Recent Blog Posts

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, ...

The European Commission has been trying - and failing - to avoid being locked into proprietary Microsoft technical standards since 1992, it has been revealed in official documents released to ...

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 ...

What on earth is going on at HP? After three years riven by changes in CEO (three times) and in strategy (lost count), the company seems to barely know what it is or where it is heading. This month ...

After the controversy of the early meetings in the government's consultation on open standards, we're now down to the last few weeks of what is a hugely important process. After a slow start, the ...

When I was a schoolboy, there was a popular if rather sado-masochistic playground game called Chinese burns. This involved grasping your opponent's wrist with both hands, and twisting their skin in ...

Have more money than sense? Then this is the perfect list for you.Despite being able to pick up a pretty capable smartphone, i.e. a HTC Desire, HTC Wildfire S or Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini, for well ...

To quote a phrase that was mightily popular in the 1980s: I love it when a plan comes together. In this case, it's not even my plan, but it's one I've found myself writing about often over the past ...

When Computer Weekly interviewed Cabinet Office permanent secretary Ian Watmore recently, he cited three names as the key people driving change in IT across the public sector. Two were to be ...

In a victory for the government IT reformers, the G-Cloud framework and its associated CloudStore services catalogue are now live. It's an achievement that deserves congratulation - from the public ...

Software Improvement Group and Knowledge Network Green Software have identified ways to deliver quick wins towards energy efficient software applications

Following on from Faisal's "How do touchscreens work", we've started experimenting with different objects to see which of them work best, or at all, with a touchscreen smartphones.As outlined in ...