markets

Dafydd Singleton – User needs for data standards.

Dafydd Vaughan – The bridge to nowhere: Why your ‘Target Architecture’ won’t ever deliver:

I’ve lost count of the number of Technical Design Authority meetings I’ve sat in, watching smart people tie themselves in knots over a diagram. We’d debate whether a proposed change conformed to the “target architecture” – a utopian blueprint of a perfectly rationalised, fully integrated, and utterly fictional technology estate.

Ben Holliday – Analogue innovation (doing one thing well):

The art of making a product that does one thing well has arguably been lost. With so many modern devices, digital overwhelm is everywhere. It’s design without trade-offs. The constraints used to be that products had to focus on a single function or task, or were limited by computing power or what was possible with engineering.

Phil ‘The Rumenator’ Rumens – Sourcing the stack for local government technology:

…there’s a systemic contradiction that local government is fragmented by design, but given the state of the market, councils often make similar technology choices, then individually procure many of the same products from a small pool of vendors, and separately expend the time of their under-resourced teams managing their own local technology stack of those similar products.

Ben Thompson – The benefits of bubbles:

What goes up must come down, which is to say bubbles that inflate eventually pop, with the end result being a recession and lots of bankrupt companies. And, not to spoil the story, that will almost certainly happen to the AI bubble as well. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that that is not the end of the story, at least in the best case. Bubbles have real benefits.

(This reminds me again about how much I really want to be the Ben Thompson of local government IT. Just pay me to blog, someone! Please!)