Recent Blog Posts

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 ...

There has been a lot of discussion lately on the topic of teaching school children how to code. Some controversy has ensued - as ever - around some of the initiatives, but there is little ...

Do you believe Iain Duncan Smith?This is becoming a key question in the progress of the troubled Universal Credit welfare reform programme. The secretary of state for work and pensions has staked ...

We learned today of another government IT fiasco - millions of pounds being wasted at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on a system for recruiting soldiers and reservists for the Army. The project was ...

"There is no debacle on Universal Credit" declared Iain Duncan Smith in his opening salvo to MPs on the Work and Pensions Select Committee this week.The beleaguered secretary of state yet again ...

Devastating public sector job cuts will be put off until half-way through the next parliament after the Department of Work and Pensions obstructed the government's "digital" reform of its Universal ...

The Conservative Party has attempted to erased a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when ...

It is increasingly likely the government will have to write-off most, if not all, of the £303m spent so far on developing IT to support Universal Credit. Multiple sources told Computer Weekly that ...

This is a guest blog by Clare McDonald.The iPhone 5S and its golden Bond-style finesse has us all thinking about technology upgrades. The 5S is fancy, and 5C may be colourful, but if you're going ...

As software application development now spans an infinite variety of user touchpoints across a multiplicity of devices, is it fair to assume that our definition of digital assets should also expand?

As self-appointed guardian against government IT bodges, the Cabinet Office played a role in deciding Universal Credit could meet its over-ambitious aims. It was not only wrong. It also shares the ...

How much worse might things get with the troubled Universal Credit IT programme?Last week, we learned through a National Audit Office report that already £34m of IT work has been written off. This ...

It was the core philosophy of the coalition government's ICT strategy: creative chaos. But instead of fixing government IT it has let it run rampant, according to the National Audit Office.The ...

Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith - the person ultimately responsible for the delivery of Universal Credit - has been touring TV and radio stations this morning, and facing questions in ...

In an unprecedented show of partial openness, the head of the troubled Universal Credit programme has gone public on some of the problems in the government's flagship welfare reform project.This ...

The 2013 GCSE results showed a 25% increase in students taking the ICT exam - the first rise in numbers since 2005. However, the proportion of girls studying the subject continued to fall, from 46% ...

Keep the Lights On (KTLO) technology refers to that portion of information technology expenditure a company has to perform on daily operational tasks.

So, what's really going on with the Universal Credit IT programme?If you trust journalistic warning bells - and believe the saying that there's no smoke without fire - then there has to be ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

The IT industry's vital role in the UK economy is under threat from what appears to be a desperate attempt by a Whitehall department to avoid being cut back or even scrapped in chancellor George ...

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 ...

In space, no one can hear you scream at the Windows 8 Metro screen.

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 ...

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 ...

In the hopefully unlikely eventuality that your company executives still need convincing that the internet is going to transform your business, the past few days have provided further evidence of ...

BPO used to be about cutting costs. But today, through the use of technology, much more can be gained by outsourcing a process. The ability to collect and analyses the massive volumes of data ...

There are two things that often signal a major government IT project on the brink of disaster. First, streams of leaks appear suggesting little problems here and rather bigger problems there; and ...

Universal Credit is not turning into a car crash, the programme's discharged boss has told Computer Weekly.Speaking out after he and other managers were moved off the unfinished project, Steve ...

The government has finally released its policy for open standards in IT - after an often controversial consultation process - and it will surprise and delight many observers who expected a meek ...

So Gary McKinnon stays free - for now. At Computer Weekly, we've followed the self-confessed hacker's story for the 10 years it's taken to fight his extradition to the US. Along the way we've seen ...

A degree of ironic congratulation is due to the Department of Health (DoH) and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude for finally extricating the NHS from its disastrous contract with CSC. The ...

It's a challenge faced so far only by the most ultra-successful software companies, but a major turning point comes when a product becomes a utility. It doesn't happen often, but there's a big ...

So far, the London 2012 Olympics has been a triumph all round. An amazing opening ceremony, Team GB gold medals sprinkled generously around, and even the transport system has coped. Ironically, one ...

While prosecutors in Europe and the US struggled to restrain Microsoft's monopoly in the late 90s, their own compadres in the European Commission's Information Directorate demonstrated in ...

The European Commission gave up pretending there were alternatives to Microsoft in 1996. It side-stepped new laws designed to keep public money honest, claiming exceptional circumstances. It gave ...

Europe's ill-fated 1993 migration to Microsoft Office was rubber-stamped by a committee that failed to see how it would get locked into buying Microsoft without a competition for the next 20 years, ...