A couple of recent articles got me thinking about the relationship between innovation and enterprise architecture in the digital business age. At first glance, the two areas may seem as closely related as a unicorn and a public library. However, Chris Barianuk’s BBC News piece “Blockchain: The Revolution that hasn’t quite happened” and Gerben Wierda’s Linkedin… Read More
The intelligence Hokey Cokey; where next for the Internet of Things?
My jaded post-festive brain cells have been sparked into life by an excellent, thought-provoking LinkedIn post from Jess Hadleigh off the back of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. In part, it’s about moving from the Internet of Things to the ‘Intelligence of Things’ – a world of connected devices with their own, out of the… Read More
How can you tick the box when you’re thinking outside it?
It’s the age of the gig economy and the portfolio career, so we’re told. Yet, judging by the number of people still streaming off the 7.13 to Waterloo and the recruitment angst pervading LinkedIn, a lot of us are still ticking those traditional career boxes; get qualified, get a job, get fed up with that… Read More
50 Years on, what can IT learn from Apollo 11?
If, like me, you’ve been gripped by the Moon landing 50th anniversary coverage, you’ve probably been struck by how calmly the Apollo 11 team dealt with the stuff which went wrong, given the wafer-thin margins and mortal risks they faced. If, like me, you’re an IT person, you’ve probably also noticed how much of the… Read More
Avoiding Techocalypse – time to break out the canaries?
We pretty much accept now that one price we pay for relentless technological advance is a parallel growth in IT risk. Whether it’s from government-sponsored cyber-attacks or corporate system meltdowns, fallout from IT failures and abuses seems to get more earth-shattering with each passing headline. Some talk of a potential techocalypse, although I wouldn’t trust… Read More
The Mythical 0.025% Baby: Where Agile Went Wrong
I’ll come clean, that title is a bit like ‘Free Beer Here!’ or ‘Build the Wall!’ It’s intended to draw you in and provoke a response, without necessarily having any basis in rationality. I’m certainly not about to tear into Agile and start advocating a return to the dark days of interminable waterfall projects and… Read More
GDPR the sequel – now it’s personal
I recently jumped on the GDPR bandwagon with a blog post about it, and I couldn’t resist coming back to it. In that post I argue the importance of the ‘Four Ps’ in complying with the regulations: does your implementation address the fundamental principles, are those principles all pertinent to your organisation, and are your GDPR… Read More
Stacks, Blockchain and the death of capitalism?
If you’ve been reading my blog, firstly, thank you kindly, and secondly, you may have picked up that I like to take themes from the world of IT and apply them in a wider context. This is because I find it interesting to take stuff from one domain, abstract it and apply it to another… Read More
The Elephant Man, GDPR and four Ps to prevent panic
I recently acted in a local community production of ‘The Elephant Man’ by Bernard Pomerance . It’s a moving and thought-provoking play which I can recommend if you get a chance to see it. One of the thoughts it provoked for me, somewhat bizarrely, was about GDPR and similar regulations and standards, and specifically, the… Read More
Hokey Cokey Management and the Anti-Legacy Legacy
During my years in IT management, I heard more than enough cynical responses to the regular round of strategic changes handed down from on high. One hardy perennial was ‘What goes around comes around’; the view that these changes never took us forwards but simply circled us back to somewhere we’d been before. In the… Read More
Nick Teale 