Achievements this week included: - Mid-year review meetings process completed - further thinking about the ITDF presentation in May - a bit of blogging for Computerworld UK - and surviving a week with the boys with Mummy in the USA with work (well, I say "a week"; actually, 5 days and with grandparents called in … Continue reading Weeknote 84: home alone
Category: General
As I continue to get some thoughts together for the presentation I'm giving in May at the ITDF, and also with some of the recent conversations about start up mentality in existing organisations (see here and here), I've been wondering what would an IT department look like if you could start, today, with a completely … Continue reading A green field IT function
There is a truism that I have often heard repeated by teachers that when a pupil performs well it's because of the pupil's talent, and when they perform badly it's blamed on the teacher. This sprung to mind when I recently read reports of research from Gartner about companies and their IT strategies. The news item was … Continue reading When is an IT strategy a business strategy?
From a conversation with @bindik, @plankytronixx, @MikeOrmond and @mtaulty this week, an unordered list of things that start ups consider when they are making choices about which technologies to use: is it free? can I find people with the skills to develop on/with it? can I hack things together quickly with it? will a VC … Continue reading How start ups choose technologies
Amongst the mass of three-letter abbreviations (TLAs) that permeate the langauge here at Microsoft, there are two that I've been giving a bit of thought to in the past few weeks: ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and CSVs (Cloud Services Vendors). Putting aside that there are over 17,000 TLAs available and we seem to be having to … Continue reading Moving products to services
Achievements this week included: - second week of full-time-working parenting involving but two trips to the GP and one to Kingston Hospital - mid-year review planning reaches fever pitch - preparation for a talk on Storytelling to some Microsoft students this weekend Next week: some rethinking of priorities for the next six months in light … Continue reading Weeknote 82: to A&E and beyond!
Spoiler alert: I'm about to do a whole load of advocacy for the devil... Earlier this week, to much fanfare, Michael Gove announced planned changes to the current England and Wales ICT curriculum, moving focus away from training kids in how to use computer applications, and moving instead to teaching them the fundamentals of computer programming. … Continue reading Does the UK really need lots more programmers?
In May I'm going to be giving a presentation at The IT Director's forum (see http://www.itdf.com/Spring-Conference.aspx for more details). I've entitled the talk People-Centric IT, and am looking for a few volunteers to help as a sounding board for me to shape it. If you are interested in helping out, please tweet me @ballantine70, reply on … Continue reading Sounding boards requested
Last week I wrote about a way of thinking generically about different types of app. Today, I'm going to take a look at the underlying business models that might underpin apps. To start with, many apps are developed out of altruism. Software developed for charity, for general good, to prove a point or “just because” … Continue reading Types of App business models
We've been doing some thinking in the past few months about categories of "apps" - whether those deployed onto devices, or web apps sitting in a browser. It's extended out of the conversations about "when to app" that I started last year, and attempts to put together a schema for categorising apps that can help … Continue reading Types of App
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