One of the workshop sessions we put on as a group the other week in Munich was around ‘IT Governance’ in Higher Education.  John Townsend of Liverpool John Moore’s University facilitated the session by leading us through the current setup at LJMU and how well it’s working for them in managing investment and strategy across the University.

I’ve heard John speak through this before and he’s always rather self-deprecating about his involvement in how successful they have been in really getting to grips with Governance as a whole.   Their story is oneof adopting successful and proven approaches elsewhere in industry, without getting bogged down in intellectualising whether what’s good for everyone else is applicable in a ’special case’, as can sometimes happen in HEIs.

One of the points that came up on numerous occasions was the general displeasure at people using the prefix of ‘IT’ in IT Governance.  In short, the prefix tends to reinforces the whole ‘us’ and ‘them’ standoff between ‘IT’ and ‘Business’ where IT either think or are expected to govern themselves and have some artificial interface with the business.  I guess it’s a bit like having a service counter approach at the stores where the business rocks up and asks for a can of tartan paint, to which the IT shop’s response is to head off in to the back to try and come up with the goods out of sight.

So what this means for well-established institutions with large and sometimes seemingly unwieldy governance structures is that a more desirable behaviour would be to develop a more mature approach to practical engagement with IT development at the core of business and quality improvement, rather than having the two approaches be distinct from one another.

Even if an organisation can manage to change itself to be more optimised in its governance, then there is still the more complex and multi-faceted people dimension which fills that structure. As a force, this could either be good or bad, depending upon the culture of the organisation and how people conduct themselves within that.  That said, waiting for a perfect governance structure to roll along is not likely to happen without a significant external shock to the system – say, for instance, through a major security issue arising or through an unexpected cut in funding.

Place your bets on which is likely to happen first…

Posted: November 2nd, 2008 under Business, enterprise architecture.
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According to a tweet from @blackberry earlier this week, then today was inked as the official release day for the new Blackberry Bold handset from Research In Motion. I’ve been using the handset on a daily basis since leaving for Chicago and so have put together a few notes on what you can expect from using it

Similarities between the Bold and iPhone are bound to be drawn given the styling of the RIM device. It remains a trackball and keyboard based input system, so there’s no change to a touch interface yet, although that is rumoured to be coming with the ‘Thunder’ product expected at some point this year (pick up a pinch of salt at this point).

The Bold is the first RIM device to have HDSPA capabilities, and if I heard correctly, T-Mobile (UK) are teaming up with 3 (UK) to provide greater 3G coverage across the UK. Data transfer speeds, using a BES server for the usual data compression and encryption, will likely be at least twice as fast as existing GPRS coverage. Add on top of that the ability to use WiFi, and you’re getting towards a single device that could just about have you leave the laptop in the bag for a long journey, though I don’t think any device has got to the point that you could leave the laptop at home yet.

All the extra services available on the handset obviously put a greater strain on the battery. One differentiator with the iPhone is that you can actually take the back off the phone and swap your battery out. If you’re away from power for any length of time as a business traveller, believe me when I say this is a necessity. The iPhone 2.0 at least doesn’t have the battery soldered in to the device, but you still need to be an expert safe cracker to get the smooth case apart, and you’ll probably find that it invalidates your warranty. Certainly not something you’d be doing in the field.

I’ve had issues with the quality of the browser on RIM devices before today, and on the pre-release version of the Bold firmware, this continues to be the case. A number of the more popular business/traveller social network sites that I’d normally make use of just don’t work all that well on the current version of the browser, which is a great shame as the new screen is really great.

A couple of weeks ago we were lucky enough to attend the VIP Preview for T-Mobile’s introduction of the Blackberry Bold in the UK, and RIM had provided us with some test handsets a while before that. There was a fair bit of conversation amongst people around the iPhone as a competitor platform, as you might expect, and we’ve certainly had the same questions asked of us at work. The new public sector list prices for iPhone put it almost head-to-head with the exec RIM devices and data plans, but there are noteable differences – particularly depending on your backend architecture and security requirements.

More on this when we receive our release handsets.

Posted: August 21st, 2008 under Business, mobile.
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Well, that was Lotusphere 2008 – a very different Lotusphere to last year in that I had absolutely no chance to do any real posting during the week.  It’s been a really busy week of meeting after meeting, along with attending the sessions, and we’ve done quite a lot of business along the way.

The biggest pushes from Lotus this year are along the collaboration tools front (no real surprises there), but the reaction from folks seemed a little mixed.

Much reflecting to do, and that starts today now that the we’ve reached the end.  Time to kick back and unwind before the long and winding road/flight path home.

Posted: January 24th, 2008 under Business, Lotusphere.
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http://wiki.spv-developers.com/HTC_Application_Unlock_Guide

Not that I actually needed to, as we bought unlocked i-mates anyway. However, we have hit exactly the same problem as most folks trying to get .cab files installed on to handsets where the Windows Mobile 5.x security is such that your .cab has no hope at all of ever being installed.

The i-mate SPL is a little bundle of annoyance in not accepting the Novell Groupwise sync .cab file, as it means that there the only way I can actually sync calendar entries at the moment is to .forward mail out to Gmail from work and have Entourage Pop calendar entries to its own Calendar and then sync from there. Pft.

So, even tho’ the CTO is somewhat dead set against RIM, I think I may well vote with my Budget and go down the Blackberry line if I’m expected to keep a PDA on me.

Posted: February 15th, 2007 under Business, Hardware, mobile.
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There are 5 themes in the Lotus Connections product suite:

• Profiles
• Communities
• Dogear
• Activities
• Blog

All of which are customisable, and all – in the spirit of Creature Comforts – very turn off and onable. We know this because only the invited great and good have access to the Blog component on the special Lotusphere pre-beta we’ve been invited to use. This is partly because I suspect that setting up a pre-beta for 7500 users has potential issues for the folks having to admin the temporary Domino and Connections servers down here in Orlando.

Profiles

OK, we’ve been talking about this at work for some time and have a project underway at the moment that is looking to provide something similar for a partial coverage of our staff. We’ve hung back from developing significant applications to deliver and drive the profiles precisely becuase we were expecting something along the lines of the profiles module to be delivered sometime soon. IBM have made considerable noise about their own internal use of ‘Blue Pages’ as a ‘People Finder’ on steroids.

Communities

Communities alows folks tocreate ad-hoc groups based around subjects they are interested in. All taggable – just like Facebook / Bebo Groups etc., but for grown-ups

Dogear

I’ve talked about Dogear previously, when it was standalone as an internal alphaworks product at Watson Research Lab, and refered to by the ACM. Dogear is basically del.icio.us for the Enterprise, but is well embedded with the other areas of Connections, particularly with…

Activities

Right, now this *is* new (well, sort of – you could argue that it’s an extension of a Task List paradigm, but that would be doing a particular disservice to this piece of functionality).

The one issue I need to get to the bottom of here with some of the Lotus folk is where Activities fits with Websphere Process Server.

…

OK. had a chat with them, and it seems that we are talking ad-hoc activities here, not formal business methods. I think I can find a way of differentiating between the two when we need to present this out to people.

Blogs

Shouldn’t really need any explanation really.

So the potential of Connections is pretty huge for businesses prepared to invest in the improved Notes / Domino / Connections environment. We’ve seen countless demos of how seamlessly they all integrate and can be used to organise work. It all looks good.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Posted: January 26th, 2007 under AJAX, Business, Collaboration Tools, Information Management, Portal.
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