Recent Blog Posts

I therefore strongly encourage you to visit the OFT website , discuss with your peers and respond - individually and collectively. This topic is far too important to be left to Cabinet Office, ...

It's surprisingly hard to find good quality guidance for business managers on information security, and even harder to find material that is free. Far too much essential reference material is ...

Travel agents & tour operators, as a sector, commit around 3% of their turnover on IT & telecoms. The proportion increases with size of organisation ranging from just under 2% for smaller ...

The implications are truly profound. The chairman knew exactly what she was doing. I remember a PITCOM visit to Washington, twenty years ago, when we "bumped into her". As rapporteur, I listened to ...

It will be interesting to see the precise words in the transcript and whether we will see a short order disclosure of plans, perhaps brokered by DCMS and/or BDUK as part of the follow up to meeting ...

The officials are using the Groucho Marx defence: "Deny it. Deny it, Deny it. Somewhere, somwhere may believe you."

The promise of VDI - virtual desktop infrastructure - is theoretically sound. Call it thin client computing, server-based computing or whatever - the idea is good. The capability to host and manage ...

This was a constructive meeting between the Secretary of State, BT and the most advanced community-led rural broadband schemes. It was agreed that all parties would work together, along with local ...

Tablet watchers will no doubt have noticed this week's news of Microsoft cutting the price of its flagship Surface tablet.

Inspect-a-Gadget quizzes Computer Weekly's networking editor, Jennifer Scott, about her thoughts on the BlackBerry Q5. A Z10 fangirl BlackBerry convert, she has spent the past five months cradling ...

Agile can work but in the context of the Government Data Service and Digital by Default, it is not enough. Success requires an agile mindset towards policy formation. It also requires that central ...

This is a contributed posting for the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog by Peter Linnell, Linux Engineer at SUSE.

Five years ago we didn't talk about the development of enterprise social network applications, but things have changed.

Ahchan on iPad (Photo credit: jetalone)We are all animal lovers at Downtime, with one of us particularly obsessed with her two fluffy little felines at home. However, even she balked at the idea of ...

The cost to BT, as well as to the UK economy as a whole, would be very serious were our multi-media complexes, currently struggling with expensive and slow copper lines and exorbitant business ...

Or should I have added another conspiracy theory to my competition: that the publicity for PRISM was to hide the fact that GHHQ and the NSA really spend much of their budgets paying for collated ...

The days of the CIO role in central government are over. Computer Weekly has followed the steady demise of the Whitehall CIO for some time, since it became clear that the key IT reformers at the ...

HTML5 is described as the "cornerstone" of the Open Web Platform, a full programming environment for cross-platform applications with access to device capabilities

Application software packages purchases by specialised construction firms with 50+ staff are at a lower level than that for the construction sector overall. The latter additionally covers buildings ...

The sizzling summer in Surrey (UK) has slowed my writing, though the cyber security market is also equally hot with many fresh initiatives emerging. Your own perspective will no doubt vary of ...

Officials falsely claimed the NHS had protected its £7.3bn investment in the National Programme for IT by staking ownership over any software it produced, it has emerged.

Some real gent out there has decided to create a piece of technology that Joey Tribbiani would be proud of... the clap-off bra.After discovering that countries like Syria were much more advanced in ...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will be celebrating today. He is the clear winner of the latest Super Buzzword Bingo competition, with his entry for the internal memo announcing Microsoft's biggest ...

The operators argued until they were blue in the face, Ofcom kept us waiting and waiting, and EE put all of its investment squarely behind the technology - but it seems the person on the street ...

Overall sports & recreation organisations have an outlay of £30 per employee on custom software. This varies by size of organisation with medium sized concerns investing twice that amount ...

Bringing network system management problem resolution into focus is exciting news for applications that depend upon a mainframe-based foundation.

We all know there is a problem getting women into the IT profession. I wrote last week that the only real solution to this problem lies with the men in IT - as the dominant group, the only way to ...

The big question is how government encourages the provision of commercially viable and trustworthy end-user (consumer or small firm) support services - as opposed to a clogged help-line to an ...

At the recent IT Security Analysts Forum in London, organised by Eskenzi PR, one could be forgiven for thinking that the dozen or so vendors represented were all fierce competitors. Their ...

We are supposedly about to witness the real impact of Near Field Communications (NFC), a technology that can make secure contactless device-to-device communication a realit

It is not just Birmingham, Bristol, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Newcastle, Manchester and Newcastle that have inner city broadband deserts where businesses are being forced to ...

Hanging out @ Melbourne Zombie Shuffle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)How many times have you got on a crowded tube or train, glared at people around you through bleary eyes and thought: "Am I going to ...

Computer Weekly has been following the plight of Sub-Postmasters that allege they have been falsely accused and found guilty of false accounting. Some have even been sent to prison, others have ...

The impact of touch, Windows 8 and Metro may yet have a far deeper impact on the programming landscape -- for those users who may chose to make the Surface Pro their device of choice especially.

Just in..."How To" advice from the Naked leader: The handshake- Look into their eyes, pause for 1/10th of a second and smile warmly - and introduce yourself as you move in to shake her/his hand- ...

At Computer Weekly, we like to bring you the real stories of how your peers are using technology in their businesses and organisations, not just what the vendor wants you to hear about their latest ...

InfoSec 2013 - AlienVault (Photo credit: DaveOnFlickr)More than half of information security professionals polled at Infosecurity Europe 2013 said they believe in extra-terrestrial life.Security ...

Will software application developers who build online chat apps be in some part responsible for the ultimate demise and passing of the SMS communicatio

Food & beverage services companies typically spend over £400 per employee on IT & telecom staff, products and services. Telecom services and staff take the largest share, each costing some ...

The term "platform" has been somewhat hijacked in recent times by various database (and other) vendors who feel they can get away with using the term in a slightly twisted context.

Faced with the challenge of trying to narrow down a long list of successful women in tech, a point was raised about some of the newer ladies who are just getting started in doing great things for ...

The deadline for businesses in Europe to be able to make and take payments that are compliant with Sepa, the Single European Payments Area, is six months away. But projects to migrate systems to ...

Thank you to everyone who attended Computer Weekly's Women in IT event yesterday - the feedback has been so positive so thank you to all of our speakers for doing such a brilliant job!

I have met individuals capable of doing the job he was being asked to do, but they have been senior civil servants coming towards the end of their careers, capable of politely facing down permanent ...

This time last year, after Computer Weekly announced the first of our now-annual list of the 25 most influential women in IT, I wrote in this blog about why we don't want to have to write about the ...

The basic reason that so many different costs are being quoted for rural broadband (or any other broadband) is that engineers design and build in line with whatever budget the customer has on ...

English: Parliament buildings London UK (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Yesterday, I received the National Audit Office's report on the BDUK project for rolling out fibre broadband. The report sought to ...

I wrote an article this week about the organisers of The Open Championship getting the event's website ready for four days of heavy traffic. The event is being held in Muirfield this month and the ...

Magnolia International has announced the release of the 5.0 version of its Content Management System (CMS). This release is positioned as an open Java CMS with a mobile-inspired HTML5 user ...

Given that public sector spend will be under pressure for the next decade or so and given BTs need to fund its content operations and upgrade its core networks to provide the necessary quality of ...

New golden rule for techies: be careful where you plug yourself in. Failure to heed this rule, could lead to becoming unplugged or at the very least unstuck.The case is perfectly illustrated by a ...

I do worry about the security of our industrial control and SCADA systems. I have been for the last 24 years in fact, ever since I first encountered them. In my view the real problem has always ...

An investigation into Government IT procurement is being conducted by the Office of Fair Trading. This is an attempt to identify some of the reasons why government IT supplies is still dominated by ...

The Red Hat sponsored Fedora Project has announced the Fedora 19 fully functional free of charge Linux operating system code-named "Schrödinger's Cat".

example of a riff of traditional heavy metal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)It is no secret to regular readers of my blog that my heart is filled with music of the somewhat heavier persuasion. Whilst ...

Large chemical manufacturers spend around £2.5m on external software. Just over a £1m is outlaid on application packages. About half that amount goes on system software and likewise on customised ...

English: Aerial view of the Golden Gate and the central portion of San Francisco Bay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is no kitten in the corporate world, but there is no doubt ...

As part of my job I commission and write articles for our Indian websites, Theses are searchcio.in, searchbusinessintelligence.in, searchsecurity.in and searchdatacenter.in.Yesterday as I was doing ...

BT Ireland logo (2005 - Present) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Last night, I had the pleasure of sharing dinner with the CEO of BT Global Services Luis Alvarez. And yes, that isn't me being facetious; ...

Government is indeed different, given the potential suffering of a patient receiving the wrong treatment or of some-one whose benefits have been stolen along with their identity. Hence the ...

• Infrastructure competition moves into cloud services• When technology becomes invisible, connections become conversations

Service integration is a hot topic in outsourcing at the moment. Although the process of managing multiple suppliers has been around for years, it has been completed in-house. Today with the ...

Companies and organisations involved include Red Hat, HP, Nebula, NSA, Intel, Nicira, Rackspace, Cloudscaling, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Floss Manuals.

Police authorities in Scotland are still using systems that date back to the 1970s. The Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland have chosen Accenture to support a new system they are ...

I wrote a feature about the challenges facing IT departments when they are outsourcing today.Here it is:Once upon a time, IT outsourcing was a choice between doing it or not, but with maturing ...

Opening up the free server virtualisation tool market this month is Citrix XenServer, which has now moved to a full open source model beginning with the new XenServer 6.2.

When the Carbon Trust was faced with a huge IT budget cut it went to its IT outsourcing partners for help. But they couldn't help so it moved just about everything to the cloud.Mike Proudlock, IS ...

the time has come for ministers to order their officials to look at issues from the perspective of voters, not of consultants and technology salesmen.

Hardware spend per employee for management consultancy firms peaks for those employing 50-99 staff. Notably the smallest expenditure ratio is for the largest sized consultancies. This contrasts the ...

But that raises the question of what Ofcom was created to do, whether those are still its objectives and whether they are still the right objectives. Having helped organise the scrutiny process for ...

I'm back blogging after a lengthy break due to extensive writing and consultancy commitments. Nothing much has changed in the cyber security sphere during that time apart from a very slight ...

The security services need a mix of talent and the processes to nurture them and actively maintain their motivation over time. So your reviewers should also raise their glasses to disgruntled older ...

Hence also the importance of the Cyber Security Skills framework for which e-Skills is currently seeking employers who will review it with a view to customising it for their own use. In fact, if we ...

Today there is plenty of media hype around technology "re-wiring" the young mind. Many educational experts, teachers and parents have mentioned that the digital age has made an impact and improved ...

Raspberry Pi (Photo credit: CesarCardoso)It's been a while since I raved about losing a weekend getting to grips with Linux on a home project to build a music server.It took a weekend to get the ...

If there is one area more than any other that the IT industry has consistently let its customers down, it is standards.The old adage says that the great thing about standards is there are so many ...

UK IT professionals are not sure how to get cloud computing skills according to CWJobs.co.uk. Only 45% of IT professionals on CWJobs.co.uk's database have cloud skills.The IT outsourcing sector is ...

After nearly four and a half years of change the IT services brand that was Satyam will disappear from our minds as Tech Mahindra integrates its operations.The company acquired Satyam after it ...

Evans Data has made some big picture projections by offering up its guess at the future size of the worldwide developer population. The firm says the total developer population worldwide is ...

Intel's MD of worldwide professional services Aaron Davies-Morris has been speaking at the Hadoop Summit 2013 in San Jose

Managing the mobile enterprise is moving from simply securing hardware and software to a more business-oriented position around things that really matter, like people and information.

There were some interesting presentations at the latest CW 500 Club meeting last night. The subject being discussed was cloud computing. The title was Cloud Computing Versus Outsourcing, is it ...

Telecom services spend by the banking & finance sector swamps the outlay by all UK organisations. Depending on the size of the organisation it can be up to a factor of 10. Banking & finance ...

Last week Downtime informed you about how cockroaches were being experimented on using electrical backpacks to control their movements in a bid to tread Parkinson's disease. Now, the disgusting ...

It's a rare morning when Downtime does not need a large shot of caffeine to get us off to a productive start, but one coffee shop in Taiwan seems to have taken the idea of your own personalised ...

People complain about Google Street View all the time. Many see it as an invasion of their privacy. But downtime doesn't agree. In fact it believes Street View's discovery of a species of half man, ...

In this guest blog from Hornbill Service Management, Pat Bolger, writes about research the company conducted with the Service Desk Institute to see what CIOs and service desk professionals think ...

At the recent Forrester summit in London I attended most the presentations in the supplier and vendor management stream. Following the event I blogged earlier this month about the issue of getting ...

Dealing with expenses is a boring, long drawn out process for those filling in claims, and for those dealing with processing the claims. In some cases, claimants are leaving money on the table - to ...

The government is determined to end its reliance on the big system integrators selling them huge enterprise systems and hefty support contracts on top. Part of this involves digitisation.Moving to ...

This should be good news for heads of Risk and of Information Security but most are too bogged down with data protection, breach notification and ISO 27000 to make use of the unique window of ...

Software application developers today are struggling (we are constantly told) with the task of juggling unstructured (usually big) data.

I blogged last week about talk in the market that Logica (CGI) is looking odds-on to win a contract in the GB Smart Meter Implementation Programme. The Department of Energy and Climate Change ...

We have a top-of-the-range conference camera up for grabs, thanks to those lovely people at Logitech. Just come up with the best caption for this image to be in with a chance of winning!We were ...

Specifically, it's no longer just a question of Rapid Application Development (RAD), but also a case of rapid-deployment solution modules.

The announcement of Google Glass a little over a year ago turned so many heads that it wasn't long before some even began to question whether it, and other similar pieces of wearable hardware, were ...

The group responsible for overseeing the development of the LibreOffice free and open source "Office"-style productivity suite of applications has confirmed its latest release

Medium sized civil engineering companies spend around £150k each on computer services which is just ahead of that expended by buildings construction firms. Specialised construction organisations ...

The PRISM approach means that the analyses will be available in time to be used by the secret police of the new revolutionary government after the period of anarchy is over.

tTe proportion thinking that it is not only normal but that they would be disappointed if we British did not spy on others at international conferences, outweighs the don't knowns and "would rather ...