tag:www.computerweekly.com,2007-09-05:/blogs/editors-blog//105 2013-05-14T16:30:16Z The latest news in the IT industry and what's happening at Computer Weekly. Movable Type Pro 4.361 tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86327 2013-05-14T16:01:26Z 2013-05-14T16:30:16Z

The government's G-Cloud has its critics, who like to cite the relatively few millions of pounds of spending put through the programme as being tiny compared to the annual £16bn government IT spend. But - putting aside the obvious counter...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
But - putting aside the obvious counter argument that such change takes time and plenty of Whitehall buyers remain locked into costly outsourcing deals - there are significant signs that G-Cloud is having an even more important impact.

The initiative was intended to open up the market to SME suppliers, to reduce lock-in to long-term contracts, and create transparency of pricing. It's doing all those things. For example, one smaller supplier, Memset, says it has seen its G-Cloud revenue grow 38% in just six months.

To reiterate the importance of G-Cloud, the government now has a cloud-first buying policy.

However, when G-Cloud really makes its mark is when it makes the big suppliers change their behaviour.

At the start of this month, Salesforce.com announced plans for its first UK-based datacentre - effectively a condition of being able to win business through G-Cloud due to data protection regulations around government data.

Now, Oracle has announced it is building a new UK datacentre specifically to deliver government IT services through G-Cloud. Oracle considered this so important that it brought its president, Mark Hurd, to the UK to make the announcement.

Do not underestimate how significant a move this is.

If suppliers of the size and influence of Oracle are seeing the writing on the wall saying they have to conform to the requirements of G-Cloud to continue their business with Whitehall, that is a major power shift in that relationship.

Oracle was identified as holding 70% of all government software licences, receiving more than £200m in revenue from Whitehall every year.

The Cabinet Office told Computer Weekly last year that Oracle was one of the worst culprits for price inconsistency - charging up to three times more to some departments for the same products.

And there was a furore earlier this year after the publication of an official notice for a £750m Oracle framework agreement - a deal that seemed entirely at odds with the Whitehall IT reforms of which G-Cloud is a central component.

I was told that agreement would be quietly shelved - a case of cock-up not conspiracy, said insiders - but it demonstrated the prevailing mood that Oracle for too long had the government over a barrel.

The fact that the software giant is now investing in a new datacentre, apparently as a direct response to the growth of G-Cloud, is a sign that the balance of power between government IT buyers and their suppliers may finally be shifting in the right direction.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86313 2013-05-09T12:39:47Z 2013-05-09T12:46:55Z

We're proud to this week launch our second annual quest to select the 25 most influential women in UK IT.The issues affecting women in technology have only become more important and high profile in the past 12 months. National newspapers...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com to select the 25 most influential women in UK IT.

The issues affecting women in technology have only become more important and high profile in the past 12 months. National newspapers have picked up on the theme - our poll last year even got a mention on BBC Radio 4's Women's Hour show.

In that time we've also launched a LinkedIn group for women in IT, which has proved extremely popular. Women in IT is a thriving community of interest, and a positive influence on the wider profession.

Last year's programme, which saw Thomson Reuters CIO Jane Moran voted the most influential woman in UK IT, was a big success and generated a lot of debate. We've since seen a definite increase in the number of female IT leaders attending our monthly CW500 networking events - although they are still a minority.

The issues that continue to restrict women to barely 18% of the UK IT workforce have not gone away though - a macho, male-dominated, geeky image; inflexible working patterns; difficulties catching up with new technologies for women returning after career breaks to have children; and so on.

But there has rarely been wider appreciation of the problem, and of the benefits of having more women in the IT workplace. More IT leaders say they want to recruit more women - although often the challenge is finding enough women with the right skills to apply for such positions.

The IT industry is changing the way everyone works and lives - with flexible and remote working becoming key to resolving work/life balance issues, as well as making organisations more agile and mobile. As such, IT leaders need to take the initiative to make the IT profession one which exemplifies such principles and comes to be seen as one of the most female-friendly sectors to work in.

IT needs a workforce that has the skills, experience, and diversity to innovate through technology - and one that reflects the diversity of the people using technology every day.

It is often said that women are less likely than men to promote themselves. Identifying the most influential women in UK IT is our way to help get over that - and if you know a female in IT who deserves greater recognition as a role model for others, please let us know.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86312 2013-05-09T11:26:57Z 2013-05-09T11:35:32Z

It's become something of a common public perception that Dell is a company in crisis. Fourth-quarter revenue down 11%, profit down 31%, and its founder engaged in a battle with investors to delist from the stock market to buy time...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com Dell is a company in crisis.

Fourth-quarter revenue down 11%, profit down 31%, and its founder engaged in a battle with investors to delist from the stock market to buy time and space for a radical overhaul - these are pretty solid indicators that all is not well.

But Dell's undoubted challenges are linked almost entirely to the decline in its core PC market. Look beyond the desktop and into the datacentre and the story is a lot more positive.

Server, networking and storage sales are on the rise, and Dell continues to be aggressively acquisitive as part of what its new UK CEO Tim Griffin calls an "accelerated transformation".

So it was timely to be invited to meet with the senior leadership team from Dell's enterprise solutions business, who were in London this week to meet customers, greet the troops, and no doubt try to reassure them all that the future is better than some of the press coverage would have you believe.

Executives were very non-committal on founder Michael Dell's plan to take the company into private ownership - "Business as usual, no matter what happens," declared Marius Haas, president of the enterprise solutions group, closely followed by the usual stream of carefully rehearsed on-message statements that you get from most US senior managers at IT suppliers.

(I can't help but think the company would benefit from a more down to earth response to inevitable questions about the de-listing plan - "Things are tough, we admit that, and we know radical changes are needed, but we're going to do what it takes" - that sort of thing. But on-message was the big message).

Dell's server chief, Forrest Norrod, was typical of the bullishness among the non-PC business divisions, predicting that Dell will be the number one x86 server supplier by the end of the year.

Critics say that Dell missed the rise of the cloud, but Norrod says differently - while Dell may not be competing as a public cloud provider, it is a major supplier of servers and storage to companies that are, and is doing nicely as a result, he says.

Every exec was all too happy to point to chief rival HP as a better example of a company trying to shed a reputation as a basket case.

But the server chief told me an anecdote that perhaps gives the company's best response to the critics.

He was up late one night, unable to sleep, when his email pings with a message from Michael - at one o'clock in the morning. Norrod proceeds to engage the CEO in a back and forth that lasts until nearly 2am. Jokingly, Norrod emails Michael to say - hey, we've both got kids, what are we doing talking business at this time of the morning?

To which Michael Dell emails back to conclude the conversation with a single sentence: "I like to win".

Dell's transformation is essential and nobody will pretend it's going to be easy (well, when they're not relentlessly on-message, at least).

One of the great fallacies about Dell is that the consumer decline in PC sales is life threatening - that's simply not the case. About 80% of Dell's PC sales have always come from businesses - falling consumer sales sting, but are not the biggest problem.

There will be one more iteration of corporate PC sales for Dell as customers upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 before the end of XP support in April 2014. But that will be the catalyst for a subsequent slump in the corporate PC market too, and that's the deadline by which Dell has to resolve its dilemma and reduce its reliance on the market for which it has always been best known.

You used to buy from Dell because of its great supply chain - quality, highly customised PC configurations, delivered cost-effectively and quickly. Then everybody improved their supply chain and that advantage was reduced.

It's taken a long time to get the company out of that mindset. I can remember being told Dell was on the road to being a software and services company nearly 10 years ago. IT services and outsourcing was going to be the saviour - but that didn't happen. So now, the immediate future is in the datacentre and eventually the cloud - an environment every bit as competitive as the PC market at its peak, albeit with somewhat higher margins.

Michael Dell is trying to achieve something that has never been done before - take a major, multinational, multibillion-dollar company off the stock market to change its structure and strategy, without the pressure and intensity of having to deliver growth to investors every three months.

I think he's doing the right thing. The transformation needed at Dell simply could not happen under the rapacious watch of the financial markets. The scale of change needed does show that the change is happening later than it should - the emotional connection to the PC market is proving hard to break.

If he succeeds in de-listing, it will be an interesting few years comparing Dell's behind-closed-doors transformation with HP's very public and often painful "multi-year turnaround plan" under CEO Meg Whitman.

But you don't found a company in your bedroom, grow it to a $60bn giant, and then not be up for a fight for survival.

Michael Dell likes to win. That's no guarantee that he will, but his corporate customers should give him the time to make it happen - although their patience will not last forever.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86291 2013-05-03T10:34:05Z 2013-05-03T10:42:36Z

Two years from this week, it's the next General Election.Unless the Coalition collapses before 7 May 2015, the election date is fixed and immovable. That means there are just 24 months left for the IT reformers in government to make...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
Unless the Coalition collapses before 7 May 2015, the election date is fixed and immovable. That means there are just 24 months left for the IT reformers in government to make their changes equally immovable before the political will behind them potentially dissipates.

They have a lot to do.

In the three years since Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude set about tackling the IT oligopoly of big suppliers that dominates Whitehall IT, and so reduce the annual £16bn IT budget, much has been achieved.

We have a mandatory open standards policy; the first ever preference for open source built into the Digital Strategy; a cloud-first-policy emerging through the G-Cloud; and significant savings made from existing, long-term contracts with that oligopoly.

Just this week, we've also seen an important milestone as all the government departments completed their move to the new, open-source, agile-developed Gov.UK website - at a much reduced cost from its predecessor, Directgov.

But it's equally easy for the critics to claim that apart from some lengthy documents, a new website, and a mere few millions pounds spent through G-Cloud, it would not be difficult to see a return to the bad old ways if the political clout enforced by Maude were to disappear.

Certainly the big system integrators are quietly confident that the irresistible force of change will not become an immovable object - this article quoting a senior HP executive published by Kable demonstrates just that, while also demonstrating how the big suppliers completely misunderstand what the reforms are all about.

Several big outsourcing deals come up for renewal between now and the election, and it will be instructive to see what happens and whether they will be extended. The response Computer Weekly received from the Department of Energy and Climate Change suggests it sees a future away from its incumbent supplier when its contract ends in 2014.

Without doubt there is a growing mood of IT reform across Whitehall - finally spreading to some of the formerly doubting departments, even if there are still tensions between the centre and some of the departmental IT teams.

Already some of the advisors closest to government CTO Liam Maxwell are forging links with Labour and the shadow cabinet in the hope of gaining cross-party support to ensure the reform process can continue regardless of the electoral victor. Don't be surprised to see a debate about which party is the more "open" as the next two years count down. Wouldn't it be great if IT reform became an election issue at some level.

But the biggest challenges for reform lie ahead.

A static, informational website is one thing, online transactions are another - the biggest test of the digital strategy will be when citizens are transacting with government online, not just searching for information.

The flagship of "digital by default" was to be Universal Credit, the biggest IT project in Whitehall and increasingly the most troubled. Already many of its digital initiatives, such as identity assurance, have been stripped out.

And the plans for open standards have yet to be tested in a major project - the Microsofts and Oracles of the world are not going to take it idly on the chin if they are excluded for non-conformance.

But there's an undeniable buzz around Whitehall IT and the digital reforms, and that in itself is a measure of the achievement so far. The target has to be that by 7 May 2015, we no longer call these "reforms" but business as usual.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86252 2013-04-24T12:22:26Z 2013-04-24T12:33:49Z

It's clear today that the financial services sector has been protected from technological disruption as a result of the 2008 economic crash. While industries such as retail and media have been thoroughly disrupted by internet, cloud and mobile technologies, banking...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
While industries such as retail and media have been thoroughly disrupted by internet, cloud and mobile technologies, banking has seen relatively little of the changes in consumer behaviour that brought the likes of HMV or Blockbuster to their knees.

A widespread conservatism, as bankers kept their heads down to avoid their fair share of blame for the recession, has combined with an increase in regulation to effectively entrench legacy IT systems in many major financial institutions.

In other sectors, the commoditisation of IT has broken down barriers to entry, increased customer choice, and encouraged disruptive new businesses to take on the inertia-bound incumbents. In finance, it's been almost impossible to do the same.

But things are changing, and the same process of disruption will inevitably shake the financial sector.

The collapse of the Co-op's plan to buy 632 Lloyds bank branches shows how difficult it remains to increase competition and open up the sector to new entrants. But the government is trying to foster such changes, by forcing easier access to global payments networks, for example.

There was much debate this week at Computer Weekly's CW500 in the City event for financial services IT leaders, about the relationship between regulation and innovation. There was some agreement that fear of regulation acts as an inhibitor to innovation in the sector, although other delegates felt that it was too easy to use compliance as an excuse not to innovate.

Undoubtedly, for most banks their hugely complex and costly legacy IT estate acts as more of a barrier to innovation than any regulatory authority does. After all, it was "innovation" in collateralising risk that led to the crash in the first place. Few finance firms have taken the bull by the horns and overhauled their back-office systems - Nationwide has a £1bn IT transformation programme in place, but there aren't many others taking such a big step.

But now we are starting to see glimpses of how the future might be different.

The banks have desperately tried to prevent the emergence of peer-to-peer mobile payment networks, but increasingly the likes of Google, Paypal, and network providers such as Telefonica are offering new ways to move money that bypasses the banks.

Germany has seen the world's first social media bank - Fidor is a start-up operation that uses Facebook as its primary means of customer acquisition and support. It even offers a savings account where the interest rate is influenced by the number of Facebook "likes" it attracts.

For a young, social media generation looking for their first bank, that's going to be an appealing alternative - and becomes especially disruptive if they stay loyal as they get older.

Customer behaviour is changing faster than most established banks can cope - offering a mobile banking app is one thing, using that as your primary means of customer communications is quite another. Eventually, that customer behaviour will be as much of a driver for change as government or regulators - and technology will be the means by which those customers force that change.

Like it or not, financial services will be disrupted every bit as much as other commercial sectors, with new entrants shaking up the established players as technology fragments the market. The big banks are blind if they cannot see it coming; they will of course resist for as long as they can, but like every other industry they will over the next 10 years be forced to embrace IT innovation or see their empires decline.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86240 2013-04-19T12:17:00Z 2013-04-19T12:21:49Z

One of the criticism made of the late prime minister Margaret Thatcher during the recent coverage of her life and death was the way she abandoned communities that had once relied on former businesses such as mining and manufacturing. There's...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
There's a case to be made that she was right to withdraw state support for loss-making companies, but the failure of that policy was the lack of investment in re-training affected workers who were left on the dole with skills that were no longer needed.

Sadly, this has become something of a recurring theme in businesses themselves in the last 20 years years, and particularly for IT professionals - and it's likely to come to a head in the next few years.

During any economic downturn, one of the first items to be struck from the corporate cost base is training. In too many IT departments that has gone a stage further - employers unwilling to constantly update IT skills to keep up with the pace of technology change have instead sourced newer skills externally, often overseas.

This has all contributed to the continuing skills shortage today. It's not a shortage of jobs - there are plenty of IT jobs out there - but CIOs say their biggest recruitment challenge is finding people with the relevant skills they need.

Thousands of IT professionals lost their jobs at the height of the crash, only to find that the skills they had honed on legacy IT in their former employers were no longer wanted elsewhere.

There's a huge rush to recruit in-house software developers at the moment, from large firms to tech start-ups. One entrepreneur has called for the relaxation of UK immigration laws to attract more highly-skilled foreign developers. Many existing, out of work UK IT workers would take offence at such a move.

As Computer Weekly documents every day, we are in the midst of great change brought about by technology - some would call it the digital revolution. That means a growing need for modern IT skills, in areas such as cloud, web development, mobile, social media and more. The skills that have traditionally been the mainstay of the IT department - systems admin, operations, product-focused technical support - many of these will wither as the legacy technologies they support wither.

And if all this follows the same predictable path, with the same attitudes to training and skills that have hampered UK IT in the past 20 years, we have a very big problem.

It is essential that IT leaders do not allow training and skills development to become the forgotten investment in the digital revolution.
]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86208 2013-04-11T12:22:24Z 2013-04-11T12:32:41Z

Anyone who has read this blog over the past few months will have seen there are several recurring themes I've been banging on about lately. It's been interesting to see a few things happening recently that, to me, reinforce some...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
UK gives Belgium €300m to develop the cloud

Google has announced a €300m investment in its cloud datacentre in Belgium - that's in addition to the initial €250m spent building the site, which opened in 2010.

When was the last time you read about a similar investment in cloud in the UK by one of the internet giants? Erm, never?

According to Datacenter Dynamics, one of the reasons Google chose the site was its welcoming government: "The local authorities have a strong vision for how the internet can bring economic benefits and jobs to the area," Google said.

That's money the UK is giving away. It would not be difficult to put in place a forward-looking strategy to support the internet and technology industry in the UK. All those big US internet firms like us - we speak a version of the same language, after all. The UK is such an obvious base for developing cloud datacentres, bridging the US and Europe in much the same way as we do in our role as one of America's aircraft carriers.

And when the inevitable rise of Asian cloud firms happens in the future, they would look to the European location with the most proven infrastructure, and that would be here.

Except it won't be, because there is no incentive or support for bringing such business to the UK. The government here gets excited instead when Google spends £1m on a new office.

When Google tells us we have a problem with our education system, it seems to make the government jump. But despite the close links between 10 Downing Street and Google, we have failed to gain any meaningful inward investment in the UK as a digital country. We are missing such a huge opportunity and the government should be embarrassed to see that money going elsewhere.

Falling off a cliff

Both Gartner and IDC have reported the biggest decline in PC sales they have ever seen. Gartner said global PC shipments went below 80 million units in the first quarter of 2013 for the first time since mid-2009.

Many firms in different sectors continue to view the changing environment brought about by the digital revolution as a gradual and manageable decline in their established markets. But the disruption and fragmentation caused by the internet and new technologies will not work like that - many markets will fall suddenly off a cliff, and companies constrained by inertia and management sclerosis will go with it.

Look at retail - HMV, Blockbuster, Jessops. The IT industry itself is seeing the same thing happening - Dell, HP, BlackBerry, Nokia. You can argue about the definition of a cliff, but year-on-year declines of 11% (Gartner) or 14% (IDC) in PC sales are at the very least a sign that the lemmings have started to jump.

Business leaders that fail to change, and ignore the inevitability of the digital revolution in their market, will have no excuses when their revenues reach the cliff edge too.

Microsoft is not going away

Gartner produced some separate research recently that looked at the overall market for end-user devices as a whole - PCs, smartphones and tablets. The headline news was the rise of Android devices, which Gartner predicts will be more than double the number of Windows (desktop plus smartphone/tablet) devices by 2017.

Much of the reporting around this research highlighted the demise of Microsoft - The Guardian labelled it "a slide into irrelevance".

But even the Gartner graphic used to illustrate that argument in The Guardian told a different story.


 
To me, this shows that for sure Microsoft is no longer going to enjoy the dominance it has been accustomed to for the last 25 years. But irrelevance? I don't think so.

Look at that green line, which shows Windows device shipments growing from a little over 300 million in 2012 to just below 600 million in 2017. That's still not a bad growth rate, even if it masks the fact that the product mix will change from profitable desktop Windows to the likely lower income of smartphone or tablet Windows.

Android's predicted growth is remarkable but predictable - it's open source software; Google created it as such for the very reason that it would disrupt the market and fragment the ecosystems built around Microsoft and Apple.

But while device manufacturers and app developers may gain sales as part of the Android ecosystem, Microsoft and Apple are the firms for which that upwards chart represents the biggest actual revenue growth.

It may be a different Microsoft in 2017, one that no longer dominates the consumer nor corporate IT sectors in the way it used to, but it's still going to be a force to be reckoned with.
 ]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86167 2013-03-28T10:52:55Z 2013-03-28T11:01:56Z

While we marvel and despair at the pace of changes being wrought by the technology industry, there's a body of opinion that everything we are seeing now was entirely predictable.I enjoy the work of Carlota Perez and Simon Wardley, among...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
I enjoy the work of Carlota Perez and Simon Wardley, among others, who map and model the processes of change that drive technology adoption and its effect on the markets that buy IT.

Perez says we are living through the fifth technological revolution to occur since the Industrial Revolution, and that each follows a predictable pattern. For example, "Each time there are two different periods with a bubble and recession between them," she says.

Sound familiar? First the dot com boom and bust, and now the seemingly endless age of austerity?

Wardley writes about the move from a time of "peace" to one of "war" - when technology shakes up stable markets, disrupts the business of inertia-bound incumbents, and opens up opportunities for innovative new entrants who become the future giants of the next era.

You can see it in the IT industry - the slow-to-react giants like HP, Dell, Nokia and BlackBerry, while the likes of Google and Amazon rise rapidly. Look in particular at the battle for control of Dell - founder Michael Dell trying to take the company private, while rival investors seek a higher price and a different future, all the while distracting the supplier from the real task of adapting to the changes that brought about the battle in the first place.

Go back even further and you find evidence that the transformational shift represented by cloud computing was predicted as long ago as 1966, by a Canadian technologist, Douglas Parkhill, in his book The challenge of the computer utility.

You see it too in the increasingly rabid reporting around IT security - the idea of cyber warfare with China, and doom-laden predictions of the internet being brought down by hackers abound in national news today, only proving the old adage that truth is the first casualty of "war".

Wardley in particular is scathing about the likes of Dell, whose travails were, he says, inevitable because they missed the entirely predictable changes in their market.

For IT leaders, this predictability should be a strategic tool.

You can see the same patterns of change happening in every major business sector. In retail, the inertia of HMV, Jessops, Blockbuster and others while new entrants like Netflix and iTunes revolutionised their market. In media, the financial challenge for national newspaper groups as blogs and online content destroys their old business models.

If you're in an industry undergoing such radical change, which side of the inertia barrier are you on? Are you fighting to protect the peace, or embracing the battle of reshaping your business with IT?

Perhaps you're in an industry so far protected from such change - financial services springs to mind. Perez claims the 2008 crash actually delayed revolutionary change in the sector, but that the change is nonetheless inevitable. Are you ready for the technology-led change you are about to experience?

All IT leaders need to understand which side of the inertia divide their organisation occupies, and get on the right side before it's too late. Your future is both predictable and inevitable.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86140 2013-03-21T12:08:35Z 2013-03-21T12:13:40Z

Once again, the Chancellor of the Exchequer's red briefcase remained firmly in the analogue world. George Osborne made his first tentative steps into the modern world by joining Twitter on the day of the 2013 Budget (well, some unfortunate Treasury...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
George Osborne made his first tentative steps into the modern world by joining Twitter on the day of the 2013 Budget (well, some unfortunate Treasury press officer did at least, and then had to read all the abuse their boss received).

But you can't imagine George is planning to retire the briefcase and walk out of Number 11 Downing Street carrying a red iPad anytime soon.

For the IT industry, the Budget was best described by one commentator as "tech-lite".

There can't be many sectors that contribute 12% of GDP yet still get so little consideration in the UK's economic planning - not least as a growing industry with enormous opportunity to establish Britain as world leader.

There was some encouragement for start-ups - start-ups generally, that is, not specifically tech - which will help the burgeoning UK scene. But other than that, the briefcase contained policies for banking, manufacturing and construction, those important but resolutely 20th century industries.

Surely it can't be difficult to join a few simple dots for those in the Treasury team.

We have record youth unemployment in the UK, and a huge shortfall of young entrants in the IT profession - not to mention the need to fill tens of thousands of new roles in the coming years. Would it have been so hard to offer incentives for training and recruitment into IT jobs?

According to research, nearly 15% of commercial properties in the UK are empty. Meanwhile, one of the fastest growth areas in the technology world is cloud computing, a US-dominated area where the main suppliers have to be convinced by data protection laws to set up cloud datacentres in Europe.

Might it be a good idea all round to find ways to use suitable empty commercial properties to establish datacentres or businesses to support the cloud ecosystem? Or of course, you could just let UK companies give all their cloud IT budgets to US suppliers.

It can't be difficult for some economist to prove the net-positive effect of such policies - more people in work, paying more taxes, buying more goods; more landlords receiving rentals, corporate IT budgets being reinvested in UK companies, a growing source of tax revenue from the UK being a hub for cloud providers.

Labour leader Ed Miliband labelled Osborne as a "#downgradedchancellor" after his Twitter debut. What more do we have to do to convince George to upgrade his UK IT budget?   

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86113 2013-03-14T17:37:33Z 2013-03-15T11:34:18Z

In the long history of bad IT projects, one of the common characteristics has been the willingness - perhaps even determination - of IT teams to see things through to fruition even when it's obvious that things have gone wrong.This...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
This has been highlighted numerous times in various official reports about some of the high-profile government IT projects that have gone off the rails - even now, it looks like the increasingly troubled Universal Credit programme is going the same way.

Elaborate quality assurance processes have been put in place to flag up failing projects at an early stage - but in many cases civil servants have ploughed on regardless.

It's not exclusive to Whitehall though - there are plenty of private sector projects that have made the same blinkered mistakes.

So it's refreshing - even if on a small scale - to see retailer John Lewis talking publicly about its intent to "fail fast" at technology innovation.

The department store canned a "virtual mirror" initiative that had been launched with great fanfare last year, because it was making no money. "The key is, when you find it's a dud, stop," said one of the John Lewis IT executives.

It's a principle that all IT leaders would do well to adopt.

"Fail fast" is a phrase that has come out of the online and start-up worlds, where the emphasis is on prototyping and piloting new initiatives, which inevitably makes it easier to stop. When there have been thousands of pounds sunk into a major development programme, there is clearly more at stake for project leaders.

But if "fail fast" has an antonym, it's "pride comes before a fall". It would take a culture change in many organisations to make a fail-fast strategy accepted, and not simply seen as failure. Risk-averse British business culture can be a hindrance.

But failing fast doesn't just encourage honesty and prevent problem projects. It enables a culture of innovation - think how much more confident employees would feel about suggesting new ideas if they knew there would be no stigma attached to their subsequent failure.

"Right first time, every time" was the mantra of the quality brigade, and it's a nice objective to have - but it doesn't always reflect reality. Fail fast is good for IT departments, and good for innovation.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86086 2013-03-08T15:32:39Z 2013-03-08T16:46:47Z

The vultures are circling over the IT behind the government's Universal Credit (UC) programme. Computer Weekly has catalogued the gradual drip-feed of concerns and rumours around the highest profile IT project in Whitehall at the moment. Staff have been removed...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
Computer Weekly has catalogued the gradual drip-feed of concerns and rumours around the highest profile IT project in Whitehall at the moment.

Staff have been removed from the project at the highest level; costs are running over; deliverables appear to be thin on the ground. And now the row is brewing inside the House of Commons as Labour and Coalition politicians make claim and counter claim - the latest being that the key IT contractors have been told to stop work.

We hear lots of other speculation that, if true, would show a programme in chaos - suppliers that have simply not delivered; ultimatums and threats of legal action; despair from those in Whitehall IT who said all along that the approach taken was doomed.

Much of that speculation may be simple gossip - but the fact that people are engaged in such negative whispers shows the dark cloud under which UC is being developed.

You can understand why the government is reticent to admit problems. Universal Credit is a flagship Tory policy that could make or break their General Election hopes in 2015, by which time it is due to be live. Don't be surprised if political expediency sees those deadlines put back to 2016 as polling day gets closer.

But the IT politics is even more interesting. UC is the project that, so we hear, minister Iain Duncan Smith personally insisted should remain outside the IT reforms being introduced from the Cabinet Office.

While nobody in Whitehall wants another IT disaster, you can bet the IT reformers would not be too disheartened if UC followed that all too familiar route.

And then there is the supplier relations - some of the biggest names, from the "oligopoly" of system integrators who have dominated government IT, are involved. These are the companies the reformers want to see booted out; the ones who still believe Whitehall can't do IT without them.

If those suppliers, individually or collectively, fail on UC, it would be a crushing blow to their future sales in government. They will not go down without a fight. But there are powerful forces who would love to see them go down nonetheless.

Don't underestimate just how much is at stake with Universal Credit - the outcome could shape the future of Whitehall IT.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86055 2013-03-01T11:53:12Z 2013-03-01T12:24:53Z

The European Union wants to impose a cap on banker's bonuses. Regardless of what you think about the reasonableness of legislators trying to regulate private sector salaries - I'd say it's a daft idea, no matter how much banks need...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com a cap on banker's bonuses. Regardless of what you think about the reasonableness of legislators trying to regulate private sector salaries - I'd say it's a daft idea, no matter how much banks need to change the bonus culture - it is another sign of the shifting sands for the financial services industry.

The sector is slowly, inexorably, shifting its centre of gravity eastwards. London is never going to disappear as a global finance hub, but it's inevitable that the City's influence will decline over the next 10, 20 maybe even 30 years.

That's going to have a huge impact on the UK economy, and no matter how much successive governments will try to protect the finance sector, it is difficult to see anything but a gradual reduction in its contribution to GDP. Thanks to technology, banks can put their physical headquarters wherever the regulatory and tax environment is most favourable.

So this government, and the next, and the one after that, will all face a difficult decision. The sector that was the powerhouse of the UK economy for the 25 years since Maggie Thatcher's "Big Bang" deregulation, will need to be supplanted by something new.

Now I know I'm biased, but surely if any sensible person takes a long-term view of what industry is likely to generate the biggest growth over the next 20 years, you can't look much further than technology.

What's more, the UK is well placed - a great (but still under-developed) skills base, a culture of innovation and creativity, a history of invention, and the most digitally active population in Europe.

The government plans to publish an "information economy" strategy in May - a rather belated stab at what it describes as "Digital technologies and information combining to drive productivity and create new growth opportunities across the whole economy."

Glad they noticed.

But more than ever, it is clear the UK needs a committed, long-term strategy to place technology at the heart of our economy; one that transcends party politics and promises to put the country at the centre of what will be the most important sector in world business.

The industrial revolution was the turning point for the UK's global economic influence. Let's not waste the opportunity for the digital revolution to have the same impact.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.86021 2013-02-21T13:48:20Z 2013-02-21T14:05:22Z

Cyber security has made its ultimate mainstream breakthrough. This week, a relatively minor hack targeted at Apple not only made the BBC 10 O'clock News, but warranted a lengthy studio discussion between presenter Sophie Raworth and a BBC security correspondent.Attacks...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com a relatively minor hack targeted at Apple not only made the BBC 10 O'clock News, but warranted a lengthy studio discussion between presenter Sophie Raworth and a BBC security correspondent.

Attacks of varying sophistication and impact are becoming a near daily occurrence - and they are only the ones we hear about. Meanwhile, David Cameron hopes to export the UK's supposed cyber security expertise, offering the government's support to Indian officials during a trade visit, while China stands accused once more of extensive military-backed cyber espionage.

So the European Commission's proposed directives on cyber security and data protection are nothing if not timely. But they are proving controversial.

As businesses come to understand the full implications, there is likely to be quite some uproar over plans to effectively police and regulate the data security of almost any firm that offers some form of electronic or online service, from social media to retailers to banks.

US internet firms are lobbying to water down the proposals, and European companies are pushing back on plans for mandatory data breach reporting. There will be other concerns yet, and it seems certain that before long we will be bracketing IT security providers alongside lawyers as the guaranteed beneficiaries.

But the problem ultimately remains one of the IT industry's own making.

Security is still an afterthought too often. Few, if any, of the software and hardware systems that are used on a regular basis were designed with security in mind from the start. Security is still a feature to be added in, rather than a fundamental element of product strategy, architecture, design and development.

The need for regulation is in itself an indictment of the failure of technology providers. But much of the proposed rules will serve only to allow those suppliers to sell more products and make more money, instead of changing their behaviour.

The users of technology will bear the brunt and cost of compliance with the EU's directives, not the providers of the technology upon whom they rely. This, surely, risks missing an opportunity to force change on a negligent IT industry.

]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.85968 2013-02-08T11:05:34Z 2013-02-08T11:13:23Z

We've all become used to the idea of constant change working in a sector like IT. We're so familiar with coping with the pace of innovation, that sometimes it's easy to miss the scale of what is happening around us.Make...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com
Make no mistake, we're seeing change at a pace and scale that even for technology is almost unprecedented.

This week, one of the world's biggest and most successful IT companies basically admitted that its strategy is wrong and desperate measures are needed to secure its long-term survival. Michael Dell placed a $24bn bet that he can turn the company he founded into a modern software, services and cloud provider.

Taking the firm private is a huge gamble. It's also a historic milestone in the decline of the PC sector that has sustained so much of the IT industry for 30 years.

As I've written in this blog before, we're entering a period where change is no longer a gradual, inexorable downward curve - but instead it's a cliff. Dell saw the cliff approaching too late and is trying to perform a high-speed handbrake turn.

BlackBerry, the original icon of the smartphone and mobile working world, has also placed what could be its final bet. After far too many years of development, its new BlackBerry 10 operating system and associated handsets are the last throw of the dice. If it fails, the company fails - simple as that, and as unprecedented as that.

Closer to home, we've seen one of the UK's biggest and best known resellers, 2e2, collapse into sudden administration.

In an industry that has always been obsessed with the "next big thing" - take a look at the current big things: cloud, mobile, social, big data. As we know those topics today, they were barely on the edges of many IT leaders' radar even three years ago. Only a select few forward-thinkers saw the dramatic rise and the scale of change those trends would initiate.

We are in what one expert has called a state of war - established companies fighting for their position as they see their cosy status quo disappear, and new entrants charge the battlefield.

In the midst of such change, it's hard sometimes to find the time to step back and get some perspective. But for IT leaders it's going to be increasingly important to understand the broader context of the current landscape, and to plot a successful route.

A lot of people in IT will be placing a lot of bets in the next year or two, and a lot of companies will see their future determined as a result.
]]> tag:www.computerweekly.com,2013:/blogs/editors-blog//105.85938 2013-01-31T17:04:45Z 2013-01-31T17:11:33Z

Great news: It's a good time to be a software engineer again, you no longer have to worry about your job going to India, and IT leaders are queuing up to employ you.For much of the "noughties", it was a...

Bryan Glick http://www.computerweekly.com IT leaders are queuing up to employ you.

For much of the "noughties", it was a widely acknowledged truth that all software development was going to India and the Far East. Swathes of corporate application development teams were laid off and big outsourcing contracts put in place, as the global system integrators convinced customers of their "transformational" delivery skills.

Numerous expensive non-transformations later, things have changed.

According to Sam Gordon, a director at recruitment firm La Fosse Associates speaking at the first CW500 Club event of the year this week, there is a huge and growing demand from CIOs to bring software development back in-house. Gordon quoted one un-named CIO as saying he would rather have "10 rock-star software engineers than 100 programmers in India."

It's important to note this isn't a backlash against India - it's a realisation that in a digital world, when dealing with technology-enabled customers and IT-led business change, software is your salesperson.

Increasingly, your customers are dealing with you not through well-trained human beings, but through software - whether websites, mobile apps, in-store kiosks, ATMs, whatever. Software is your shop front. It's also the key to internal efficiency and productivity.

The value that organisations deliver is increasingly embodied in the software they use. And that means you need the value-creators in your organisation, not in a supplier bound by little more than a project plan and a service-level agreement.

"Agile" is an over-used word, but it's the essence of the interface between software and competitive edge or customer service.

Walk into any online company - Asos.com, or LateRooms.com for example - and you'll see software engineers sitting alongside business decision-makers. They're not talking code, they're talking business, and user needs.  

Software engineers themselves have changed. Walk around the Government Digital Service - the closest thing the public sector has to a software start-up - and you won't see the old programmer stereotype of bearded blokes with open-toed sandals and few social skills. These are bright, creative, thought-provoking, idea-generating business people who happen to be able to push out some kick-ass Ruby code.

Attitudes are changing elsewhere too.

This week, there were two fantastic news stories for the future of UK IT. First, the Department for Education announced that computer science will be one of the subjects for the new EBacc baccalaureate qualification in schools. Second, the number of students applying for computer science courses at university grew for the first time in years - what's more, it was one of the highest increases in popularity of any degree course.

That's the future. At last, kids are finally seeing software as something they want to learn.

Another of the IT leader guests at CW500 came up with a great phrase - "agile annihilation" - to describe the prospects for organisations that don't have the flexibility to rapidly respond through software to what's happening in their market.

If you're a software engineers with the skills - it's going to be a good few years for you. If you're an IT leader without the in-house software skills you need - well, it's time to review your recruitment plans. Agile annihilation awaits for the rest.

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