Richard Barton

Richard Barton

he/him

Agile Coach at Cornwall Council

Strategy

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.

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.

Strategy or routine operations - Binary Thinking Hex No. 8

1 minute read

Why has IT management become so cursed with Binary Thinking? No. 8: The CIO needs to focus on strategy and ignore routine operations Binary Thinking: CIOs should not waste their time on the trivial matter of keeping the IT machine running. These days the issues in running IT are well understood and should be left to subordinates. If necessary a CIO can appoint a CTO to look after technology. Instead the CIO should be a business strategist and spend most of their time sitting with the CEO and the board and: talk about social media and new consumer devices, agree the budget for replacing all existing IT equipment with public cloud services and consider what questions could be answered through Big Data once the management hierarchy has been made obsolete by collaboration and gamification.