable regardless sometimes of political debates where this can get very much lost which is what we're seeing at the moment. Particularly again for the very young. We're also as people have alluded to talking about longer term consequences that of the implications of early developmental trauma on children's neurological development, their brain development, the development of their emotional capacities and importantly the development of their capacities to relate. So when we think about some of the most vulnerable children I think it's very sobering when we think about not only the current distress and trauma that we might need to respond to but also the implications of this for social functioning, for society as a whole. Particularly in an era when we are concerned about adolescent mental health and we know that many of those adolescents with mental health problems have come from very traumatic backgrounds. So even more concerning when we look at government approaches and policies that literally replicate some of the very traumatic experiences that the rest of us spend our time trying to treat and to prevent. I think very important debates at the moment. The young, particularly the infants in the 0-3 period can suffer a huge variety of traumas with these long term implications but particularly important are going to be the impact on attachment relationships connectedness with others. There's a lot of discussion in this field of course about the importance of attachment. Our attachment to our carers, to our extended family networks to community, to culture, are fundamental to human functioning. They provide a set of meanings, scaffolding for interpersonal interactions and shared values and the capacity we hope to transmit those shared values to the next generation. I think and we'll hear more about this today obviously but the impact on groups such as Indigenous communities with disruption of attachment and hugely significant and we've seen the long term implications of that as we look at the translation of disrupted attachments and caregiving contexts into disrupted social functioning and the real need to actually intervene in that and prevent that rather than cast moral aspersions on particular people. I think the same applies when we look at the asylum seekers. The motivation of these people to offer their child a future, a better life is a worthy motivation and yet what we hear constantly at the moment and very difficult to intervene in this and to actually have a more broader and sophisticated discussion is that these are somehow bad people wanting to exploit others with only self-interest at heart. I think that's very disappointing that we in Australia have sunk to such a level that we can't even have a more sophisticated discussion of some of the core values that motivate anyone to protect their children. I would like to think that all of us, if we found ourselves in situations where we were persecuted, discriminated against or our children had no future, we would all become asylum seekers, I would hope, and take our children. So we have, I think, academically a great interest in the field of so-called developmental traumatology which tries to understand the impact of trauma on development and the way trauma expresses itself at different age groups has been a marvellous academic exercise. We do know a lot more about the long-term implications of trauma and how we maybe can intervene. We have evidence-based models which can help us shape therapeutic approaches. What's very important, though, is that we maintain the momentum and have bases where we can actually do this sort of work, where we can look at the evaluation of tailor-made interventions for different population groups, for different communities that are based on an understanding of the way in which trauma is experienced and expressed and different ways of intervening. So we can't assume that all different, all traumatised groups in the community will respond to the same approach. So the dialogue with communities themselves around what constitutes trauma, what does recovery mean, I think is very important. At my unit, we're doing some of that work with young refugees who have been extremely traumatised, but talking to them in terms of their own cultural set of meanings and understandings about what does recovery mean, what's going to be helpful, what sort of services do we need, what would you actually come to if we had something. And I think what's most noticeable is that many of these groups do not easily go to the mainstream public hospital sector for support or treatment. And as one young Sudanese boy said to me, why would I go to the hospital? The hospital at home in his country is the place you go when you're really going to die, where there is no alternative. He said, why don't you come to me? Why don't you come to where we hang out, his group of young people? And I think that's a simple example, but really very, very important that we need to avoid imposing our particular frameworks and understandings of trauma and recovery on diverse populations, to make much more embedding ourselves within those population groups and thinking about what we can do. The evidence about the impact of early adversity in the broad sense on development and its relationship to mental health outcomes is actually quite clear. I'm making this point, and I know I'm speaking to the converted, but I think it's an important point to highlight in terms of some of the debates that go on currently. A lot of these debates, of course, are about how can we get more resources and funding for our particular part of the service? How can we build up, in my perspective, how can I get more money for infants when infants are not necessarily going to present with mental health problems until later? Someone who works with young people or adolescents might argue, well, I should have more of the funding because that's when the young people present to services. So we get into these very limited and rather polarized discussions. What we do know is that all mental health problems, whether they present in adolescence or young adulthood, have underlying vulnerability and risk factors, and that trauma, abuse and neglect is probably the most significant group of factors that we know about in terms of large-scale epidemiological studies. Those are the factors that contribute to the whole range of mental health problems down the track. Not just one mental health problem, not just something that we might call post-traumatic stress disorder or so-called borderline personality disorder which some people will be familiar with, sometimes not helpful labels, but the entire range of mental health problems. In other words, there's increasing evidence that trauma, abuse and maltreatment early on set up neurovulnerability to the entire range of mental health problems. Now, we don't know enough about why one person develops a particular disorder, another person develops a different one. There are obviously many factors contributing to that, but what's significant is what we do know. Trauma and abuse contribute in a major way to neurovulnerability and to the burden of mental health problems in adolescence and young adulthood. What that says to me, and I'm totally biased obviously, what it says to me is that we should be doing much more about early identification and early intervention of these high-risk families and children who are already exposed at a very young age to trauma and abuse. We know enough about the science of brain development to say that those experiences, in and of themselves, contribute to setting up a vulnerable brain, a brain that's much more likely to develop mental health problems in response to later trauma and stress. What we know from a social and cultural perspective is that trauma and stress is cumulative, and people who are vulnerable, may vulnerable in their early years by adversity, attachment disruption, abuse, neglect and so on, are more likely to have stressful experiences down the lifespan, sensitised to poor relational functioning, to re-exploitation and re-victimisation, very vulnerable in that sense, and then more likely to have very marked responses in terms of stress response. So doing something about early vulnerability really speaks to me about primary prevention as far as we can do that, but certainly we need greater expertise and service responses in how to actually intervene for these children who are at great vulnerability of contributing to our overall community burden of mental health. Some of the examples, I guess, are fairly well known, and the Romanian and Bulgarian orphans such as these children in unbelievably poor institutional care where many, of course, were also abused in a direct sense, as well as being neglected under fed and having little in the way of human interaction. These terrible examples have, of course, allowed us to understand much more about the developmental pathways, the impacts of these sorts of experiences. And Kate Jones, to get back to Kate, and I've had many discussions over the years about some of these children who we see out of home care and under the various programs who continue to have, even though they've been in places of safety for many years, ongoing difficulties with attachment and with believing that they are safe. So some of these young people from these sorts of backgrounds neurologically and functionally remain oriented around survival, makes perfect sense if you've lived in an environment like this. They're operating in a basic and core level around surviving in case something terrible happens again and not being able to re-establish a sense of safety. So for all the children that we're talking about today, re-establishing a sense of safety and a belief and a hope for the future that things might be all right is going to be pretty fundamental, but very difficult for some children with these experiences.  Equivalent degeneration and loss of brain tissue that we might see in someone who has a degenerative dementia in their later years. Fortunately, we do know a lot more about the capacity of the young brain to regenerate and to actually recover to varying degrees from some of these experiences. But this is, I think, a very important point that a lot of us spend time talking about the needs of children in an emotional and psychological way. We're also talking about in the early years the way the child's brain develops and is shaped or in this situation damaged by the social and emotional environment that they find themselves in. The children in detention is probably, I think, an extremely, it's an emotional issue, but an issue which I personally think that none of us who work with children or in child protection settings can be neutral on. I find it very puzzling when people say to me, I don't have a view on children in detention. I'm not prepared to speak out or to have a stated belief about this because it's so political. Child protection, the needs of children, the rights to protect children have always been political. I think it's absolutely naive to assume that there's ever been anything different. We're very clear that we advocate for the rights of children in the mainstream community. We have people working extremely hard in indigenous communities and other groups. We're used to that, and I'm really, I think it's very concerning that this group of children is seen as somehow different as if rights apply to others but not to these children. This is a drawing from a child on Manus Island when children were there. These children experience themselves literally as imprisoned, as trapped. And this girl, you can't read her writing there, but she talks about the dots being, she keeps a calendar of every day that she's in detention. This is an eight-year-old child. The issues for infants, of course, over the years have been raised and have been raised today, as we speak, and as you may be aware, they've been, in the last two days, 10 mothers on Christmas Island have been engaging in self-harm and suicidal behaviours of varying types. What's significant about that is that it is about their babies. Women are of the belief that if they, even if one successfully suicided, then maybe the babies would be given better options. And I think this speaks to tremendous despair and raises very significant questions for all of us involved in children about the necessity of keeping children in places like Christmas Island, the necessity of threatening these young women and their babies with transfer to somewhere like Nauru, where having been there, the circumstances of detention and the capacity to meet the needs of vulnerable children are incredibly limited. So the asylum-seeker children also include, of course, children without families. Children are the unaccompanied minors, many of whom are now, of course, in our community, and are still around 50% of young people arriving unaccompanied. Children within these environments have been exposed to the sorts of traumas that when we speak about trauma in general, we're very concerned about, but these have even greater magnitude. Children are witnessing the behavioural disturbances that have gone on in these environments over the last decade. Children are not able to be protected in terms of what they're exposed to. Children with families witness the mental breakdown of their parents, such as these young children on Christmas Island at the moment. Many of the parents are depressed, despairing, fail to protect children because of their own mental health problems. So we have cumulative risk in these sorts of situations. These are drawings that we collected from the initial round of detention in Baxter and Woomera. Children exposed to riots, to extreme riot responses. And I think we're probably all familiar with these sorts of descriptions of what actually went on in detention. But the question I think we need to ask as a group of people involved in responding to children at need is why on earth we're doing it again? And I think this is one of the most difficult questions when the evidence in terms of the research and unsurprising results that children are damaged in these environments, I think that's fairly clear. The Department and the Minister is unlikely to challenge that directly. But I think what makes the current situation even more morally perilous, if you like, is that the conditions of detention which cause in a major way the problems that we've seen and the developmental and poor psychological outcomes for children are in fact being replicated. Despite the fact that we have, in migration law, statements to the effect that children should only be detained as a matter of last resort for extremely brief periods of time for necessary processing. I don't think that's unreasonable. But at the moment we are detaining children and babies as a matter of first resort and as you're aware, not offering care and protection for unauthorised, so-called unauthorised arrival. So these, in many ways, are the crises that come up when we work with child protection and children in need. And many of us in our different work contexts are experienced in advocacy and in making statements and trying to broaden the discussion and actually trying to have a more comprehensive approach and essentially a more humane approach to the most vulnerable. So I think we can all contribute to this discussion but particularly important that we don't remain neutral. So we've called this the groups that I'm involved with using quite strong language but I'm not going to shy away from the strong language. That the great irony of a marvellous project like this and what we all have to struggle with is the fact that whilst we're doing this and contributing in such a significant way to developing a therapeutic framework for children we have some in our political leadership who are literally supporting the abuse of children and arguing that this is necessary in some way for the greater good. I think that's the argument we need to challenge from a human rights perspective and from a child protection perspective that no state should be abusing children in this way. That states and communities have a responsibility, a key responsibility to protect children that all of us as members of the community have a right and should be opposing state-sanctioned, abusive children or any policy or practice that is damaging children and that we have a view on this. So I would urge you if you feel strongly enough about this issue to actually contribute to that discussion on the basis of the work and support that you already have for child protection. A unit such as this, a place of safety like this project will in fact see some asylum seeker and refugee children no doubt and will have, I hope, an ongoing and significant role in protecting those children in the same ways we protect any others. Thank you very much.


But we're going to try to look at this a little differently during this last portion about where the most strength is, where some of the deficits are as a way of patting out and understanding what needs to be done. So a bit of a more practical, pragmatic approach to getting this more mature as fast as possible and make it most usable and applicable and beneficial to enterprises. So with that, you're familiar with the panel, but I'll go through them anyway just for the sake of for anyone that may have come in late. We're joined by Michael Fulton, he's principal architect at CC&C Solutions, Philippe Genest and a partner in Accenture, Sue Desiderio, the director of Price Warhouse, a director at Price Warhouse Coopers, Dwight David, enterprise architect, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Rob Akershoek, solution architect, IT for IT at Shell, IT International. So let me start with our panel and just go down the line. Philippe, tell me where you think the most progress has been made in terms of making this a mature reference architecture and where you think the most work is needed, at least from your slice and view on these. Most, okay, greatest level of maturity I think, that's a tough one. I think I like all the two innovations that we have in the IT for IT reference architecture, the service backbone and the R2F. I think we keep hammering on this message, but I think it's important for people to understand that these are the two greatest novelties of the reference architecture. Are they mature? I think they are mature enough, they'll probably evolve in their level of maturity. There are a number of areas that are maturing and some that we have in design. The IT financial management, for instance, is one that, again, I'm working on a little bit and the service costing within that, which I think will get a chance to get ready by version 2.1 and the idea is to have it as guidance into version 2.1. The value streams by themselves I think are also mature and almost complete. There are a number of improvements we can make to all of them, but I think overall the reference architecture is usable today, has an architecture to start with. Not quite for vendor certification, although that's upcoming. There are a number of good things and a number of implementations that would benefit from using the current IT for IT reference architecture version 2.0. Sue, also where do you see the most traction and growth and what would you like to see improved? I would say that I would agree with Philippe's statements. I would say, and also even picking up on what Lars had said earlier this morning, I do think it is an easier entry point to start with to detect a correct, which is often where we see it because it's maybe one of the value streams that's a little bit more known and understood, and so that's an easier point of entry for the whole IT for IT value chain compared to some of the other value streams. I think the service model is definitely, as we've stated all along, the backbone to the whole IT value chain, and although I think it is well formed in a good mature state, I think there's still plenty of work to do to really make that consumable to the IT organizations to really understand all the different phases of the life cycle, all the different data objects that make up the service backbone, and so that is something that we are currently working on for the 2.1 version so that we have better examples we can really show how it applies in a real IT organization and it's not just what's in the documentation today.  Well, I don't think it's about positive and negative in this case, but it's like some areas where we need to work on specifically is like the service broker role that you see in the IT organization, so interfacing with your suppliers. So we have identified a number of areas where we have touch point with the vendors, like if you have your catalog, you need to synchronize catalog information with the external vendors and aggregate the net in your own catalog, but also the fulfillment API of how do you communicate a request to your suppliers or different technology stacks and getting the consumption and cost data in. So that's an area that I think we define that, but we need to go lower level of detail is how do we actually integrate with the vendors and our service providers, I must say. So there's on many different levels, it's on the catalog level and the request fulfillment that you'd actually do provision seem to be the cost to consumption data and those kind of level. And another topic I think is still the linking into security and identity access management. It's an area where we still need to clearly identify, you have an identity or IT organization that has a subscription to a service. So the linking to that access management which is part of the subscription and of course the fulfillment. We didn't identify as a separate functional component. And to why were you most optimistic and where would you put more emphasis? Oh, I'll start with the latter. I think more emphasis needs to be really our approach to specifically to detect correct. Oftentimes I see people thinking about detect the correct as really in the traditional mode of being reactive as really as opposed to really understanding that this model can be applied even to the new change in user friendly type of economy and within the hybrid type of IT. So I think really a change in thinking in the application of the value streams really would also help us. I think many of us have a lot of gray hairs including myself. So we revert to the old way of thinking as opposed to the way we should be moving forward. So that's really I think the area that we can do the most. What I think is really good though is that a lot of people understand, detect the correct. So it's an easy adoption in terms of understanding the reference architecture. It's a good entry point to the IT for IT reference architecture. So that's where I see the actual benefit and I would also again encourage us to actually make it useful, use it, try it. The most benefit happens then. And Michael, same room for optimism and room for improvement. Yeah, I want to build on Dwight's point around trying it by sharing the one thing I'm most excited about, particularly this week and that's the management guide. And particularly very specifically chapter five of the management guide. I hope all of you got a chance to grab your copy of that. If you haven't, I recommend downloading it from the upper group website. That chapter is just absolutely rich in content about how to actually implement IT for IT. And I tip my hat to Rob who did a great piece of work along with several other people but it's just if you want to pick up this standard and use it, start there. Start with chapter five of the management guide and you may not need to go much further because that's just great content to work with. So I'm very excited about that. From a standpoint of where we need to continue to evolve and grow as a standard, we've referenced some of the individual pieces but at a higher level, I think the supporting activities in general really all still need to evolve and get to the level of detail that we have with the value streams. So that's a key area for me and then the next area that I would highlight and I know we're actively starting work on this is really around getting down to that level of detail where we can do data interoperability. Where we can start to outline the specifics that are needed to define APIs between the functional components in such a way that we can ultimately really bring us back to that open group vision of boundaryless information flow. And picking up on that when we finished our main panel in the plenary this morning just before lunch, one of the last points made was how do we bridge the divide between a cloud provider or a series of providers and have IT in a brokering role within the organization. But as the broker, they're going to be held responsible for the performance regardless of where those services originate and how they interoperate or not. So what do we see as needed in order to make that boundarylessness extend to this idea of a brokered IT organization, a hybrid organization, but still able to produce a common approach to support and quality of service across IT in that particular organization. So again, let's start on one end of the panel and work our way along. How do we get to that hybrid vision, Philippe? I think we'll get there step by step. I think there's a practical step that's implementable already today. My suggestion would be that every customer company that selects an outsourcer, that selects a cloud vendor, that selects a product, uses the IT for IT reference architecture in the RFP, putting a strong emphasis on the integration. We see a lot of RFPs that are silo-based still, which one is the best product for project and portfolio management, which one is the best service management tool. But it's not very frequent that we see the integration as being the top notch value measured in the RFP. So that would be one point, the discussions with vendors, again cloud vendors or outsourcers or consulting firms, should start from this, use it as an integration architecture, and tell us how you would do things based on these standardized concepts. So today that's a practical step that can be used or employed. I think in a second step, when we go forward or further into the vendor specification, there are vendors today or again when you analyze the products and the cloud offerings that are closer to the concepts we have in the reference architecture. Maybe not certified, maybe not the same terminology, but the concepts are there, or the way to the concepts is closer. And then ultimately, step three and three and a half will be product vendor certified, cloud service offering certified, and hopefully so full integration according to the RA, and eventually even plug and play. Maybe I'm dreaming a little bit about plug and play, but at least integration. And what sort of timeframe would you put on those steps? Is this a two-year process, a four-year process, too soon to tell? That's a tough one. I suppose the vendors should be responding to this one, but no, I think for the cloud service providers, it's a little bit trickier, but for the consulting firm, for the service providers, it should be what it takes to get the workforce trained and to get the concepts spread inside the organization. So I would say within six to 12 months, the critical mass should be there in these organizations. It's possible, stuff, but project by project, customer by customer, it's achievable. Vendors, I know some are on the way, and we've seen several vendors talk about IT for IT in this venue, in this conference. So I'm pretty sure that those have, you know, I know that those have significant efforts on the way and are preparing for vendor certification, and it will be probably a multi-year process to get the full suite of product certified because there's quite a lot to change in the underlying software, but progressively we should get there. So having first levels of certification within, I don't know, one to two years, possibly even sooner, and be interested in knowing what the vendor responses will be. Mm-hmm. Sue, along the same lines, what do you see needed in order to make the IT department able to exercise the responsibility of delivering IT across multiple players and multiple boundaries? Yeah, again, I think it's starting with the awareness and the open communication about IT for IT and on a specific instance, where does that fit in? So depending on the services we're getting from vendors, from whether it be even internal services that we're getting or across, really, where do they fit into the whole IT for IT framework? What functions are we getting? What are those key components within that? And, you know, kind of where our interface points are and really have those conversations up front in the contract conversations and whatnot. So that it's, you know, everyone's aware of what we're really trying to accomplish and that we really are trying to seek that seamless integration between, you know, ourselves and those suppliers. Mm-hmm. Rob, this would appear to be a buyer's market in terms of their ability to exercise some influence. If they go seeking RFPs, if there are a fewer cloud providers and there were general vendors in a traditional IT environment, they should be able to dictate this, don't you think? You mean who dictates it? I would, in the cloud world, I would say the consumer would not dictate at all. See, that's the traditional way that we dictate how an operator should provide us data. And so that's the problem with the cloud. We want a consumer standard service. So in that sense, we cannot tell the cloud vendor, you sent me your cost data in this format, right? That will not work because we don't want the cloud vendor to make something proprietary for us. So that's the first challenge. The cloud vendors are out there and we don't want to dictate. We're going to assume a standard service. So if they set up a catalog in their way, we have to adopt that. If they do the billing on their way, we have to adopt it or select another cloud vendor. So that's the only option you have. Select another vendor or adopt the management practices of the cloud vendor because otherwise we will continuously update, I have to update it according to our policy. So that's a key challenge. So that's why managing your cloud vendors is really about the entire value change. So you start with strategy to portfolio, thinking about what cloud services do I put in my offerings or my portfolio, I must say. So defining, let's say for past platforms, we use vendor A and for infrastructure service, vendor B. So that's where it starts. Which vendors do I engage with? And then going down to the request to fulfill, it's more like, okay, what are the products that we're allowed to order and how do we provision those? And unfortunately, the cloud vendors, they don't have IT for IT yet. Meaning we have to do some work, let's say, the same, how IT for IT defines it. Let's say we want to provision a cloud environment. We make sure that all the cloud resources we provision are linked to that subscription, linked to that service. So at least we know the components that the cloud vendor is managing, where it belongs to and which service is consuming that. So I'm gonna jump in on Dwight, I apologize Dwight. But to Rob's point, I think Rob has got a key point here around the expectations being different around cloud vendors. And that's why I think IT for IT is actually so powerful. A cloud vendor is not going to customize their interfaces for every single individual company. But we can hold cloud vendors accountable to an open industry standard like IT for IT, if we've detailed out the right levels of interoperability. And so to me, that's the way that this thing comes together long term, is through this open standard. And then through that RFP process, hold customer organizations holding their vendors accountable to delivering against that open standard. And I think in the world of cloud, I think that's actually to the benefit of the cloud providers as well. Yeah, I think that's a key point you make there, indeed. And even just to piggyback on what you're saying, it goes back to the value proposition. Why am I doing this, right? And if we have something that's an open standard, it enables velocity, you can identify costs much easier, it's simpler, so really it goes back again to the value proposition and showing really these cloud vendors that because of a standard, I am able to consume more of your service, I'm able to consume your service easier. And here, I'm guaranteed based on, because it's a standard, to get my value. So again, back to the value proposition, which the open standard offers. Great. A couple of other threads that we heard earlier today were the idea that this standard makes more sense at least now for large organizations and say startups or SMBs. And that automation is essential and that manual processes are a bug. How do you react to that? Is that wisdom and truth for you that automation is king and that this is designed for large, complex organizations? Again, we'll start on one side with Philippe. If it will be, sorry, it will be a lot, it will take more work for a large organization to deploy the full RA that it will be for a smaller organization. I think those organizations that today use a lot of dev ops practices, agile practices that are close to the concepts that we have service catalog, service backbone, should be able to get it straight very quickly as a matter of fact, including with vendor products and things that aren't necessarily fully certified, but at least for which the concepts are quite close to what we're recommending here. So the large organizations will have a different set of challenges, which is that there is a massive legacy that we need to transform along the concepts. So it's possible and we heard recommendation. Start with D2C or do it one way or another. But I would say that the smaller organizations can get it right by simplifying some of the implementations, getting the right tools that can move faster on two new tools. And I view it as two different challenges, but not necessarily in adapted for the smaller organizations. It's a set of very good practices that are implementable and the description is in the books, basically, that have just been published. The ones for which I see an extra challenge perhaps, or at least that I see today in the industry is the big outsourcers. You know, those long-term contracts, data center outsourcing, five years, networks, so on and so forth. Companies that use those should plan before their contract renegotiation, exactly what I said for the RFPs for vendor products. When you are planning a year ahead, two years ahead, even three years ahead to renegotiate your outsourcing contracts, again, introduce the reference architecture, use it as a bit of a benchmark for who you're gonna contract with. And if you know that you're gonna renegotiate with the same vendor, try and influence them enough that they can, you know, you can have these concepts and these architectures in place. Sue, how about this issue of automation? Is it essential to be largely automated to realize the full benefits of IT for IT, or is that more of a nice to have or a goal? How what's the relationship between a high degree of automation in your IT organization for the support of these activities and the standard reference architecture? Yeah, I definitely am a believer that automation is key, so we definitely have to get automation throughout the whole end-to-end value chain, no matter what, that's really part of the whole transformation going into this new model. So yeah, I think you see that actually throughout the whole value chain. I mean, we talked about it, I think, individually on the different value streams and how it comes back. I also wanna touch back on, you know, what's the right size company or firm to actually pick up the IT for IT? And I do agree with where Philip was coming from, is that I think your smaller shops can actually pick it up and start leveraging it more quickly because they don't have that legacy and all that historical legacy IT that was done, you know, where it's very, you know, not built on composite services and things, but everything, you know, on a system is, you know, pinpointing direct servers and direct networks and all this instead of the building it on services like a hosting service and a monitoring response service. So for your larger IT organizations, you know, there's a lot more change, but it's critical for us to really survive and actually be viable in the future for those IT shops, the larger ones and larger organizations to really start adopting and moving forward. And it's not a big bang. We on a larger IT shop are gonna be running in a mixed mode for a long time to come. So it's really looking at where do you start really seeing that business value and as you look at new initiatives and things within your organization, how do you start moving into the new model with the new things? How do you start transitioning your legacy systems and whatnot into more of the new way of thinking and really looking at that consumption model and what we're really trying to do which is focus on that business outcome. So it's much harder for the larger IT shops, I would say, but I do think the concepts apply to all sizes. Rob, the subject of the moment is size and automation. I think the principle would just discuss automation is, we automate always, it's a good principle, but if you look at the legacy as you mentioned, so you're not gonna automate your legacy unless you have a real good business case for that, so you need to standardize your services on many different layers and that's what you see in the clouds, cloud vendors are standardizing extremely, say these are my standard components and you have to do the same, you say these are our standard services and we're gonna automate those and the rest, the legacy ones is you cannot automate or you probably don't want to automate those. So it's more standardization, more standard configurations and then you can automate and that valid for detector as well if you have a very complex configurations that changes all the time without any standard. So and even if you're small, let's say you deploy to the cloud there because typically if you're small and you probably consume more from the cloud, there you still use their automation tools, right? And it can be done initially through a web portal to it could be Amazon or Azure, but you could also have them to standardize like infrastructure code there, so as a developer you're gonna do that. So it doesn't have to be small or a large organization, it's even for small environments you can do that and you probably should to make it repeatable, yeah. Yes, so small organizations don't want to remain small all the time. They actually want to grow. So it starts really, growth starts with a mindset, a thinking mindset. By applying the reference architecture, even though you don't apply every single point to my one man or two man shop, it then helps me, it positions me, it gives me the frame of reference, the thinking to enable growth and so it grows organically so you don't end up with the legacy baggage that most of the large companies have and small companies may get acquired, right? At least they have good discipline or they may acquire others as they grow. So I think the application of the reference architecture, IT for IT is just not for large companies. It's also for small companies and I'm saying that as a small business owner myself. Can I add to that, that if you are starting now as a cloud, deploy to the cloud, maybe the best way is to start with automation at the first, or at least design for automation because if once you have a few thousand servers running in the cloud and you didn't start with that concept to start off, then you already have legacy after a few years running in the cloud. So you should start thinking about automation from the start and not with your legacy of course but if you're now moving to the cloud, design that and build that immediately on the control, let's say. Yeah, on this topic of size, you may, if you were with us yesterday, you might have participated in a maturity model conversation if you were here this morning for Ryan's plenary speech, he referenced an emergence model. We have just started work within the forum on this topic and I think there's at a minimum a few of us and I think potentially one of the directions we're heading is to figure out this very issue. What of the reference architecture applies at what size and evolution in a company's growth? And I think that as I mentioned, I think I made this comment earlier, I actually think that the entire reference architecture applies from day one for companies of any size. It's just a question of whether it is explicit or implicit. If it's implicit, it's in the head of the founder, you're still doing the elements or you can be still doing the elements of the reference architecture in your mindset and your thought process and your thinking but there are pieces you need to make explicit even when you're in, as Charlie likes to say, two people in a garage. On the cloud piece, I think, I'm sorry, the automation piece, the key thing I would say that has been happening throughout our industry related to automation has been, at least this is my perspective, when we've been automating, we've been automating within functional components and I think what the IT for IT reference architecture and its vision of value streams allows us to do is rethink automation along the lines of value streams, across functional components and that's where I think it starts to really add considerable value, especially when we can start to put together interoperability between tooling on some of these things. I think that's where we're gonna see automation really take us to that next level as IT organizations. Okay, one more question for me before we'll take some questions from the audience and this goes a little bit into the future, a little bit of the hypothetical but as IT for IT matures and becomes adopted and serves both consumers and providers of services, it seems to me that there'll be a similar track with digital business of how you run your business which is gonna be more a brokering activity at a business level, that a business is really a constituency of different providers across the supply chain and increasingly across service providers. Is there a dual track for IT for IT in the IT side and business for business management of services through portal, through dashboard, something that your business analyst and on up would be involved with? Should we let them happen separately? How can we make them more aligned and even perhaps highly integrated and synergistic? I hope you understand where I'm getting at. Again, we'll start on the panel end with Philippe. All right, well, I'm looking at your question as we have such best practices in IT for IT that the businesses themselves can replicate that and use that for themselves basically. So if I'm, well, I suppose certain companies do that a little bit today. If you take the Ubers and some of the RBMBs and have these disintermediation connecting with, well, private individuals a lot of the time but have some of these service oriented concepts today effectively even though they don't use IT for IT. But I think that just as much as we see today we have cases where businesses for their help desks or for their request management basically turn to the likes of HPE for service management software to help them with their business help desk. We are likely effectively to see that those best practices in terms of individualization and specification of individual conceptual service, service catalog, subscription mechanisms, you're right, the concepts could very easily apply to businesses. How technically that would turn out, we need to do a little bit more thinking but I think from a good concepts point it surely should be useful. Sue? Yeah, I mean, again, I think we really are trying to move ourselves up the stack to really be helping the businesses in the services that they are providing. And so it's very relevant as we're looking at IT for IT and how we're managing the IT services. It's also those business services. I think it's concurrent. I mean, I think it's really evolving and really make training and making the business aware of where we're trying to go and how can they leverage that in their own services that they're providing outward. And I mean, when you look at adopting this even you go back down to your IT in your organization where you have your different typical organizational teams and things like that, it's, you know, there's a challenge for each IT team to really look at what are the services they're providing and how do they start looking at what they do in terms of services instead of just the functions. And so I mean, that goes all the way up the stack including the business and the business services and IT's job and really where we start talking about transformation is really being, you know, next to and aligned with the business so we really understand their business processes and the services that they're really trying to serve and then how are we truly that business enabler. Great, thank you. Yeah, I interpret your question like we discussed, I think this morning about shadow IT that there is no shadow IT then the IT is part of the or performed some management activities performed by the business. And I think you mentioned it as well, then they can apply IT for IT there as well. So as soon as IT activities are done by the business like they have their own SaaS application that do it all themselves. They even configure it themselves. The business is doing the configuration. They maybe even do end user support to do end user support. Then those activities fit in the IT for IT reference architecture model as well. Dwight, we have a business scorecard. We have an IT scorecard. Why shouldn't they be the same scorecard? Yeah, I'm always reminded that IT is in place to help the business, right? The business is the function. IT should be an invisible enabler of business success. So I think in really IT for ITs, I would classify it as catching up really to business today. So could some of the principles that we apply in IT be used for the business? Yeah, it can be, but I see more of the other way around, right? If you look at our whole value chain, that really came from the business perspective being applied to IT. So I still see that the business driving, but really IT becoming more seamless in enabling the business to achieve their particular goals. Michael? I think that the whole concept of digital business is actually a complete misnomer. I hate it. I think it's wrong. And the reason why I think it is wrong is because it's all about the application of information technology. I think in the context of what we typically talk about with IT for IT, we're talking about the application of information technology to the management of the IT departments. But we also talk about the application of information technology to the transformation of business processes, most of the time that happens inside companies and we're using the principles of IT for IT to do that. When we talk about digital business, usually we're talking about the application of information technology into the transformation of business models of companies. And again, it's still all about applying information technology to make the company work in a different way. And for me, the IT for IT principles, the reference architecture, the value streams, I'll still hold for all of that. Well, great. We have time for one or two questions from our audience and let's start with the gentleman right there in the black shirt. So I heard that you could start with detective correct as an entry point. A comment was made that you could start with detective correct has an entry point into the value chain. And then I also heard you don't have to implement all the functional components. Does that imply that you can do just some of the value streams and not all and people can kind of pick and choose what they think will help their organization the most? I'll say the starting point can be detected correct. But I think as Sue mentioned earlier, it's where in your business is that pain point? Evaluate the entire value chain, look at all the value streams, map that to your business activity, identify where you have exactly one of your main pain points and start there. Certainly, if you go to detective correct and maybe your shop doesn't have a problem type of practice, there are certainly options that you could maybe leave out problem if that's not a particular pain point for you. Again, the size of the company, the level of maturity will determine where you actually start and what you use. But what we do have in the reference architecture, it will help any size of company across the breadth of that particular organization to use and apply the architecture. So yeah, my opinion is that you don't start with a specific value stream because otherwise you focus too much on a single value stream, so you still look at the overall picture first. So even if you're gonna optimize detective correct, it doesn't make sense if you don't have requirements to deploy very well or you even don't have your service portfolio in order. So in that sense, you should not try to optimize a value stream by itself. And I guess most organizations have something in place and then you could say, yeah, I have my portfolio, my service portfolio. So if you don't have anything, you probably start with strategy to portfolio. What services do we start to offer, right? You don't have suddenly so many services running out there. So that's best, there's always to start there. But of course, we're not in a green field. So you hope that you have some portfolio management capabilities in place. If not, maybe that's, at least you need to start there because otherwise you seem to be, you cannot link your CIs to services have no concept of that. So I think it's still, you look at the entire value chain you select the things that you try to mature. What great one suggestion on this, I think, which we're testing at the moment with a couple of clients is the start with a pass, start with a platform as a service thing. So to train your IT workforce first, they need to understand all these concepts before they move it to the business. And IT will source its own services. My development environment, my test, I'm sorry, my development service, my test service and so on. And once you've piloted that, then move on to everything that you develop in the, what we call the new. All of those digital solutions are solutions for the digital business, which typically are newer based on these metaphors and have tools that are easier to make work along those concepts. And then progressively, as these will not work in isolation, they will need to work with some of your legacy, some of the data you have in your existing data sources and so on. You can bring those on as designing them as services as standardized APIs and progressively bring in the more and more business services in that fashion and sort of try and take over the legacy of the IT progressively like this. I'm not afraid we've gone over our time a bit, so I think we'll have to leave it there, but how about a big hand for our panel, thank you.


Good morning. We are representing Gulf University for Science and Technology in this conference in 2014. We are participating as one of the Goal sponsors in this event. We are going to show you in this session our successful story of using the open source applications in general in the educational sector in our area and then we will focus more on Drupal. But before I go into the details we will distribute a small brochure of our university to each of you to just have a small idea about Gulf. Gulf University for Science and Technology is located in a country, Kuwait, it's in the Middle East, a small country between Kuwait and between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. We are the university established in 2002 and we are now almost 10 years old. We are going to show our success story of using the open source technologies in the educational sector and we'll see how this things can work if you start using the open source application in general and also focusing on this one. Myself, I'm an assistant professor of computer science. My name is Tahir Ali and I'm also playing, I have two hats in the university. I am assistant professor and as well IT director in our university. So I'm managing the IT department. The most challenge of the bottleneck to be successful in any use of open source application is the challenge to convince your upper management to go with open source applications especially in our area the culture of that oh okay who's going to support that the concept of security business point of view those companies who are giving us the close providing the close source applications or solutions they will always try to find that you some organizations in the governmental section or even in the private section especially in the area of Middle East they don't go for open source applications so still in our region there is a little bit people scared from the word open source okay how we are going to manage it who is going to maintain it so those all questions I took long time to convince where I joined I took the responsibility of IT department especially the the applications area it took me a long time to convince my upper management I want to go with the open source solutions so there was a lot of questions regarding the security the quality because the usability of the product the freedom flexibility of those products all those points and I had to convince my upper management that okay using those on the long term we will have a lot of benefits and the most important factor out of all was that to convince them that long time it's going to so save a lot of cost for you and that's that's you know when it comes to financial managers and financial directors they love to to hear such words so this was the first within like in 2008 where we were trying to start build up a team which will focus just on open source solutions to provide different functionalities services to our faculty staff and students and we succeed in that as a result we start using a lot of open source applications here is a major list of applications we have some more small small but this is the major list of applications that right now they are installed currently working in our environment in the educational sector where we are using them each of them it's in it's on this one of course Drupal is one of the biggest one of them because I'm going to talk in few slides about Drupal itself and we have all other those applications Moodle has been used as our official learning management system we are using OTRS in the IT department for ticketing system so anybody needs any kind of service from IT department whether a student staff or faculty they log in and they create a ticket we are using El Presco as a document management system between different entities in the university and so on so we have different we want the server side we have one tool we have Linux and those are the solutions which we succeed to implement and use them as our source application some of them now we are using not the standard community addition we are using the professional addition or we are buying some services to to integrate with our systems but overall the concept is to use the open source application and we succeeded in that and today on reality in whole campus I have just only one application which is closed source people soft our student information system it was there since 2002 so it's not that easy to change your student information system and that's the main core application which from the first day of any university you needed so it was before I joined in 2002 when we established the university people soft was there other than that all the applications used this one the main advantage which I would like to say here we've seen it and we practice it after using the open source application is the integrity integration between the applications when it comes to open source and you have different applications and you'd like to integrate integrate them things becomes more flexible things becomes more easier if you know the back end of it and that makes things much easier this one that's our experience that's what we have found out in four five years after moving towards to the open source applications when it comes to Drupal Gus had decided since 2008 9 Kedem Kier that Drupal will be our main content management system for building any websites in Gus so far we have implemented I have a technical team of two developers and we have implemented so far for our university around 24 25 sites some some of them are very simple sites some of them with a lot of functionality and modules using them and all our in-house development by our technical Drupal team and that was the main one we choose Drupal for many reasons flexibility open source clear as well document API each release is giving us more features we are very happy to what we hear right now with the technical team about Drupal 8 and what is going to present in Drupal 8 as new additions and features so that was one of the reasons that Drupal has been used in Gus this one most used models that we are using during our development lifecycle different websites views rules web forms tokens automatic note title and because we have an LDAP server so that's very important for us to use the LDAP integration so these are most major main rule the models that we are using in our systems here is an example of some sites that we have built it up using the Gus websites this is the Gus main website we have done the library website those all websites which you are using to present them in the last slide which I would like to say this question I have been asked so many times and during the conference because we have a booth why Gus is participating in such a conference because this is not an educational related conference we we felt as the university administration since we are using Drupal since 2008 and we use it a lot to build lot of provide a lot of functionalities and services to our faculty and staff so it it is the responsibility of the university that we participate we contribute the community of Drupal so this year we decided to move towards to be one of the sponsors the gold sponsors of the event and hopefully we will try to continue this relationship with the Drupal Association in future to support this project and maybe we involved more we are planning now we are working with the Drupal Association and maybe I have other couple of meetings last two days we are trying to make Gus as an official training center a certified training center for Drupal in our area in the Middle East so there is not a lot of awareness of a content management system and Drupal in Middle East so we are trying to reach to a kind of agreement either with Drupal Association or with any certified partner of Drupal Association to make Gus as official training center and official testing center for those who are looking to be trained and certified in Drupal in the future in near future especially in our area thank you very much and now I open the the channel for any questions if anybody have any questions thank you very much for your time and patience hope you enjoy the trip and see you soon thank you morning everyone let me just make sure the microphone sounds good I really love this format kind of fast paced and in fact this presentation I've done here I've given it as a 40 minute version a 30 minute version a 20 minute version and so now I'm basically going to go through until the time's up and let's see if I can rattle that through fast enough so um obligatory kind of the Twitter information so I'm Miles I'm the CEO of Icos we're at Drupal shop we specialize in e-commerce that's it we focus on all aspects of e-commerce experiences from building out great customer experiences the front integrating at the back that's that but this is all about content and us sharing some knowledge that we are learning along the way and continue to learn so within e-commerce um this is just about usability and what I love to call it's the small stuff that when combined can make an enormous difference and we deal with customers that sometimes spend some really large money on things like paper click and google and adwords and seo maybe a little less these days but they find a lot of ways of getting addicted to spending that money they're getting good at measuring it and they can see the coins going in the top and the coins coming out the bottom and that feels really good but we talk to people and say you know this statistic is phenomenal right one percent increase in your conversion by the way one percent can be really hard to get to that's kind of part what we're talking about here but can be the equivalent of 16 percent extra conversion if you've got a company's got a budget and they're spending could be a hundred thousand a quarter could be a lot more than that in some areas and they they took just a small percentage of that budget worked for improving their user experience on their website and really increased that conversion the impact is enormous the return on investment certainly justifies continual investing in the right area and I say sometimes the right area is investing in your user experience your design your customer experience so what we're really looking to do is I'm just going to share some of the things that we've learned some of it learned through anecdotes some of it we've learned through actually measuring and some of it we've learned through mistakes so the and just on this slide here what we're really saying is generally speaking if you think of two big levers yeah that you got the persuasion the marketing budget getting people to even come to your site when you've got commercial site comes with the cost and on the flip side what we're really talking about here today is what can you do to reduce the effort and the frustrations that are seemingly still around in a lot of websites and I see it a lot in a lot of Drupal sites because it's so capable but it also does throw out a layer of crud and systems messages and you really need to get in the practice of helping to tidy that up so classic example forms my view on forms very simple you know don't make your visitor think let's make it as easy as possible and don't worry you don't have to take that in that's far too small for anyone's eyesight and I'm standing close to it but this was a study that did the classic it kind of studied what is the impact of taking the same information and displaying it in different ways single page multiple page or with an accordion because we often get that request saying you know you know we want to change your customers with marketing people they get caught up like you know I've heard this we should change we should change we should change the format and what this study basically showed is it's nothing to do with the number of steps in fact if you have exactly the same form fields and you just lay it out in a different way you're talking marginal gains to almost negligible certainly doesn't value the time and effort to to build it so if that doesn't kind of work what does well actually what does is making it really easy and on this particular slide you see this John Newman kind of part now what John Newman has just done is put his name it's the you know he's done it and the first and surname in the same form you know of a study where usability study people did this the first I've got some nods here of everyone who's done this I've done this I kind of we get that form field the first 19 people in this study did that and it's like well hang on you can if you can kind of learn that then you could separate that out and you can make on the left hand side I think we've got an example of helping people understand what the form is trying to achieve and people are still you know my email address is quite protected I just can't stand getting spam so give people a reason why you're asking for their email that's in context so and other things we can do is remove steps Drupal's great we're developers we can do stuff you know what how many times you go to a website and it says choose your card and they're tiny little icons there's four visa icons and is that the visa debit or the delta or whatever and yeah you can detect the credit cards it's so easy you see the based on first four digits or six if you're looking at China Bank it's all you know that stuff is just readily available and I would say go even further tell people what card you accept detect from the first few and then why not then let them know hey great you're using your visa card welcome whatever you know I think you can help this a lot and I always like putting this up it's been around with my slide deck for a number of years you may even recognize the design from several years ago it's an Apple website I love this it talks about we talk about making things clear and here we have three types of shipping well two-day shipping okay that takes two days cost me ten dollars next day next day shipping all right comes next day everyone see what's wrong with this yeah standard shipping a month three weeks I don't know and so the these are things these lack of clarity points can be there's some a little bit more flippant than others but lack of clarity in an e-commerce journey puts people off and generally speaking when it comes to shipping goods people care about two things fast or cheap and that depends on whether you've left your wife's present until the next day and then you would it really fast or you're buying that thing you know hey that's a kind of novelty buy and I don't mind I'll use Alibaba I'll wait 20 days for that shipping to come over but that's what people really care about so when you kind of know that I think you can build a great experience and make it really clear to use as what you make it really clear and again you know developers we've got the ability the front-end engineering that we can now do we can do so much more contextually in the browser and this experience right I'm not picking on the Drupal site but hands up we've done that filled out the form hit submit don't know where they are scrolled up and found some big red error message you know that's so frustrating because then you have to read in there which bit did I do and then you go and fix that problem and you submit it and it didn't also save your password and then you've got another thing and I've been through that yeah I'm glad we're nodding right we've all been through that system that's driving people nuts that is a great reason to leave people leave through frustrations of sites and this is an area that as developers we can really do it and you know what you can think it through and you can reduce errors some little standard things all this is doing is saying you know just looking at it and this is common in good experiences but yeah I my feeling is there's more bad experiences than good and e-commerce websites been around for like two decades it's like we really should have figured some of this stuff out by now or you'd like to think it pervades across so all this this is about let's make things quicker make things simpler and I think there's really nice things that can be done if I look at this again it's part of a study and it was about when you use real-time feedback on a form you've got 22 this isn't it's not like you do this you get 22 percent jack increase in your sales but it was just a form sort of test between one and the other and success rate also included accuracy and other other key parts but it's like you know here we are someone who may not even be thinking about logging back into the website because unless you're going back into an amazon or a site that you're always using you often does not forget that password but actually we could we could detect that password and say hey welcome back enter your password speed you through the form we've got your address update your address so these are the things that we think about we try to influence and a lot of time you can use defaults you can certainly study and the vast I mean here's a huge sweeping statement most people shop buy and deliver it to themselves in one of two locations that's it it's often is not delivered to that office location you can use defaults and from and if you don't know what it is you could do a lot worse than just starting out by saying yeah using that kind of checkbox and it says my shipping address is the same as my billing just you know all things that can significantly speed people through we're huge fans of using postcode lookup this happens to be a UK postal partner obviously it's different depending on where you are and if you're using other part but zip codes and the light it just comes back to that same philosophy of speeding things through and for people who into Apple if you've got iOS 8 when you're now transacted on if you're just just in browser looking at a mobile website and you get to that payment page it's starting to detect it and you can actually put you can make sure you marry it up scan my card scan your card auto fills it in for you so if you didn't know that little tip it's awesome it's gonna these are things that can really really help and I just hate some of the jargon that ends up around e-commerce sites and this is an example here this is a huge global retailer site and just things I put out you know don't worry the SSL has got your site secured right we're all secure we've got the SSL right this is a tech room here maybe and maybe we know what SSL stands for but where's the context what does that mean is that really helping users and there's other little things here it's like you know add your CVV and we see CVV and we see CV2 and I think if you're shopping a lot you kind of know what it means it's the little bit on the back but that's still really doesn't show any great customer care and I think you can improve it in fact I have to say the only thing I liked about this it was Uniqlo I don't mind saying this I'm gonna name the only thing I liked about this site is they really asked us to help improve their site so I really went to town and said you know what you should do this you should do the why didn't you do this and you know I'm just waiting for their agency to call me up that should be fun. Buttons has been a design tool used by designers and developers and I've read blog posts that said we changed the word on this button and you know this form went up by 200% and generally speaking the whole thing about button it's just got to be the thing you expect it to be don't really make people read it's the thing and it's got to be non-confusion and I just look at context continue with care here is a particularly odd site selling guns it seems but it's um but here we are maybe I skipped over that just a little bit too quick and it's like we're on a phone we're going through we're in the e-commerce journey of this particular site and it says continue shopping that's actually taking you you're about to buy the good and you hit continue shopping and it takes you out of the shopping cart you know that's a really it's bit of an old example but I'm still seeing things like this and then if that's old this is the new problem the new problem around decluttering is as new things come out as new trends come out there's the temptation to keep adding stuff to pages adding the badges adding this and here we are you can register you can log in all with Facebook all with Google and they're just kind of adding all of those those details you know again we can unify we can simplify um that sometimes getting caught with the idea of giving customer more choice is actually detrimental maybe not always but there's a coming one of my favorites you know you can measure this stuff this is the other great stuff guesswork is gone we can measure stuff and um favorite hobby halls of many people it's like you know passwords I mean it's still a still a problem we've all got we've all got but the you know if you are a small you're building out uh almost any e-commerce website unless it's this huge global website if you it's the first time someone's transacting with you and you ask them to set up an account before they can pay imagine doing that in a shop oh you want to buy that that good that jacket that jacket looks great the suit fits you yes really well well if you can just come over here and open this account with no other benefit apart from well no we just want your details but two things happen one three in nine people in a test left said I wouldn't go past this but that's customers walking out the door which is and and of those people that even went through they then expected to be spam and I just said what a bad expectation you've just set that customer I really want to buy up I'm gonna have to register but now I'm already losing trust you know just little very very little kind of things that I think are really important um search I actually I managed to speed this one up by counting lots of parts out I've got a very simple thing about search if you're gonna have search on a website can be really really important if you get this someone searches on it and they get a result not found it will be your highest reason for people to leave and I just say search do it properly do it brilliantly or don't do it at all if anyone saw the case study on lush lush.co.uk site that we built we put it wasn't just another module one feature you know search was a whole for those people into agile it was a two week sprint of two developers minimum plus way more plus a dedicated search box we've really made search the key point of navigation and search is incredibly important you know that's why one of the the highest net value company in the world ultimately makes 95 percent of their revenue through search regardless of the the google car and the mapping and everything else is the search is such a premium product it's not super hard to get right but never under just just don't just stick on a search box in some way if you do people will use it and they'll get this and they'll leave that's that's my kind of take away on search recommendations we like to be recommended hey where did you eat last night was it good ah great you got the name of the restaurant I want to go recommendations is hugely important but at the moment it's been faked everywhere if you look at the world through my lens which is I hope you don't have to this is maybe slightly a UK century but I and I'm no great football man but I know that the premier league is as a pretty big thing globally so here we have you know I am looking at the Manchester I could even get this wrong though the Manchester United shirt okay the Manchester United shirt I'm in the mode of buy net but apparently people who looked at that if that's going to take on and people who actually looked at the Manchester United well according to this they also looked at the Arsenal way shirt which doesn't sound so part but maybe they did they were just looking around and but you know then they looked at the Chelsea homestrip but guess better ultimately the person who looked at Manchester United bought the Liverpool top right now for those people who don't know their football this is not going to happen right this is this that is never happened I'm like really that's not real and this is this is live still now this site is it's a huge website multimillion pound business that has built that and I'm like what the wtf has a flag up a bit for and this was from a last year stat that John Lewis however put much more of a machine learning kind of people who bought this also bought this and they did some great metrics and this was a report it's only consultancy talks about recommendations really hiking sales and we've seen it as well we worked with a company called Nosto and they do that kind of machine learning pattern behavior based on what people have done and we're seeing this make a really good effect and the first thing we did on the site that we helped take over was we stuck it on a search results page because they had a really bad search and it was learning and it soon filled up and nobody ever got you know didn't get that horrible no results page so this this really good tech doesn't have to be Drupal but it can work really nicely with how are you doing Simon if that's if I'm right no I think we are we're okay we've got about three minutes so and I'm number 10 which I decided to finish with any of bonus material so lots of what I've talked about here and I've hopefully I've threaded through is you know a statement I just love you cannot manage what you don't measure and where we are today you can measure everything you can really measure staff and this here this statistic is from a sage pay report they've got a couple downstairs on sage pay stand this is a small group you should go and get it it's called the I think it's like the landmark or the payment the reference for it is that something like the payment landscape report they interviewed 1500 business owners thousands of users they it's really good pieces I think it's almost aimed slightly towards academia not fully but it's a great report they've got a few copies left downstairs and this talked about here they defined successful businesses that track dropouts they also have studied where people drop out and this is kind of just really great takeaway stuff to to to know so wrapping up the takeaway bonus material was also just a couple of things I said ah things that I can kind of thinking of at the moment this guy obviously doesn't do user testing because he looks way too happy but 90 percent of we've got this this this phenomenon now my house you sit on the sofa and there's you know there's a tablet and there's a there's a mobile device and we're switching devices more and more and more so yeah and in e-commerce this is super high and I guess the ultimate takeaway for the three things is I think hopefully stuff here you could take away but each percentage is quite hard for it can be a bit focused on the little stuff because it's the little stuff that drives people mad it roads trust and people sometimes bomb out and and just measure the results and something I put in when I'm trying to push Drupal this is one of the things I say you know the technology is right you're going to really struggle to get the user experience so you owe it to yourself do you need to have the right technology platform but you also need to not be so caught up on that because you just need to focus on the customer experience and I think that's pretty much the time which is a miracle thanks very much of course I'll take any questions so thanks thanks a lot for this presentation actually your it's a typical human computer interaction concepts but you are trying to do to improve the e-commerce through those fines and there is a huge research has been done last 10 years in the area of human computer interaction do you have any studies that shows that if we do those small small tiny things and care about them in our websites and e-commerce is it really affecting the income and is there any study shows that it's there's a percentage of improvement or how much is that improvement or not no studies yeah several of the things in the early part of this come from Bay Mard Institute very happy to put if these slides are going up whatever or I'll give you the thing Bay Mard Institute have done a study that they looked at the top might be wrong here 40 or 50 in terms of transactional websites and they did some detailed studies and they also have done some actually eye tracking and usability and done studies and there was just one or two things that I had here around like 22 percent increase in success that's one particular good source and there are a couple of others that I have referenced here that you know everything I reference I will happily share but there are some but I actually think it's a weakness that I get frustrated that there is not more a sort of academic rigor in this commercial area and where it exists even worse people in our position don't look at that reference material they just could we're all out there learning by iteration and mistaken yet there is some pretty good academic stuff the Bay Mard Institute is one with that well thanks everyone for your time hugely appreciated


So welcome, this is Brian Rowe in Northwest Justice Project, putting this on as part of an LSE TAG grant. Today we're going to be talking about ShareLaw video, a website that was put together by Atlanta Legal Aid, and we've got two staff from Atlanta Legal Aid who have been doing incredible stuff on this, who are here to teach you about making videos very, very simply and easily. We've got a bunch of feedback from the community in working on this site, and one of the major focuses of today's webinar is going to be the help guides and how you can use these new QuickStart guides or QuickStart kits that we've put together in order to create videos. But before we jump into that new feature, I'd like to talk about some of the new changes to ShareLaw video. Number one, we've removed the login, so it's much easier for people to actually get to see view the content that is available. In order to download content also, you no longer need a login, but you do need to give us some information and agree to the terms and conditions here, which is basically that it's available under a license that allows nonprofit organizations to use each of the different pieces of content here in their education and outreach. We do collect a little bit of information, your name, your organization, and your email. This is pre-populated with my email here at Northwest Justice Project because I'm logged in, but you do not have to have an account to download, just have to be able to give us that information and then we'll be monitoring that to see who is creating videos and hopefully be able to outreach to the community and help individuals with videos. And then when videos are created, we also want to be able to promote and share those through the LS Untap blog or other places so that we can help people actually find these videos when they're done. We also have tried to upgrade the visual appearance of the site to make it easier to see what type of content is available. We are slowly but surely adding better functionality with regards to thumbnails so that you can get an idea of what the content is directly before downloading it, taking snippets or pieces of videos and showing that as part of the thumbnails that are there. We're still working on some ideas for slides and audio content of how we can come up with a thumbnail that lets people know what the audio content has in it. One of the really nice things about the site is we've got a strong search with a lot of different categories. If you are on someone else's legal services website, you find their YouTube channel and you see content that they've created, you can easily go through here and then search for content by the donating organization, the organization that has provided that content to us. For example, Northwest Justice Project has a significant number of videos that we have done and we put a lot of the source materials up there. As you can see, Illinois Legal Aid has donated a huge amount of content as has Atlanta here. We've also got a tag feature that will help you figure out or find particular common items in everything that is available and a lot of these come up with solid, useful thumbnails to it. There is a diversity of content here ranging from static images to short little video clips. This gavel here is just someone actually hitting a gavel that could be put into or sliced into a video somewhere. The search function on here is really good. If there are ideas or things that you think we could do better with this website, please feel free to contact me, contact LSNTAP, or just take the survey that we've got embedded here on the front page. Give us feedback about it. Our goal is to continually upgrade this site and try to improve how easy it is to use. The next section that is really important here is our help guides. There is a list here of how to upload media. You do need to create a content or create a login in order to upload content to the site. We are happy to help you with this process. The walk-through is pretty easy, but we're also willing to just take email submissions and upload it ourselves to the website and help you with that process. We're here to get as much content up here tagged with the highest quality tags as possible to make it easy for other people to find. We also create guides on how to use different pieces of software. A big part of this webinar today is going to be how to use free software in order to create your videos using the QuickStart kits that are right here. This is where I'm going to turn it over to Kirsten to talk some about those QuickStart kits and then walk you through creating a video using Windows Movie Maker. What I wanted to do is introduce the idea of the QuickStart kits. We've changed the name several times. We've called them packets for a while, QuickStart packets, QuickStart guides. The idea is when we created ShareLaw video, video content for statewide websites was kind of in its infancy in the legal services community, and we envisioned ShareLaw video as a place to share raw material so that organizations could have an easy way to create new video content specific for their organization or for their jurisdiction. Now that we have a nice body of high quality replicable video content, things are a lot easier or should be a lot easier. You can, if you want to, cut and paste, grab the gavel scene and grab the judge scene and make your own video with your own content for your own jurisdiction, but the QuickStart kits are designed to make it very easy, quick and simple to take the replicable video projects that other organizations have done and make it so that you can actually replicate it because I know on our statewide website I love, for example, some of Connecticut Law Helps how to get ready for court videos, but at the end of it, it sends you to CT Law Help, and it doesn't send you to GeorgiaLegalAid.org or doesn't send you to Atlanta Legal Aid. So it wasn't something that I could just grab and embed in my website. So the QuickStart kits are designed to give you absolutely everything you need to do that, to take a very carefully, thoughtfully designed, high quality video and replicate it, not reinvent the wheel, not redo the content. We've taken out all of the jurisdictional specific content and we've created placeholders so that you can put in your jurisdictional information. And so you're not recreating content. When you use a QuickStart kit, you're using content that somebody has already very carefully put together with an eye for it to be replicated by other jurisdictions. Where you find them on the site is you go to the Help Guides section and we've created a list of QuickStart kits. I sort of, when we got this idea, I surveyed the community and kind of tested out whether the idea was something people were interested in and people were. And they gave me sort of an indication of the topics they were interested in replicating and that includes landlord-tenant consumer housing and benefits. And we did our very best to find videos that hit those topics. It's also designed so that people with zero tech background can replicate these videos. We follow the instructions using free software and make a video for your statewide website to be used by the end of the day. I've sort of timed doing these videos and it takes me less than an hour to do. So it's really, we've sort of parted down to this simplest method. Thank you so much, Gab and Kristen. We greatly appreciate you coming out here and going over share a lot of video and how to replicate that video content with these QuickStart kits. You're very welcome. Looks like there's a question. Oh, excellent. We've got a question about the photos that are used. Are they licensed so that organizations can safely use them in videos? Yes. A lot of the photos are either created by individual organizations or they are from sources like Pixel Bay that are public domain, that type of stuff. So all of the images, all of the content, the organizations that are donating the content have set it up in a way so that other organizations can use it. Copyright is one of those things that we're definitely cognizant of in creating and that's one of the big reasons that ShareLaw video exists is to try to make it so that you can easily find content that has been licensed in a way that legal services non-profit organizations can use it. We encourage all of our donors to use a Creative Commons license that makes it really easy for other organizations to use it. In fact, all of the photos that I used in the PowerPoint that I was demonstrating with, with the exception of one photo, they all came from Microsoft Office Clipart. They've got a lot of great stuff in there. Yep, and Alice Ntap about two years ago wrote a full guide on copyright and it has a section in there about finding content that can be used specifically for video projects, blog posts, that type of stuff. And that guide is available on our website. You're seeing a picture of it currently here. It was co-authored by myself and Liz Lehman who was working out of Montana legal services at the time. Any other questions? If not, we're going to be closing out. Thank you so much for attending. Thank you.