Richard Barton

Richard Barton

Director at CIO Portfolio Limited

Recent Posts

Are we there yet?

less than 1 minute read

Thanks to the 100 or so people who have taken a look at the IT Portfolio survey app so far. I am still looking for more feedback so that I can improve both the content of the survey and the way the app works. If you want to help just pick your favourite phone/tablet/PC, point your browser at the site and start moving the sliders around with your finger/stylus/mouse. The app looks best on a large tablet but I have used it on a compact mobile phone held in landscape mode. Let me have feedback by adding a comment below or you can get in touch via Twitter Update I am still making changes and releasing new versions of the app. The app is now based on serverless technology and I have written another blog post about making the migration.

Breaking free from the tyranny of time

5 minute read

This is quite a long post so here is the 30-second version: organising services around calendars and clocks is generally a bad idea it is much better to organise around outcomes and risks this is now a practical option because of new technology CIOs can take the lead and help the whole enterprise. Sarah Wilkinson, CTO for the UK Home Office, recently wrote a post about breaking away from some long held traditions in IT. The article includes some great advice but I think we need to go further.

Show me the money

4 minute read

Don’t expect any return on investment in IT Earlier this week, during a short twitter exchange with @dhinchcliffe, I decided to write a more substantial post about why your IT department needs to stop chasing its own agenda. This will be an easier case to make if you realise that IT investments and IT projects generally don’t make any sense. Rather than try to persuade you of this (no doubt you will already have an opinion about this) let me share a tool I use all the time and challenge you to show me where I am going wrong.

Isn’t it about time Chief Digital Officers went away?

2 minute read

Despite being pronounced dead a few times the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) role still seems to be going strong. Unfortunately, it is quite hard to tell if this resilience is down to the merits of the role or just mislabelling. These days, people have a tendency to add “digital” to quite ordinary things to make them sound more exciting and special - the letter “e” used to have the same magical effect, as in E-Business. For example, a recent poll by @marthaheller asked CIO’s where they thought the digital department should reside - the results are above. It seems unlikely that Martha’s followers had a common idea about what a digital department was for. In order to help, here is my digital department field guide. Are there any species of digital that I have missed?