Recent Blog Posts

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 ...

Google Body has open sourced the enjoyable to use 3D visualisation of the human body built by Google labs engineers in their "20% time", the fuzzily-measured time slot employees are allowed to use ...

There's suddenly a big gap at the top of government IT. In less than two weeks, government CIO Joe Harley and his deputy Bill McCluggage have both announced their impending departures from ...

The London 2012 Olympics is a test not only for the athletes taking part, but also for the IT suppliers whose technologies help to make it all happen. Last week, I was given an opportunity by ...

Oil and Gas giant BP spent 65% of its $3bn annual IT budget with 3000 suppliers in 2008 but now it outsources to only seven and has reduced its annual IT budget by $800m as a result. Vital to the ...

Computer Weekly has to declare a conflict of interest when it comes to writing about yet another report from some branch of Parliament that issues scathing criticisms of government IT. Frankly, if ...

The E-Skills UK Computer Club for Girls (CC4G) aims to encourage more women into technology-related careers by providing school girls with computing classes related to their interests, such as art ...

Should companies be made to appoint a certain number of women to their boards in order to break the glass ceiling?

Here's a story that's going to run and run - and one I predict will start to make national news headlines once its significance sinks in to the consumer press. As part of its plans to create a ...

DWP can manage the massive reorganisation of computer systems demanded by Universal Credit as long as politicians don't move the goalposts and over-complicate matters for departmental techies, said ...

The article below is the editorial leader column from the last ever printed issue of Computer Weekly magazine. If you like nostalgia, you may want to treasure the magazine you hold in your hands ...

How often do you, as an IT leader, tell people in other parts of the business what you have achieved? For many IT folk, that sort of self-promotion doesn't always come naturally - and often that ...

The government has promised to bring down the ICT oligopoly as part of a strategy that may have seismic consequences for the public and private sectors.

I write a lot about how UK IT professionals are often replaced by workers from overseas using Intra Company Transfer (ICT) visas. These workers are attractive to UK businesses because they cost ...

There's plenty of rumour and speculation doing the rounds over the timing and contents of the imminent government IT strategy, due to be released anytime soon by the Cabinet Office. I've been told ...

Imagine the scene in one of the deals I was doing recently. It was a long negotiation on an IT deal which was nearing its conclusion and I was acting for the IT customer. One of the last issues to ...

Government CIO John Suffolk effectively leaves his post at the end of this month - although I understand that he will still be on the public payroll until the end of March next year - but there ...

I've decided to summarise my hatred for Facetime on the iPhone.

The cyber security world is alive with gossip about Stuxnet. The virus has been described as one of the most sophisticated yet created, containing an unprecedented four zero-day vulnerabilities in ...

Many thanks to Chris Potts for this wonderfully timely and ironic spot from the annals of Department of Health history. Click here to read a document published in 1998 by the Labour government, ...

Government CIO John Suffolk and his colleagues are preparing plans for the publication of IT-related documents that have always been secret and difficult to obtain even under the Freedom of ...

iSoft, an important supplier to the NHS IT scheme, issued a market update today, which appears to have been well received by the market as the company's share price rose by about 16% to 28.5 cents. ...

"Since IBM took over the 'auto-pay' system my life has been a misery" - Bryan Thompson, Operations Director at car rental company Miles & Miles.There are plans to extend the problematic ...

Pulse magazine says the BMA is confident it can convince the new government to order a new opt-in model for summary care records. Opt-in is likely to mean that patients would give their consent to ...

A new Liberal Democrat MP has put down an early-day motion that "calls on the Government to halt all SCR [summary care records] updates, effective immediately, pending its promised comprehensive ...

The Treasury outlines in a statement today (24 May 2010) how the government will save £6bn in 2010/11. There's no detail, only headline figures. This is what the statement says: "Government ...

As expected, the new government has scrapped the controversial and unwieldy identity cards project created as a flagship of Labour policy. Labour's problem was that it never properly explained why ...