This week the Guardian (http://tiny.cc/mnn3b) reported how three million doctors have already downloaded a 59p stethoscope app for their iPhone. No more recoiling from that cold metal stethoscope now the doctor can press their warm iPhone to your chest.  This just the latest example of how consumer technology innovation can drive non-consumer use of technology such as enterprise IT.

More than that, this story shows why everyone in the corporate world – including senior management who may not really ‘get’ IT – expects so much from their IT systems, since they can do so much, so quickly with devices and software themselves.  That is all the more justification for companies making efforts to understand what their IT infrastructure and the business processes they are there to support actually do.

So the World Cup came and went.  England’s underwhelming campaign was greeted by loud media recriminations. These centred on an ambivalent showing by overpaid and lazy stars or key players jaded after a long domestic season. Worse, wrong formations were blamed for stifling the team’s creativity. It was also being suggested that the team were not being consulted on tactics by a well-resourced but seemingly autocratic team coach. The disciplinarian regime ignored the building of team spirit and failed to deliver the goods in unique and trying tournament conditions. For his part, the manager failed. There is some truth in these criticisms, but perhaps we also need to see the team’s difficulties as part of a wider picture of gradual English football decline with the squeezing out of home-grown players in the top teams and failure to absorb new coaching skills and ideas in the way that more successful countries seem to do.

Is the position of CIO ever the stepping-stone to greater things?

The appointment of Philip Clarke, Tesco’s CIO and head of international development, to the CEO’s job at our most successful retailer last week seems to be the highest profile CIO step up to the top job that anyone in our industry can remember.  So, is this the start of a new age of IT directors truly changing board-level thinking and starting to lead companies?  Or are CIOs forever destined to be the Cinderella of UK business?

So the government has taken its first steps on cutting back public expenditure to address Britain's budget deficit with £6.2 million in savings announced last week.

Perhaps inevitably, the headlines focused on large IT firms such as Capita being deprived of some of their major projects (such as the Child Trust Funds programme) as a long shadow starts to fall on private sector IT providers - but there could be some positives to draw from this situation.

The new Coalition government is quite a novelty for most of us and so unsurprisingly there is plenty of media coverage.  There is a continuing fascination with two political rivals with clear differences co-operating to ensure a workable government.  Whatever labels this approach is given, the parties have, to a degree, been forced to collaborate to avoid the workings of government grinding to a halt and causing a wider financial crisis.

Collaboration between partners who may have differences of viewpoint seems commonplace in many other aspects of government:  many city and county councils are routinely managed by different parties where there is no overall control.  Observers say that in these situations, local politicians tend to bury their differences, address the issues in the interests of their constituents, and develop a coherent programme of activity. 

I was struck by a recent blog post by Bryan Glick at Computer Weekly http://tiny.cc/6j828 on CIOs’ challenges revealed by an industry round table.  Among some of the usual suspects on the list were:

·        How to connect IT with the strategic priorities of the organisation

( 3 Votes )
Historically the move to outsourcing was seen as the traditional method of removing entire cost lines/centres from an organisations operational budget. Very often this meant that the IT staff simply TUPE'd over to a large IT outsourcer to provide the same service, very often on the same physical hardware, whilst application licenses and contracts remained with the end user. For the first year at least the IT understanding of the business remained as did boundaries of responsibility.  So what's the difference with cloud.

( 2 Votes )

With the change in fine level for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act (1998) rising from the inadequate £5000 to business closing £500,000, company boards need to re-assess the business cases for introduction of privacy technologies. It is my view that in the past many commercial organisations made a blunt Cost vs Risk analysis and made the decision that they would accept the fines rather than implement protection. Those industries where the consequences were far higher such as retail and PCIDSS compliance, companies addressed this small portion of data privacy, (often outsourcing it completely, so they had no visibility of data that risked their position) yet left other equally sensitive data unprotected.

As much as I'd like to say that IBM is faultless and standing proud above the competition, I can't say that in good conscience. Sometimes I feel nothing but frustration towards IBM and their desire to make things so unnecessarily complex and difficult. This is especially true when it comes to customer support, though in fairness to IBM this seems to be a common trend with most hardware or software vendors these days.

As a result I sometimes see support as a "wall". Not because a wall is a fundamental element to any building providing both reinforcement and safety for the overall structure, but simply because that's what it feels like my head is banging against when I'm talking with them.

Continuing the theme of value-for-money and pricing , I thought I’d take a step back and establish some basic truths that can easily get sidelined or ignored.

Many moons ago when I was involved in software development I was introduced to an assertion that I’ve not managed to disprove in the intervening years which is: “fast, cheap, good – pick any two”.