Recent Blog Posts

In recent times, I have noticed a sudden influx of articles, blog posts and tweets about getting more women into IT. Allow me to mention that this isn't a bad thing;

Recently Computer Weekly held its Most Influential Women in UK IT event, which attracted over 90 women to the Doubletree Hilton hotel in London.

The rhyme of first line support"Have you checked that it's switched on?", I said "Have you checked that with power it's fed?" Cos without any juice It's about as much use As a Python-esque parrot - ...

Smartphones already provide a vast toolkit in your pocket, and soon that arsenal could include the ability to take down a violent attacker. No, not a new app, but a cunningly crafted case, ...

If you are in a pub toilet during the Olympics and the guy next to you starts screaming "come on, come on" and "oh yes" don't panic he is not committing the sin of Onan, he is taking part in an ...

It has been a while since I have written about Intra Company Transfers (ICTs) and their impact on UK IT professionals. ICTs are used as a loophole to bring workers to the UK without a visa, if a ...

Despite calls from inside government and the IT industry for a more equitable distribution of government IT contracts, with SME suppliers given a fair crack of the whip, nothing is changing.The ...

[email protected] (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Those who prefer to wonder the realms of Azeroth than the bars of Soho might get the odd pang of loneliness that the virtual world cannot cure. But a new website has ...

The Independent on Sunday has revealed that the reason that G4S couldn't get enough staff to handle the Olympics might have been related to a problem with an internal computer system. An insider ...

I met up with the CIO at the London Stock Exchange last week.Antoine Shagoury, joined from the American Stock Exchange in February 2010. He was brought on board partly because of his track record ...

Nokia Lumia 800 (Photo credit: John.Karakatsanis)Before we have even polished off the bottle of whisky needed after listening to RIM's painful figures, Nokia is heading our way with its second ...

Given the lack of policy co-ordination and thought leadership at the centre, it is incumbent on those who wish to see economic recovery pulled through by 1930s style infrastructure investment (c.f, ...

As businesses invest more in analytics technology to extract valuable intelligence from business data, managing and storing that data becomes more challenging.

Thanks to Stan Gain for sending in two more finely crafted pieces of IT related poetry.

With less than two weeks to go until the start of the London 2012 Olympic Games, PRs everywhere are trying to find a desperate Olympics angle to shoehorn a story into publication by a ...

When the Financial Services Authority (FSA) introduces new rules, companies under its jurisdiction often have to invest in IT to enable them to adhere to the new guidelines.Because data is so ...

We've been asked a few times why we put together an award and an event to showcase women in IT. It's quite simple - we don't want to have to discuss the issue of women in IT again. How much better ...

Those who claim that the WCIT would be ultra vires were it to seek to wrest the oversight of Internet addressing from ICANN should remember that until last month it was the ITU that was hosting ...

O2-UK SIM Card (Photo credit: DeclanTM)Today has seen yet another technical failure leaving hundreds of thousands of people in the UK without a tool that is necessary to their daily lives. This ...

Next time your outsourcing supplier visits you just check the car park to see what he or she is driving. If it is a flashy sports car you may want to ask questions.Outsourcers have a bad name if ...

Why are there so few women in the in the IT profession ? Men and women have very different views on the problem.

Thanks to Steve Pauline for sending in this great limerick on the delights of a career in IT.

This is a guest post by Kane Fulton, editor and founder of online magazine SKRBBLR. Some of the more interesting and exciting innovations in mobile tech of late are borrowing from the past to shape ...

Programmers working at the coalface of cloud services development just now will no doubt have the words "secure access to corporate data via mobile" ringing in their ears at some point.

If there's one good thing to come out of the information superhighway its unlimited access to pictures and videos of cute cats.

Scientists are developing T-Shirts that will be able to recharge batteries on mobile phones if they happen to run out. Yes scientists at the University of South Carolina have found a way of storing ...

To learn more download Computer Weekly's special report on Cisco.Packed with graphs and diagrams this independent briefing is essential for any organisation thinking of working with Cisco. Flash ...

Just over a year ago I wrote an article about some research carried out by automation software supplier Lieberman Software. The survey of 250 IT professionals this year has the headline figure of ...

As organizations analyze their informationalized personalization projects using de-serialized data in newly virtualized environments with optimum memory utilization, there clearly is a need for ...

If you are serious about wishing to do intra-EU cross-border trade within the EU, without having to route your transactions via the US so as to avoid the overheads imposed by ill-considered ...

On 28th June 2011, Microsoft released a significant upgrade to its cloud services portfolio - Microsoft Office 365 - an online collaboration and productivity tool, which includes Microsoft ...

Tablet computers are trickling down from the board room into the rest of the organisation, according to this analysis of tablets in small and medium sized businesses.

I doubt that those dealers who rigged Libor in their own interests (or that of their counterparts in other banks as part of "easing" the market) are any more, or less, (dis)honest than the average ...

Electronic business has many levels. No surprise then that e-business (or e-commerce if you prefer) is served by e-accounting, which itself comprises of e-payments and (before that) e-invoicing... ...

At the very end of last month Real Business announced the winners of the 2012 First Women Awards. Designed to recognise pioneering women whose achievements open opportunities for others, the awards ...

Opinions are divided whether modern apprenticeship schemes are a solution to the shortages of skilled IT professionals facing many organisations, this Computer Weekly poll shows.

If you are a F1 fan like me or even caught a glimpse of the news this weekend, you would know it was the Silverstone Grand Prix on Sunday. You would also know that the typical British summer tried ...

An estimated 20,000 PCs in the UK could be cut off from the web today as a consequence of the DNS Changer virus. Infected machines will no longer be able to access websites, e-mail, chat or social ...

(Twitter: @energizedwork @seanblezard )Thanks to Simon Baker of Energized Work for sending in this great picture. Simon put it together using Adobe Fireworks.Do you have a hidden artistic talent ? ...

When a CEO leaves a company it often means a change of strategy. Certainly it puts things on hold.I was chatting to a contact of mine last week who told me that Barclays has a lot of outsourcing ...

As Agile software application development has become more popular in recent times we have (by no coincidence) logically seen the rise of extended code analysis tools in the Agile space.

We have computers to thank for teaching us the importance of business continuity planning. The real objective might be to keep the business running rather than prop up the technology, but the ...

Meanwhile ICANN is now fighting for survival, having stirred a similar hornets nest of IPR issues with the ambitions of US registrars to earn more revenues from the sale of domain names rather than ...

Who would you rather trust with your savings, bankers rigging interest rates to boost their bonuses or politicians doing so to write-down what they owe you?

We have been thinking its time to raise the cultural level on downtime for some time. Does downtime really have to devote so much space to, frankly, downmarket jokes and innuendo. How about Unix ...

... I sometimes wonder how they justify operating what should be pretty seamless systems to look after our bookings, when things can go so wrong.

According to government sources Bill Crothers, executive director for commercial relationships at the Cabinet Office, has been tipped to take John Collington's job as government chief procurement ...

Dane-Elec have transformed some of the most well known Marvel action heroes, including Spider-Man, into 4GB USB drives.They will soon be available, with a 5 year guarantee, for around £9.99.As if a ...

The tenth annual NatWest everywoman awards will close for entries on July 20th so there is not much time left if you want to enter for the 'Iris' category.

"We are in danger of creating teams of Morlocks, people who live underground with very dark eyes. And that is not good for anyone."Thanks to Gus Power, CTO of Energised Work, for this salutary ...

Downtime was interested to see how technology can change history these days. Those clever IT bods at UEFA are using digital technology and super-fast networking kit to edit apparently live ...

Most IT professionals surveyed by Computer Weekly believe that outsourcing is contributing to a shortage of skilled IT professionals in the UK.

If software configuration and change management (SCCM) tools had never existed, then we may arguably have gone on interminably without the speed and efficiency benefits that version control systems ...

"The OSSIM community is spread among many industries and countries, and is composed of organisations of all sizes, making it the most diverse and comprehensive threat feed possible," said ...

We are obsessed with getting Wi-Fi in weird and wacky places where it really isn't necessary to access the internet - well, except to check to out Computer Weekly of course! Now, it seems theme ...

The challenges for female IT professionals to win a place on the board are well documented. The good news is that things are improving... slowly. But those women who gain a seat too often realise ...

After the latest banking industry scandal, it is surely time for the government to invest in the future - and that future is surely technology. For the last 25 years, since Margaret Thatcher ...

We still have a "situation" where no single universal world standard exists for all video formats to play to. Neither Windows, Mac OS X or any other pretender to the global video crown has truly ...

Could the ring fencing of UK banks be an opportunity for them to share more services in common functions?Daniel Wakefield, head of capital markets at business intelligence specialist IMGROUP, wrote ...

UK prisons are to get state-of-the-art mobile technology that is not available to the public, but not the kind that inmates will appreciate. Far from having reception issues, prisoners have been ...

Will PC's (as we once knew them) die out now that the cloud computing model of service-based software application delivery and virtualised data storage and management has taken hold?

When will the storage industry experience its next 'paradigm shift'? This is what we want to know.70,000 images are uploaded to Facebook every minute, so we are experiencing a data explosion.

Unless we once again take seriously the issues of data quality (and the disciplines of information governance we are in danger of building a future based not merely on sand (silicon) but on quick ...

How cool is this. Students at Rice University, Houston, have invented a spray-on battery. The lithium-ion battery that can be painted on virtually any surface. All you need to do is spray on each ...

Cat watching cat (Photo credit: gillicious)We all know the internet was invented so we could share pictures of cats doing funny things with people around the world. What? It wasn't you say? Well, ...

You have to feel sorry for some of the victims of the technology crime that has been the RBS software upgrade debacle.

The chief of Boris Johnson's Mayor for London re-election campaign has been touting for advisory work with military propagandists seeking to persuade civilians to see things their way.Your ...

So why did the Minitel approach not take-off globally? ... the French were proud and possessive of their IPR ... Meanwhile the fathers of the Internet and of the Web gave away their IPR in a world ...

What could a former Delta Airlines chief teach us about open source? This is the opening line of several stories quoting Red Had CEO Jim Whitehurst who has undeniably come from a corporate airline ...

Electric cars get a mixed reaction. Those wanting to hark back to hippier days, despite their current middle class existence, rave about the benefits they give whilst still providing a cool driving ...

The effective monitoring of Internet Traffic today depends even more on international co-operation. Giving BT, O2/Vodafone/C&W and 3/Everything Everywhere £200 million a year to retain ...

I recently wrote an update article about progress being made in a software testing methodology. The independent Test Maturity Model integrated (TMMi), as it is known, has five stages and the long ...

Red Hat is this week hosting its Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 developer symposium in the city of Boston, Massachusetts.

If you occasionally read this blog, you'll know that I'm a big fan of Windows Phone but that my opinion of Nokia has slowly been declining. Well, that was until I got my hands on a Lumia 800 a ...

In this podcast recorded at the Forrester CIO Summit in Paris, Adriana Karaboutis, global CIO at Dell explains how her IT management team learns from summer interns. She says, "The Gen Ys have ...

Is this a Tay Bridge moment? Probably not. Not enough people are dead - although if RBS has to be put down as its customers walk away and the rest of us go back to carrying cash reserves in case ...

Adobe is getting its open source credentials in order and has now moved its complete range of supported projects and standards into a single "portal" area which has been labeled Adobe & HTML ...

"Financial services can be thought of as a technology business with a financial domain of expertise." That quote came from the CIO at investment banking giant JPMorgan Chase, and it's one that ...

The "know your customer" requirements that get in the way of banking competition in the UK will prevent an immediate flight of business to those who still retain such operations within the UK ...

Boston-headquartered Progress Software has been going through various reincarnations of itself since the 1980s

Many major suppliers appear to have believed that government was serious. Their cuts this spring have been even more savage. The only ones spared have been those working on new business from the ...

FDM Group has made it into the 'Top Ten IT Employers for Women' in 2012.The list is compiled by recruitment consultant Trendence and voted for by the female proportion of over 16,000 students.

Looking outside, it might be hard to believe summer has begun and the festival season is already kicking off, but technology companies are trying to remind us. Last week Downtime told you about ...

It appears to be an almost pre-ordained destiny today that once a piece of software has been developed, it's form and function must ultimately form the part of a service-based delivery option that ...

Customer events hosted by IT companies are always interesting to the external observer - I mean, to someone who is not the buyer nor the seller. I am now attending the Orange Business Live customer ...

Outsourcing is set to see the fastest growth since the 1980s with the sector worth up to £5bn by 2015, say city analysts.According to an article in the Financial Times over £4bn worth of tenders ...

Domain name registrar Names.co.uk has announced its nationwide search to uncover the Worst Domain Names registered on the web by businesses and it has already discovered a handful that you'll find ...

Among the sessions at Forrester's CIO Forum Emea, was one that looked at sourcing, and in particular, the role of the big system integrators (SIs).According to Forrester the major US, Indian and ...

How many challenges do software application developer face today? It's an impossible question to answer and if anything the challenges are becoming more complex all the time.

Microsoft's release of its first own-brand tablet computer - Surface - is an example of the dilemma the software giant is facing. Predictably, Surface has been branded in many places as an "iPad ...

As a senior woman in IT, I'm surprised by the lack of female representation in the sector, as I've found it to be a fabulous career choice. However, my teenage daughter and her friends recently ...

Last night Microsoft finally unveiled its first tablet computer, the Surface.The Surface will be available in two different models:The Windows 8 pro model, which will run on a Intel Core i5 Ivy ...

The US Army has started pinning wayward data down to prevent a new payroll system joining a gargantuan pile up of military IT disasters.The effort is part of an emergency reform of IT projects ...

As smartphones get smarter, tablets get easier to swallow and the cloud powers all of these "slim" devices with all the back-end power that they do not naturally come with at birth due to their ...

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has been providing businesses with a way to cut costs for years, but current IT trends are shaking up the sector, putting CIOs at the forefront of planning. A ...

My blog postings have been very thin lately. This was due to my annual Scottish fly-fishing holiday (the highest priority in my calendar) followed by the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and a mass of catch ...

It is not just the libertarian supporters of Big Brother Watch who want to preserve the anonymity that lies at the heart of the current Internet. The current proposals are about preserving ...

BlackBerry's rocky road of technology evolution has continued this month with a UK developer tour event aimed to silence a few critics, preview the forthcoming BlackBerry 10 platform and showcase ...

Last night I was given the opportunity to attend the Storage Awards 2012 and I realised it's been a while since I attended such an event, yet nothing much has changed in terms of male to female ratio.

Having created this blog and nurtured it for the past four years, I've decided to put together the best blog posts from the best (me).