Recent Blog Posts

Within minutes of Mike Bracken announcing his departure as the government's digital chief, Twitter was full of tributes from people in his team at the Government Digital Service (GDS), and from the ...

Government digital chief Mike Bracken has announced his shock departure from government, four years after taking on leadership of the Government Digital Service (GDS). There is already much ...

In software application development and programming, upstream refers to source code that has been posted/hosted into/onto the code repository.

The political climate in the UK makes it difficult to talk about immigration and its effect on the IT sector, given the wider sensitivities around the subject. But it's a topic that needs to be ...

The Turing Test is a famous challenge to computer scientists to create an artificial intelligence machine that is so convincing people believe they are talking to a real human being. Meanwhile, it ...

We'd like to let you in on a little secret. In the past week, Computer Weekly uncovered IT problems at two NHS trusts in the north-west of London. In one, medical staff were unable to access ...

Earlier this week, I wrote here that a new Conservative government could mean more changes in government IT than such administrative consistency would suggest. It already seems those changes may be ...

On first impressions, the Conservative election victory appears to be business as usual for IT across government. The challenges before the election are the same challenges now; the civil service ...

It's been said that the general election this week is the most important for a generation. That's probably true on a number of levels - and certainly within the microcosm of the IT and digital ...

The closer we've come to the UK general election, the more it seems the Government Digital Service (GDS) is taking a public bashing. You might wonder why.It's certainly true to say that GDS divides ...

Sourcegraph aims to answer the challenge here with a search engine and code browser designed to help developers find the code they need.

A criticism often levelled at IT education is that by the time you come to apply the skills, they might be out of date. Why learn technology skills when that technology might not be in use in a ...

Last month, I wrote in this blog about the problems that caused the new rural payments digital service to be withdrawn from use by farmers and replaced by paper forms. The system was one of the 25 ...

It's great to see so much debate taking place on social media - and hopefully in the real world - following Martha Lane Fox's Dimbleby Lecture broadcast on BBC1 last night. Regardless of what ...

No blood was spilled, but listening to the three main political parties debate their digital policies together for the first time this week laid out the battleground for their likely general ...

Microsoft open sources 'execution engine' for .NET

Damage coalition cuts and bodge have done to Universal Credit was omitted from the National Audit Office assessment of the scheme in November.The full story emerged a week after the auditor ...

It's been impossible to ignore the biggest technology headline of the week - especially as it became the biggest business headline in many places too. Apple declared the largest quarterly profit in ...

The software company with 14% share of the global operating systems market announced the latest version of its flagship product this week. It's called Windows - you might have heard of it. It's not ...

While many people are obsessed with their mobile phones and never put them down for a minute, research shows that for many others they are just a waste of time. In fact, the average Brit will spend ...

Iain Duncan Smith looked like a fall guy when he started work on Universal Credit. He humbled forward to take the stage for his grand social project, with a little shove from his superiors. He ...

As we know, use of the term "infographic" generally causes involuntary gagging and may result in unwelcome skin irritation.

As we know, we have spent the last couple of decades and more putting more and more electronics into our automobiles.

If Universal Credit were made into a Hollywood rom-com, you just know that Margaret Hodge and Robert Devereux would be the central characters. Thrust into repeated opposition on different sides of ...

"Unacceptably poor management" and "wasted time and taxpayer's money" - that's how Margaret Hodge, MP, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee described Universal Credit this week.The latest ...

Diversity is a topic that is widely discussed nowadays. A lot of companies have Diversity Leaders within the business whose actual roles revolve around making sure the business is diverse. Some may ...

When you are consistently criticised over trust and security, deliberately obfuscating the facts about your involvement in a brand is very strange.

In July, the government revealed the existence of the Prime Minister's Digital Taskforce - notable at that time mainly for the fact that Tech City chair and former Facebook Europe managing director ...

It was hugely welcome to see the prominence that digital issues were given during the Labour and Conservative party conferences. Nobody would pretend that voters will make their decisions based on ...

So Scotland is not going it alone - and in all probability the whole of the UK will be better for that decision. The independence drive engaged voters in Scotland like never before, and also ...

I've just completed jury duty - my first real-life experience of the English judicial process. It's a fascinating thing to do - I would recommend it to anyone. But it was also an eye opener for the ...

Back in February, when the UK government's consultation on the use of open document formats closed, I described the decision to be made by the Cabinet Office as the acid test of its commitment to ...

The government has finally been forced to admit that the business case for the troubled Universal Credit programme has still not been signed off - despite repeated assurances that approval was ...

Congratulations to the 25 most influential women in UK IT - our annual list was announced yesterday, and it contains some amazing, high-achieving individuals (who happen to be women). The event at ...

Labour MP Jon Cruddas gave a speech this week that was barely reported in the press, but contained his party's most significant statements yet about the role of digital and technology in a ...

There's an interesting story in The Independent today that highlights the issue I wrote about on this blog last week - about the Cabinet Office policy of trying to make the old "oligopoly" of big ...

Google taken its PDFium software library forward into open source project status.

Pretty much every week these days you can expect a story in Computer Weekly on one of two topics: the growing importance and influence of the web to business and economic development; and the ...

Computer Weekly can illustrate how a UK network connection forms part of a US weapons targeting system that has slaughtered civilians in attacks gone wrong.The illustrations add credibility to a ...

Earlier this week, I was in Moscow, visiting the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, Russia's $15bn attempt to create a tech startup environment to compete with Silicon Valley.I mentioned in one of my ...

The billions of rubles of government money being invested in the Skolkovo Innovation Centre on the outskirts of Moscow (read my previous post for more details) is not only going into developing the ...

The Skolkovo Innovation Centre is about a half-hour drive from Red Square, in a 400 hectare building site on the outskirts of Moscow. Today and tomorrow, it's the venue for the second annual ...

My sources suggest that the IT problems that affected UK airports and sea ports earlier this week were related to Warnings Index, the ageing system that sits at the heart of the UK's border ...

Is the troubled Universal Credit programme looking for yet another new leader for the project?A good contact of mine has told me that he was approached by two separate headhunters recently, asking ...

And so the most popular PC operating system of all time reaches the final winter of its years.Windows XP goes out of regular support on 8 April, but it is testament to its enduring success that ...

Government IT - and in particular, the role of the Government Digital Service - is about to get political. Tomorrow night, the Labour Party launches its digital government review, a programme ...

With the tablet market booming, it's no longer just traditional office employees that have laptops and tablets in the workplace. We've written before about ruggedised tablets being adopted in ...

I've been told that the Department for Work and Pensions CIO, Andy Nelson, is about to step down from the role.The information came from a usually reliable source, but at the time of writing this, ...

Microsoft's call to its friends in the software community to contribute to the government's consultation on open document formats seems to have worked. Although, perhaps not as Microsoft intended. ...

The rumbling, growing row over the NHS England Care.data service has become an instruction manual for how not to handle data privacy in the digital age.For anyone not aware of the issue, Care.data ...