Richard Barton

Richard Barton

Agile Coach at Cornwall Council

Recent Posts

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?

Your investments in IT infrastructure are going nowhere fast

4 minute read

I don’t care if you are developing mobile apps or extracting minerals. You might be a young start-up, a national government body or a global corporate - it doesn’t matter. If you make bad decisions about your IT infrastructure you will be saddled with a burden that sucks up money, puts obstacles in the way of innovation and will turn away customers, partners and your best people. You would think that organisations would do all they can to help their CIO avoid such a fate but, unfortunately, you would be wrong.