Many organisations are finding themselves asking “What is Digital?” It’s a difficult question which sounds easy at first. After all, isn’t everything that we do today that involves electronics, digital in some shape or form?
If an organisation has a CTO (Chief Technology Officer), why does it also need a CDO (Chief Digital Officer)? If an organisation already has an IT department, why does it need a digital one too?
So what is digital?
To me, digital is a mindset. In the 1990’s we’d have called it a paradigm. It’s all about thinking slightly differently to classic IT. Continue reading What is Digital?→
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You better hope users stored their photos elsewhere once Fotopedia closed down
This week, the website Fotopedia closed down, and this heralded a key stage in the Internet’s maturity.
We’ve seen various Google products shutdown in the past, sometimes with more publicity than they attracted while the product was ‘live’, such as Google Video and Wave. However Fotopedia signals the dangers that lurk behind relying upon consumer-focussed cloud services.
Earlier today I gave a short presentation to the Digital Finance Masterclass in London. I only had ten minutes, followed by 8 sessions of pretty intense ‘Digital Surgeries’ – a great format, but quite tiring.
Before the event, I had been told that the Digital Surgeries were like speed dating – thankfully I got married before speed dating, because I can’t imagine going through that process in a relaxed, sociable setting.
With only ten minutes for the first presentation, to a varied audience across Financial Services, I focussed on the following topics, shown in the attached Slideshare presentation:
techUK (formerly Intellect UK) has released a new paper called “Towards a ‘New Financial Services’” which is a thought-provoking view of the future of the UK financial services industry. The paper itself is 75 pages, very well produced, and free to download.
Sometimes we think that modern computers are so advanced and powerful, and then it all gets blown away in a few moments.
For the last few days my kids (well, the three eldest ones) have been saying their iPod Touches don’t work. Actually, that’s inaccurate. The truth is, two of them had forgotten their passcodes and had been locked out of their iPods, and the third one had given his iTouch to a friend ‘to do something cool to it’, and ended up with an iTouch that didn’t show all of the installed apps, and generally behaved a bit ‘weirdly’.
I spent five hours restoring and resetting and restoring iTouch after iTouch after iTouch, and another hour and a half this morning. Eventually they were all working, but the amount of effort and Google searches to get them working seemed far too difficult.
This evening I sat down to write a couple of blog articles on my home PC. As I logged in my anti-virus program alerted that I had two apps installed which were critically out of date and must be installed. One of them was no problem. The other one was Java.
Java. Apparently it’s used to run a billion or so devices including washing machines and cars (according to the installation screen which I’ve seen a few times this evening). So why is it so hard to install on a PC? I am reasonably technical, but I had to download the installer three times and wander all around sun.com and java.com to actually install the thing.
So there I was, well actually, here I am, forty minutes after sitting at my PC and I haven’t actually done anything productive, just updating apps.
All programs could learn a few things from Google Chrome. It automatically updates itself. It can be configured to provide the same experience across numerous computers (including remembering passwords, etc.) And when I open Chrome, I’ve set it up so that it opens with the same websites as when it closed down.
If you’re designing a PC app at the moment, take a look at Google Chrome’s user experience. Especially from the updating and troubleshooting point of view.
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Continuing my theme about naming conventions in the IT world, I think our industry is better at branding and marketing than branding and marketing professionals!
I mentioned that I took part on a Big Data/ BI (Business Intelligence) workshop recently. My first job after university – in 1994 (no gasps at the back please – I know I don’t look old enough) was as a developer providing an EIS (Enterprise Information System) for NHS clients.
We took large amount of data from Patient Administration Systems (PAS – again, no sniggering at the back if you work for Endava please (private joke)) and provided graphical dashboards which often exposed ‘intelligence’ in the data which would have taken much longer to process in standard databases. And the data was too large to import into Excel.
There are many off the shelf products, many of which are open source, which makes implementations far quicker to implement today than fifteen years ago.
Another great piece of re-branding is thin-clients. In the late 1990s, moving to a thin-client model (i.e. most of the processing was done by a server) was fashionable. We then moved back to thick-clients – where the processing is mainly done by the desktop. Then the Internet age was born, and we never heard about thin or thick clients, because they were rebranded as ‘browser-based’ and apps. Exactly the same model, just rebranded.
Infrastructure has gone through some great rebranding. The term ‘hosting’ was left untouched for 10 years, before virtualisation – which wasn’t really a new concept. Citrix have been doing it for ages in the desktop industry. But suddenly every CIO felt compelled to virtualise virtually everything (pun intended).
And then… “Cloud”. I remember speaking to clients early on about Amazon Web Services, and within three years every hosting company rebranded their virtual environments as Cloud. Nothing more than rebranding. My personal website is stored “in the Cloud”. When I first took out the contract it was a Shared server, then a virtual server… now a Cloud server. It’s just the IP address has never changed!
My final example of brilliant branding is Enterprise social media. Lotus were doing Enterprise Collaboration in the 1990s – boasting shared documents with workflow and permissions.
I’m looking forward to future rebranding – green screens becoming “eco-screens”, dot matrix printers becoming “banner printers”, email becoming “enterprise messaging”, word processors becoming “information asset collation”… the list goes on.
The Olympics is like London buses – you don’t see anything about it for a while, and suddenly you get several opportunities at the same time.
On Monday I was very fortunate to meet with Alex Balfour, who was the Head of New Media at London 2012. If you haven’t seen Alex’s summary of London 2012 on slideshare yet, stop reading this and take a read straight away.
So I saw Alex on Monday, who for a man who has had one of the most stressful jobs in Digital Media for the last three years, didn’t look any worse for it (no grey hair or hair loss!); and this evening I was invited to an event hosted by Simon La Fosse where the guest speaker was Gerry Pennell, the CIO of London 2012.
Gerry spoke for around thirty minutes, which flew by quickly, and then there were literally dozens, dozens of questions from the audience. The thing that struck me was how each member of the audience was so polite and started off by congratulating Gerry and his team on such a successful event. This was refreshing because the IT community doesn’t congratulate one another – IT has such a high expectation that if it works, well, it’s expected to, and anything less is something to complain about.
Gerry described how important digital was such a key component of delivering the Games. Actually, he wanted to stick to ‘just’ the huge undertaking of delivering a live events service, but his presentation kept coming back to digital consumers. All wonderfully consumer focussed.
Some of the other key points he covered:
Just under a quarter of LOCOG’s budget went to IT
It was easy to motivate his team to get things done – everyone knew about the deadline, rather than many other IT organisations who have a degree of lethargy and motivation issues
Gerry’s teams had to create their own requirements four years ago, because the rest of the organisation didn’t know what it would want back then
Preparation was key. The team prepared via a large number of test events, scenario planning, disaster recovery planning, and so on
The threat of cyber-attacks was taken extremely seriously, and some politicians were involved on this subject. There were six actual significant attacks during the Games which were dealt with, and Gerry was paid his compliments to their Content Delivery Network
To resolve IT issues immediately, rather than the usual IT call-fix resolution timescales, they had to ‘saturate’ the stadia with support staff and equipment – they would replace desktops and equipment rather than problem solve
Despite all the IT infrastructure, there is still a huge reliance on paper in the stadia – referees and other games staff wanted/ needed to have a sheet of paper. The last two Olympics have printed 50 million sheets of paper, and in London they produced 16 million. A full box of office printer paper has 2,500 sheets, so that’s still almost 6,500 boxes of paper!
LOCOG were shocked at the amount of mobile traffic. And this traffic wanted live results. For the first time, London was able to provide point by point score updates (as opposed to game or match results) – and the peak traffic period was the Murray final, where mobile users wanted point by point updates about the match
There were 40 university sandwich placements who worked for the LOCOG IT organisation. I had a sandwich placement in my third year at university, and I can only begin to imagine what an experience the Olympics must have been for these once-in-a-lifetime lucky students
Someone in the audience asked about the huge amount of data that LOCOG had collected during the summer, and whether there was a Big Data opportunity. Gerry answered that the team was disbanded straight after the Paralympics, so there wasn’t much of an opportunity or business desire (because the business was dismantled as well!)
We are seeing a world where the value of content is continually diminishing – there are so many sources of content that it’s easy to move to someone who’s giving it away for free as soon as one source starts charging. Technology also makes it easy to bypass traditional content funding models – such as the ability to fast forward during adverts on pre-recorded TV programmes.
Sport will continually increasing in value though. By its nature, it’s time sensitive, so it’s usually watched live. This makes the advertising much more valuable – for instance, think about the infamous Super Bowl ads.
During the last three weeks we have had a number of partner sessions with our customers where we can share the advantage of working with multiple customers, as well as customers in other industries. We have been presenting and discussing trends across the industry and what we think will be key in the next six to twelve months.
I enjoy these sessions mainly because I’ve always enjoyed professional collaborative relationships and also because the questions we are asked by one customer about what we’re doing with another make us think harder about both of them – i.e. it gives us a fresh perspective. These sessions are the key difference between being a supplier and a partner.
A supplier provides a commodity and that’s the end of the relationship. A partner provides advice beyond their core product and helps the customer in their journey.
This collaboration shows how outsourcing, and indeed offshoring, has matured. Offshoring began purely as a cost benefit – paying people in distant lands a cheaper salary. CFOs made the decision to outsource and/or offshore without consulting IT departments.
This has moved on to providing R&D or innovation centres, and now it’s about collaboration and industry trends. CTOs are now willingly making the decision.
We have been working with a creative agency recently offshores their graphic design work. They seem to be ahead of the industry and only time will tell if this works with more subjective and culturally sensitive deliverables.
I remember our design team at IMG were once maxed out and we asked our New York office to help with a creative pitch for a football club. The designs came back with words such as ‘soccer’, ‘jersey’ and full of stats that, even as a Premiership club season ticket holder, I didn’t have a clue what they meant. Cultural changes apply to design more than technical development.
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A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of being invited to near-the-top of the Shard. The Shard is a brand new building above London Bridge station. It’s 310 metres tall, and is currently the tallest building in Europe. I was invited up to the 52nd floor, which gives an amazing view over London.
I’m not allowed to include any of the photos that I took on the visit. In fact, I posted the images on Flickr and received a call shortly afterwards from the landlords asking me to remove the photos, which I did instantly.
I was invited by a school friend who works as the IT Director for one of the construction firms working in the Shard.
The building is so high that my mobile didn’t have a phone signal.
The Shard is currently a construction site – on most of the floors there is only a concrete shell and windows. On some floors even the basic services haven’t been finished.
Yet, on the 30-something floor, is an office with dozens of computers, printers, plotters and a full network infrastructure. One of the first tasks on originally entering the site was to enable the Internet connection. Even the site toilets weren’t finished before the Internet connection.
I have another friend in the army. Specifically he is in the infantry. He can’t tell me a lot about what he does, although he can say that his role is to set up a wireless router as soon as they reach an advanced position, so that the army decision makers can track their precise position and send secure digital instructions.
Literally, while someone in his group is putting up a shelter or digging a trench to hide in, my friend is connecting to the Internet!
These roles both demonstrate how IT infrastructure is so critical, from the front of a battlefield to the 300 metres above London.
I’ve had a couple of emails asking what I think of Google Drive.
Firstly I’m a bit disappointed with Google’s lack of innovation. I’d have expected a few bells and whistles because they are late entrants into the market and have the benefit of watching their competitors and market makers.
I’m growing sceptical of new Google services. If Google Drive doesn’t take off, yet a business has used it for all their file server needs, migrating all those files and links to them is going to be a nightmare for any organisation.
And this is the inherent problem with immature cloud services.
This blog uses Posterous which was bought by Twitter a month ago. If Posterous is discontinued, I need to migrate all the content (relatively straightforward but a hassle nonetheless).
I use Brinkster to host my websites and domain names. For the cost of using 500Gb on Google Drive, I get the same amount of FTP storage, thousands of email accounts and a Microsoft web server thrown in.
Cloud storage is the first step to consumer IT virtualisation. Soon we’ll all be using virtual PCs via a web browser. Google started this with Google Docs and Picasa Web Albums. Creating a generic file storage area is misaligned with their goal of eradicating the need for local files.
We now have a situation where the key players in the market all have competing file storage and online services – Apple, Microsoft and Google. It will be interesting to see how they compete.
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techUK (formerly Intellect UK) has released a new paper called 
