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LINK: “Apple, Sui Generis”
Wall Street still doesn’t trust Apple’s future. The company is seen as an anomaly, it shuns accepted ways of doing business and defies categorization. Perhaps the categories are wrong. Original:
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave Briggs
An online notebook
Dave
New podcast interview on councils and digital transformation
I was interviewed by Vicky Sargent again for her Interesting Times podcast. We talk about digital transformation in local governments, focusing on Adur & Worthing Councils and Hackney Council. You can listen to the podcast, and subscribe to future episodes,…
LINK: “Slack must use cash hoard to find new ways to keep competition at bay”
Slack’s success has always been a bit surprising because it’s facing off against giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Cisco, Salesforce and many others, all gunning for this upstart’s market. In fact, Microsoft is giving Teams away for free to Office…
LINK: “Not a technical founder? This is how you build a tech company”
If your aim is to build a company that leverages technology to disrupt and dismantle some archaic experience but you don’t have those skills, then there are 3 things to keep in mind Original:
LINK: “The Future of Software Is No Code”
Today, companies like Quick Base, Mendix, and Zudy are pioneering a similar movement, attempting to transform code into visual interfaces. Much like in the shift from assembly code to FORTRAN, the underlying code is still there, but it can be…
LINK: “Distributed teams are rewriting the rules of office(less) politics”
I wanted to seek out the experience of these companies and ask: does remote work propagate, mitigate, or change the experience of office politics? What tactics are startups using to combat office politics, and are any of them effective? Original:…
LINK: “Technology innovation in government survey”
The objective of the survey was to understand current activity across government in what might be termed new or emerging technologies that are related to digital or information technologies. Loosely defined, these are new technologies that do not currently have…
LINK: “All change is system change”
All change is system change — to say otherwise is to ignore a fundamental truth about organisations being living breathing human systems. Original:
LINK: “Reuse: a Recipe for Disaster”
Authoritative, yet simplistic assertions about reuse routinely bypass past experience of just how much work it takes to make something reusable. Original:
Just what is a digital operating model?
This was originally published as the lead article in my weekly email newsletter. If you’d like to get more of this sort of thing on a regular basis, sign up! I’m sure folk get bored of people like me banging on…
LINK: “Full stack decision making”
I know that many organisations are still designed around that hierarchy but if your goal is to end up with an organisation that is less silo’d at the same time as being more collaborative, adaptive and flexible it seems sensible…
LINK: “From stand-ups to scrutiny”
Marrying agile habits with traditional local government governance is easier said than done. If we’re not careful, bringing in agile can add another layer of governance, where stand-ups become daily team meetings and show and tells become programme boards and…
LINK: “Why You Need To Know About Low-Code, Even If You’re Not Responsible For Software Delivery”
Low-code development platforms are emerging as a key strategy to accelerate app delivery to support digital business transformation. And they have the potential to make software development as much as 10 times faster than traditional methods. Original:
LINK: “Gartner on Mobile App Development Platforms: Kony, Mendix, Microsoft, Oracle and Outsystems the winners #lowcode”
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LINK: “Outsourcing: The Socitm view”
Today, the picture is very different. Socitm policy advocates ‘smart sourcing’ as critical for successful ICT delivery – more aligned with common sense than past Whitehall policies. This is particularly important today, with cloud models offering more flexibility in scale…
LINK: “On Microsoft Teams in Office 365, and why we prefer walled gardens to the Internet jungle”
Having lots of features is one thing, winning adoption is another. Microsoft lacked a unifying piece that would integrate these various elements into a form that users could easily embrace. Teams is that piece. Introduced in March 2017, I initially…
LINK: “IT Matters Again: The Enterprise of The Future Present”
But the real answer to the question depends on how IT is defined. If narrow definition is used and IT is taken to mean nothing more than base infrastructure, then Carr’s viewpoint remains correct. If, however, the definition of IT…
LINK: “Professional blogs are a lot like reality TV”
They’re part of “working in the open”, sure. Showing what you’re doing, and that you haven’t (yet?) replaced everyone by robots. But corporate blogs that are consistently a good read, and not done by a tiny start up, are not…
LINK: “Developing our API strategy [at Hackney]”
Writing great APIs demands we use a range of techniques to improve the way we write code. Pair programming, test-driven development and coding in the open are all important attributes of writing great code and therefore making our APIs reusable…
LINK: “It’ll be different this time – honest! Cabinet Office Minister makes the sales pitch for the outsourcing industry”
There should be a situation where outsourcing in the public sector can be managed appropriately and used to complement in-house service delivery and policy-making. The problem is that such a balance demands in-house skills – and we outsourced all of…