Recent Posts

Business cases can be wonderful

3 minute read

Is it just me or is there anyone else out there who actually likes developing business cases? Maybe there are a few but I am sure we are outnumbered by the many who find business cases a long-winded, administrative chore. Why on earth would anyone want to get excited about this?

Let’s be fair to procurement

2 minute read

In a recent Twitter exchange, digital leaders in the UK and US were critical of procurement in the public sector. Others make similar comments about their colleagues in Legal and Finance. I agree there is a problem but I don’t think it is entirely fair to single out these teams. The rest of us need to accept some of the blame because, generally, we get the commercial services we deserve.

A new weapon in the battle to attract IT talent: cloud computing?

1 minute read

The recent Cloud World Forum in London provided plenty of food for thought. I have already talked about some of the challenges for customer and organisations. The industry transformation being wrought by cloud computing also creates some interesting career choices for programers and other IT specialists.

The hundred billion dollar cloud gamble

3 minute read

This is the second post about some insights I gathered from attending the Cloud World Forum in London in June. The first post covered some uncomfortable choices for cloud customers. This post explores the equally unpleasant choices for suppliers.

Disruption or failure - The painful choices of migrating to the cloud

2 minute read

I managed to get along to the Cloud World Forum in London this week. It was a busy, fast and noisy event (sometimes very noisy) which provided a way to sample a lot of views in a short space of time. The fundamentals of cloud computing are well established so there were no paradigm shaking revelations (and this wasn’t the kind of premier global event where such things might get announced anyway). I did pick up some subtle signals which might be of interest to organisations wanting to move to the cloud, suppliers competing for cloud business and engineers working with cloud technologies. This first post focuses on the customer perspective.