Making IT Happen

Scanning through the Digital Britain report the following recommendations seemed most relevant to a corporate CIO working in B2B rather than B2C:

1 - Intellectual property protection - bad, in that if your staff use your network to abuse intellectual proeprty, the risks grow.

2 - Universal broadband - good for homeworking staff in marginal locations, bad for cost (we've got around 500 copper lines installed - £3K a year)

3 - Public service content - good to the extent that these improve government to business (G2B?) services 

4 - Wireless infrastructure - good promotion of extended 3G / next generation coverage

5 - BBC - good extension of the BBC's role as content provider - they are surely the UK's content provider of choice

CW site has a summary of the report and responses here

Interesting link on The Register to a report which concludes that Moore's law is losing it's practical application. Two main reasons:

• Chip speed increases are being driven my multiple cores not clock speed - and software design doesn't generally support the threading needed to exploit multi-cores.
• The econmics of sticking with Moore's law aren't working - as each new chip generation comes out chip-makers are seeing lower demand spikes - this means they are having to extend the generations to make the investment pay.

This chimes with what I'm seeing at the moment - making investments pay, rather than being at the cutting edge. Overall, probably a good thing for the corporate perception of the IT function.

Today's issue of the UK cyber security strategy coincides with a dinner I went to earlier in the week. At the dinner a security expert demonstrated various types of electronic surveillance, including a £50 gsm bug that can be left under a table and will call a programmed number whenever there is a conversation in the room, relaying the conversation. We also discussed the capabilities of systems like the (mythical?) Echelon system, which can filter information needles from data haystacks. Hackers are one thing, but this stuff is truly scary.

This got me thinking about my own antennae for cyber security risks, and what questions a CIO should be asking about the security of their information:

• for each of my major customers, suppliers and other organisations I do business with, how useful would it be for them to know what I know?
• would they go to the lengths of using electronic surveillance to find out what I know?
• how capable would they be of finding out? Are there people or organisations that would help them?
• if they did (or already were) would I have any means of detecting this? 

I went to a Computer Weekly roundtable this week on the subject of Unified Communication. There were 20 or so CIO's there, including Ian Robinson, Group IT Director, McLaren Group, who explained how his COO had described Unified Communications as 'oxygen' for the group. Others described ideas that seemed to me to have huge potential for competitive advantage for their organisations.

The more I listened the more I was convinced that this should form a new and distinct part of our IT strategy, rather than have it rolled up in our infrastructure strategy, which is where it used to sit. I doodled a mind map as we went, which I have attached  UC.tif  - key themes included software such as Microsoft OCS, technology such as IPT, and solutions such as desk-to-desk video conferencing.

A bit like Web 2.0, UC isnt so much one particular technology as a cluster of technical and social trends.