Making IT happen with Adam Burstow

Unified Communications = Competitive Advantage

2009-06-26T13:16:48Z

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.

UK Cyber Security Strategy - questions CIO's should ask

2009-06-25T14:19:57Z

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?

Software design, recession stretches Moore's law

2009-06-22T08:40:42Z

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.

Digital Britain: good or bad for CIO's?

2009-06-17T07:50:03Z

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

Recruitment agency margins

2009-03-30T11:12:34Z

We've just been through a big exercise to consolidate the number of agencies we use (from around 10 to 2 preferred suppliers) and renegotiate margins.

Don't want to discuss exact margins, but we were targetting nearer to 10% than 15%, and had a successful outcome to the process.

It's not only Gmail - we recently got lost in the cloud

2009-02-25T17:00:05Z

Gmail's outage yesterday was reported by the FT as raising questions about cloud computing. We had a very frustrating issue a couple of weeks ago with our hosted e-mail filtering service.

It seems to come down to poor change management (in this case to do with active filtering but the details hardly matter). End result was that important e-mails started bouncing.

What really struck me was the helplessness. For services we run ourselves, we can quickly look at and identify issues, not go through some painful process of trying to convince someone else the fault lies with them. As usual my excellent team dropped everything as the problem manifested itself (at 7pm on a Saturday) but there was no way we could hope for that level of response from our supplier.

More fundamentally, we spend a lot of time and effort drilling into our own team that EVERY CHANGE goes through the change committee and is carefully considered, whereas a cloud supplier can do anything without you even knowing.

Main points for me? 1 - I'm becoming increasingly wary of software-as-a-service - how can you get true accountability? Do I think that the individual made this unauthorised (by us at least) change has had the error of his or her ways creafully pointed out? Have they learned from it? 2 - I want want some money back - I'll let you know how I get on.

Today's FT - corporate spending on IT falls

2009-02-23T13:52:59Z

An article in today's FT reports the unsurprising conclusion of some recent TechMarketView research - that corporate IT spending has fallen this year.

What I found more surprising was the finding that "80-90% of annual IT expenditure is devoted to maintenance and minor upgrades of systems installed in the last four years". I'd estimate that for us about 60-70% of spend is to "keep the lights on", and 30-40% is on new projects that add new value. I'd be worried if I thought it was only 10-20% (in fact I'd sooner it was 50%).

IT Integration - Telereal buys Trillium in £750M deal

2009-02-13T09:01:34Z

I've been quiet on the blog since Christmas, grappling with our acquisition of Trillium.

From an IT perspective this is now leading to the integration of the two teams, resulting in a huge amount of work. I am now IS Director of the combined group and my focus is on three things - quick wins, longer term integration, and not taking our eye off the operational ball in the meantime. I'm planning to use the blog to tell the story of the integration, so watch this space.

Initial impressions? Culture - in many ways similar, but in some ways quite different - if we can get the best of both we'll be fine.

Legal papers served by Facebook

2008-12-16T10:30:21Z

There's a story on BBC today about an Australian court granting permission to serve papers via Facebook.

Serving papers is a costly and complex process. Could we get to the point where electronic addresses have as much legal 'meaning' as physical addresses? And at what point does an electronic address become an electronic identity? For example, if you can serve papers to a 'place' in Facebook could you serve them a 'person' in Second Life?

Software that works the way you do

2008-11-28T15:57:10Z

I recently did a talk in a conference in Orlando on this subject. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine that everyone in the IT industry regards 'user requirements' as sacrosanct. In reality end users might not have the faintest idea of new technologies, and therefore tend to frame their requirements around what they know.

To prepare for the talk I googled the phrase in the title, and got thousands of responses - generally software companies claiming their software 'works the way you do'. This got me thinking about the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they want they would have asked for a faster horse". In researching this I found a modern equivalent - Steve Jobs quoted in Fortune as saying "We do no market research". And he sold 6.9M iPhones in Q3.

This got me thinking further, and I googled the phrase "Software that works the way it works". And got one response. One. And that was meant in a derogatory fashion.

What's the disconnect here - how come Apple can brag that their hardware / software product works in the new and wonderful ways it works, but corporate IT departments and suppliers are beholden to producing stuff that replicates current (often bad) practices?

iPlayer antidote for plane delay

2008-11-12T22:54:31Z

Stuck in Orlando airport waiting for a delayed flight - but watching last Sunday's episode of Top Gear on iPlayer has made the last hour mich more bearable. The BBC have earned today's 50p from me.

CIO Surveys Murdering IT Budgets - The Register Channel Site

2008-11-06T09:57:23Z

An amusing article on The Register Channel site - the site is required reading for the thinking reseller. "Now might be a good time for CIO Magazine to stop bugging chief information officers and IT managers about their IT spending plans. Its surveys are killing us."

Shift from corporate to personal laptops

2008-11-04T16:13:03Z

Good article in todays FT about companies that give people an allowance to buy their own laptop rather than being given a corporate standard laptop. I think this is inevitable for some (often younger?) users - but I do think that others will still prefer to be given one by their company.

By the way, the technology company promoting the idea for their own employees? You guessed it - Citrix.

Netbooks, Steve Jobs, the cloud, Windows Azure and 3G.

2008-10-28T14:23:39Z

Much reaction to Steve Jobs saying "There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk." Most of the news sites interpret this as Jobs saying that sub $500 computers are junk, but that's not the way I read it - he's just saying it's not his sector.

I think netbooks will grow and grow - RM are shifting huge volumes of their RM Asus miniBook in the schools market, and it's clearly not junk.

This is why Microsoft's announcement of Windows Azure is so interesting. They seem to have half thrown in the towel by accepting that more and more software can be cloud based - but that there will still be a need for client software and (my implication, not theirs) powerful PC's.

My view?

Corporate users need to be able to use MS applications - Outlook, Word and Excel - on the move. Netbooks aren't beefy enough to support these - we have users with 2GB mailboxes, and those who use 20MB spreadsheets.

If connectivity was good enough this wouldn't matter - they could just run their MS applications on the server and access them from a netbook. (almost all the rest of our corporate applications are server based) But it isn't. We've been running 3G cards for 6 months now and they are flaky unless you stay in one place with good connectivity - it's a bit like using a mobile phone in 1992.

Better connectvity will drive smaller form factor devices like netbooks, and support the shift of applications to the cloud, but it will take 3 to 5 years for these trends to fully materialise.

How safe are your domain names?

2008-10-21T16:30:40Z

News on Register that a Kentucky Judge has upheld the state's seizure of gambling domain names.