Perhaps you remember when you first heard about Facebook and Twitter. Maybe you were one of the people who thought they'd misunderstood when these sites were described to them: "what's all the fuss about..?". You might even have tried Twitter and abandoned it after a few 'tweets' finding it every bit as lame as it sounded when it was described to you.
You would then have been further perplexed when you started to hear people saying how important Facebook and Twitter (and numerous other social sites) were to your business. Did you sit and look at that flyer from Business Link inviting you to a workshop on how social media could benefit you, and wonder just what it was that you'd missed?
Now, I'm not saying they can't or won't benefit you - as it happens, we use both at Meantime - but this blog is not an attempt to convince you of the merits of social media or otherwise. What I do want to write about is the broader phenomenon of social media and what it might mean for your business.
First of all, let me give you a couple of examples of the type of impact I want to talk about. The first one came about last year when a protestor died at the G20 protest in London. At first the police denied that they had anything to do with it, stating this as fact at a news conference. The truth might have come out if enough eye-witnesses had managed to convince a newspaper to run the story and one might have believed it or not depending on one's opinion of the police. However, in this case, footage and first person narrative of the event was promptly posted on websites and picked up by news broadcasters and the police had to confirm that the man had, in fact, been attacked, unprovoked, from behind by an officer.
The second example comes from earlier this week when Wikileaks posted the Afghan war logs. Regardless of the ethics of this action, the bottom line was that once that information was in the public domain, with even a single member of the public, it could be immediately broadcast to the wider population. Whilst one can be impressed with how President Obama rolled with the horrible revelations contained in the logs, the key point here is that he did not try to refute what was published.
So, how do these stories relate to your business, assuming that you are not running either a security firm or a war overseas?
The point I want to make is that the publication of opinion and information is now unfettered to an extent that was unimaginable even ten years ago. Most of you will have used Amazon and seen the review system used there. Some reviews - particularly those for music and books - are obviously partisan and no more than opinion but when you look at product reviews, it becomes a bit more serious. It was one the birthday of one of my daughters recently and she wanted some toys from the Little Cooks range. The reviews on Amazon across a range of their products quickly highlighted the fact that no matter how good they looked on TV, the build quality was poor and they were not a good present.
There are now independent sites - such as the dreadfully named Revoo - that specialise solely in independent reviews, and consumers are becoming more and more sophisticated in analysing and interpreting the reviews, good and bad. A simple example of this would be when I bought some headphones recently. The pair I fancied had over a hundred reviews, the majority of which were very positive. As one does, I read a higher proportion of the bad reviews and satisfied myself that those reviewers had either been unlucky or had unrealistic expectations. So, I bought the headphones.
I think that in the near future we will see similar sites that are based around services, as well as products.
So, what does this mean for your business? Two things, I think. Firstly, there's no point in trying to deny a problem with your product. Apple have kindly illustrated this point for me over the last few weeks with the issues arising with the aerials on the iPhone 4. No amount of denial is going to convince potential customers, who can see reviews and comment from any number of sources that are presenting the actual facts.
The second, more subtle issue, is germane to those who provide services. The issue here is not around people reviewing a product but instead talking about how you do business and what results you achieve. It doesn't matter how good your staff are, how good your planning is and how good your track record; you will have projects from time to time that simply seem to be jinxed. In the past, one might have been pleased to simply get the project completed and the client out of the door and focus on your successes but those days are fast disappearing. Now it is even more important to understand why a project hasn't gone according to plan and to make sure your client understands that, too. You can't simply rely on the good news that is out there about your company already; beware the old adage that bad news travels ten times as fast as good.
In conclusion then, whether you sell a product or a service, the good opinion of your customers and clients is no longer something that it would be nice to have, a secondary consideration: it is now core to your sales and success. More than ever, it is important to have happy clients because, in this age of Facebook and Twitter, everybody is talking.
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Paywalls: is this the end of free content on the web?
As of the 2nd of July, The Times has now placed its content behind a 'paywall'. This term, a derivative of the term firewall, means that you can only access The Times' content if you are willing to pay for it. This is an important step forward in the debate about content on the web, as Rupert Murdoch puts his money, or his readers' money, where his mouth is.
The emergence of the web has had a dramatic impact on newspapers. Most obviously because, by and large, all of their printed content goes onto their websites, which removes the need to buy the printed version. Whilst newspapers and their associated magazines take a lot of money in advertising revenue, the loss of the newspaper's cover price as an income stream is clearly going to hurt. This also has a nasty by-product in that it makes newspapers more reliant on their advertisers' agenda. (This, incidentally, is why there is no editorially independent women's magazine that can criticise the beauty industry.)
Of course, with a reduced income, the newspapers have less money to employ journalists and so, the argument goes, the quality of journalism will decline. And this is the primary argument for charging, that newspapers are providing a service and that has to be paid for by some means.
But is that really the case and what are the alternatives?
Firstly, let's look at the question of the quality of journalism. I can't see that there is much point in pulling the tabloids into this argument - most of their readers know exactly the quality of journalism that they are buying - so let's concentrate on the broadsheets, who are the main players in this debate (after all, Murdoch hasn't put a paywall around The Sun's website).
Erwin Knoll said that "Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge." As it happens, I can vouch for this argument. Earlier this year an incident took place at the school where I am a governor. A young girl from a difficult background brought a small knife to school. She bragged about this on the bus and said she had a list of people to get. Staff at school confiscated the knife and the list without any danger or trouble and then notified the police. Here is that story in the Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7519842/Schoolgirl-found-carrying-a-knife-and-hit-list-of-teachers-and-pupils.html. Quite apart from the obvious discrepancies between the story and what actually happened, it's worth noting the picture of the knife - a library photo, far larger than the knife concerned - and the emphasis on the stab vests, which police actually wear as a matter of course.
If this is the quality of journalism in our broadsheets, what are we in danger of losing? And, whilst anecdotal, the story above is far from an isolated example and there are far more sinister abuses of journalistic power, particularly around elections. (One thinks, of course, of Bush's first election "victory".) Whilst we have a Press Complaints Commission run by the press, specifically newspaper editors, we are not going to see the very improvement in journalistic standards and quality that is required to render newspaper journalism a profession worth protecting.
So, the argument for 'saving' journalism is not black and white. However, we clearly want our news from somewhere, which brings me to my second question, what are the alternatives?
As it happens, there are a lot of people out there commenting on the world around us, people who are free from the constraints of editors and newspaper ideology. For example, in the two years leading up to the credit crunch, a number of financial bloggers, some of whom published books, were accurately predicting what was going to happen and when. (In fact, there is a parallel in the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable who, effectively freed from toeing any party line, was able to air his concerns about the impending financial disaster.)
In his book 'Cognitive Surplus', Clay Shirky rightly points out that as publishing becomes easier, so the average quality declines. This is quite true but, to follow what has happened with printed books as an analogy, the fact there is more content being produced actually leads to a raising of the bar at the top of the quality scale. I believe that what will evolve is ways for people to find that good content and, in the same way that best seller book lists and the community on Amazon help us to find books to read, so we will point one another to the quality blogs and user published content. Indeed, one could well see a future newspaper website being a portal through to that content, some of which may be commissioned through advertising but probably not.
So, is this the end of free content on the web? The answer, simply, is no. I believe Murdoch has made a mistake here and, indeed, overestimated his own ability to impose his worldview on an evolving environment, one that is moving away from the models he desires. I won't pretend that I know exactly what the future looks like but I do know it will be one in which we pull our news from a variety of sources, channelled to us by portals and subscription services.
The emergence of the web has had a dramatic impact on newspapers. Most obviously because, by and large, all of their printed content goes onto their websites, which removes the need to buy the printed version. Whilst newspapers and their associated magazines take a lot of money in advertising revenue, the loss of the newspaper's cover price as an income stream is clearly going to hurt. This also has a nasty by-product in that it makes newspapers more reliant on their advertisers' agenda. (This, incidentally, is why there is no editorially independent women's magazine that can criticise the beauty industry.)
Of course, with a reduced income, the newspapers have less money to employ journalists and so, the argument goes, the quality of journalism will decline. And this is the primary argument for charging, that newspapers are providing a service and that has to be paid for by some means.
But is that really the case and what are the alternatives?
Firstly, let's look at the question of the quality of journalism. I can't see that there is much point in pulling the tabloids into this argument - most of their readers know exactly the quality of journalism that they are buying - so let's concentrate on the broadsheets, who are the main players in this debate (after all, Murdoch hasn't put a paywall around The Sun's website).
Erwin Knoll said that "Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge." As it happens, I can vouch for this argument. Earlier this year an incident took place at the school where I am a governor. A young girl from a difficult background brought a small knife to school. She bragged about this on the bus and said she had a list of people to get. Staff at school confiscated the knife and the list without any danger or trouble and then notified the police. Here is that story in the Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7519842/Schoolgirl-found-carrying-a-knife-and-hit-list-of-teachers-and-pupils.html. Quite apart from the obvious discrepancies between the story and what actually happened, it's worth noting the picture of the knife - a library photo, far larger than the knife concerned - and the emphasis on the stab vests, which police actually wear as a matter of course.
If this is the quality of journalism in our broadsheets, what are we in danger of losing? And, whilst anecdotal, the story above is far from an isolated example and there are far more sinister abuses of journalistic power, particularly around elections. (One thinks, of course, of Bush's first election "victory".) Whilst we have a Press Complaints Commission run by the press, specifically newspaper editors, we are not going to see the very improvement in journalistic standards and quality that is required to render newspaper journalism a profession worth protecting.
So, the argument for 'saving' journalism is not black and white. However, we clearly want our news from somewhere, which brings me to my second question, what are the alternatives?
As it happens, there are a lot of people out there commenting on the world around us, people who are free from the constraints of editors and newspaper ideology. For example, in the two years leading up to the credit crunch, a number of financial bloggers, some of whom published books, were accurately predicting what was going to happen and when. (In fact, there is a parallel in the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable who, effectively freed from toeing any party line, was able to air his concerns about the impending financial disaster.)
In his book 'Cognitive Surplus', Clay Shirky rightly points out that as publishing becomes easier, so the average quality declines. This is quite true but, to follow what has happened with printed books as an analogy, the fact there is more content being produced actually leads to a raising of the bar at the top of the quality scale. I believe that what will evolve is ways for people to find that good content and, in the same way that best seller book lists and the community on Amazon help us to find books to read, so we will point one another to the quality blogs and user published content. Indeed, one could well see a future newspaper website being a portal through to that content, some of which may be commissioned through advertising but probably not.
So, is this the end of free content on the web? The answer, simply, is no. I believe Murdoch has made a mistake here and, indeed, overestimated his own ability to impose his worldview on an evolving environment, one that is moving away from the models he desires. I won't pretend that I know exactly what the future looks like but I do know it will be one in which we pull our news from a variety of sources, channelled to us by portals and subscription services.
Saturday, 10 July 2010
NI14 - When government has IT spending right
A long time before this austerity coalition came to power, a policy called NI14 or "avoidable contact" was introduced to local government. Whilst this sounds rather unfriendly - as if our public servants want nothing to do with us - it was, and is, a good policy and one that might be usefully adopted by any company.
By whatever means, it was established that the cost of a face to face meeting between a council employee and a member of the public costs somewhere around £15, a 'phone call perhaps £3 or £4 but a website visit only has an associated cost of a few pence.
Thus, making information available on a website - anything from swimming pool opening times to a PDF of the application form to become a taxi driver - saved the council money and, crucially, freed employees up to do other work.
This was all very sensible and a good example of IT benefiting both an organisation and its clients or customers.
This policy and its aims have necessarily taken on a darker hue in the wake of the cuts that have been announced since the election and the inevitable job losses to follow. But whether you see the swingeing cuts as evidence of an unleashed Tory ideology or the essential measures required to raise the country out of a financial hole, the goal remains the same: don't tie up council employees' time on jobs that can be done by websites or, by extension, applications for mobile 'phones.
So, I was surprised to see this article in The Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7874856/Government-iPhone-app-spending-disclosed.html - criticising government spending on iPhone applications.
Firstly, the costs involved - £10k to £40k - are hardly scandalous for IT development, and that's before they are compared with the millions and billions haemorrhaged on the police and hospital systems.
Secondly, in NI14 terms the expenditure makes absolute sense. The jobseekers' app, for example, has been downloaded 50,000 times. That's 50,000 people using an app that has cost the equivalent of perhaps three public sector salaries. The maths is simple and compelling.
I am all for keeping an eye on government spending, particularly around IT, but it seems crazy to me to criticise spending that not only makes demonstrable financial sense but is also a success story within the terms of one of Whitehall's own policies.
And don't worry, the irony of the BBC investigating this story with a view to criticising an organisation for not budgeting carefully around its new media spend really is not lost on me.
By whatever means, it was established that the cost of a face to face meeting between a council employee and a member of the public costs somewhere around £15, a 'phone call perhaps £3 or £4 but a website visit only has an associated cost of a few pence.
Thus, making information available on a website - anything from swimming pool opening times to a PDF of the application form to become a taxi driver - saved the council money and, crucially, freed employees up to do other work.
This was all very sensible and a good example of IT benefiting both an organisation and its clients or customers.
This policy and its aims have necessarily taken on a darker hue in the wake of the cuts that have been announced since the election and the inevitable job losses to follow. But whether you see the swingeing cuts as evidence of an unleashed Tory ideology or the essential measures required to raise the country out of a financial hole, the goal remains the same: don't tie up council employees' time on jobs that can be done by websites or, by extension, applications for mobile 'phones.
So, I was surprised to see this article in The Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7874856/Government-iPhone-app-spending-disclosed.html - criticising government spending on iPhone applications.
Firstly, the costs involved - £10k to £40k - are hardly scandalous for IT development, and that's before they are compared with the millions and billions haemorrhaged on the police and hospital systems.
Secondly, in NI14 terms the expenditure makes absolute sense. The jobseekers' app, for example, has been downloaded 50,000 times. That's 50,000 people using an app that has cost the equivalent of perhaps three public sector salaries. The maths is simple and compelling.
I am all for keeping an eye on government spending, particularly around IT, but it seems crazy to me to criticise spending that not only makes demonstrable financial sense but is also a success story within the terms of one of Whitehall's own policies.
And don't worry, the irony of the BBC investigating this story with a view to criticising an organisation for not budgeting carefully around its new media spend really is not lost on me.
Monday, 5 July 2010
Is it time to create a 'top shelf' for the Internet?
It is an unavoidable ethical complication: sometimes good things come out of bad. Medical research, for example, has been assisted by murdering grave robbers and the horrific experiments of wartime scientists.
And so, on the web, it is undeniable that Internet technology has been pushed ahead by the demands of the pornography industry, which has enthusiastically driven the research and development of commonly accepted and valuable web tools such as video streaming.
Like so many elements of the free market - not to mention the banking sector - those making the money are happy to push ahead, while those with rational reservations make comments from the sideline that are accepted but not acted upon. Thus, we find ourselves with a generation now that has access to pornography that was unthinkable even ten years ago. No one can be sure where this will lead but you will not find many people arguing that it is a good thing.
To be clear, this blog is not about the pros and cons of pornography. However, I think I would be comfortable stating that the industry that promotes and produces it is, by and large, an unpleasant one, driven by high profits and with little regard for the people it uses. And I am consequently comfortable stating that in matters of regulation, I would think twice about consulting them or listening to their arguments about how they keep their content away from young people. (How many 15 year old boys are going to pay heed to a 'gatekeeper question' asking if they are 18?)
I am writing about this because last week, ICAAN, which is the body that manages 'top level domains' such as .co.uk, .com and .ac.uk, has begun the process of introducing a .xxx suffix for use by sites with pornographic content.
This strikes me as a very positive step. In no other area of our lives do we allow hardcore sexual content to be mixed in with the rest of what we see and do. I wouldn't take my children into Waterstones if I thought that Harry Potter would be sat side by side with adult literature. Indeed, I would be far happier with my children having unfettered access to the web if I knew there was a way by which I could simply block all unsuitable content.
More than ten years ago, a friend of mine was thinking of developing a trailer for windsurfing equipment and asked me to see if there was anything equivalent already on the Internet. I naively used AltaVista (ancient but rather good search engine) to search on 'water sports' with results that took me by surprise. More seriously, a friend recently complained to me that his daughter's biology homework had been to use the Internet to research bodily fluids, one of which was 'sperm'. This, at best, was a naive teacher.
Moving all pornographic content to .xxx domains would avoid this kind of accidental contact and also make it easier for the search engines to classify the data they pick up off the web.
There's no denying that the frontier spirit of the Internet has been and remains a great asset in its development. However, this romantic notion of a new wild west should be tempered by these oil barons of cyberspace whose intentions are not to do with creating a brave new world but instead revolve around exploitation and profit.
It is for all the above reasons that I welcome the new .xxx domain and I would support any and all efforts to oblige sites with adult content to move to using them. After all, for anyone who wants to access that content, nothing changes except a few letters in a URL. The advantages though, to those who don't want pornography and especially those who should be protected from it, are immense.
And so, on the web, it is undeniable that Internet technology has been pushed ahead by the demands of the pornography industry, which has enthusiastically driven the research and development of commonly accepted and valuable web tools such as video streaming.
Like so many elements of the free market - not to mention the banking sector - those making the money are happy to push ahead, while those with rational reservations make comments from the sideline that are accepted but not acted upon. Thus, we find ourselves with a generation now that has access to pornography that was unthinkable even ten years ago. No one can be sure where this will lead but you will not find many people arguing that it is a good thing.
To be clear, this blog is not about the pros and cons of pornography. However, I think I would be comfortable stating that the industry that promotes and produces it is, by and large, an unpleasant one, driven by high profits and with little regard for the people it uses. And I am consequently comfortable stating that in matters of regulation, I would think twice about consulting them or listening to their arguments about how they keep their content away from young people. (How many 15 year old boys are going to pay heed to a 'gatekeeper question' asking if they are 18?)
I am writing about this because last week, ICAAN, which is the body that manages 'top level domains' such as .co.uk, .com and .ac.uk, has begun the process of introducing a .xxx suffix for use by sites with pornographic content.
This strikes me as a very positive step. In no other area of our lives do we allow hardcore sexual content to be mixed in with the rest of what we see and do. I wouldn't take my children into Waterstones if I thought that Harry Potter would be sat side by side with adult literature. Indeed, I would be far happier with my children having unfettered access to the web if I knew there was a way by which I could simply block all unsuitable content.
More than ten years ago, a friend of mine was thinking of developing a trailer for windsurfing equipment and asked me to see if there was anything equivalent already on the Internet. I naively used AltaVista (ancient but rather good search engine) to search on 'water sports' with results that took me by surprise. More seriously, a friend recently complained to me that his daughter's biology homework had been to use the Internet to research bodily fluids, one of which was 'sperm'. This, at best, was a naive teacher.
Moving all pornographic content to .xxx domains would avoid this kind of accidental contact and also make it easier for the search engines to classify the data they pick up off the web.
There's no denying that the frontier spirit of the Internet has been and remains a great asset in its development. However, this romantic notion of a new wild west should be tempered by these oil barons of cyberspace whose intentions are not to do with creating a brave new world but instead revolve around exploitation and profit.
It is for all the above reasons that I welcome the new .xxx domain and I would support any and all efforts to oblige sites with adult content to move to using them. After all, for anyone who wants to access that content, nothing changes except a few letters in a URL. The advantages though, to those who don't want pornography and especially those who should be protected from it, are immense.
Friday, 2 July 2010
Can you really spend £35 million on a website?
Let's suppose I told you I was going to buy myself a new car. If I also told you what I planned to spend, you would naturally make some informed assumptions about just what I was going to buy.
I might say £6,000 and you'd think maybe a second hand car or low spec Skoda. Somewhere between £15,000 and £40,000 and you'd probably assume that I was looking at a new car. And how about if I said £100,000 or £200,000? Then, perhaps, you'd get really interested in what kind of car I was buying (and where I'd got the money from).
But what if I told you I was spending a million pounds? Now you'd be a bit bemused. Can you buy a car for a million pounds? you might ask. What is it, armoured? Jewel encrusted?
Which brings me, perhaps not obviously, to the Business Link website.
Yesterday, the government announced they are scrapping Business Link: http://www.bmmagazine.co.uk/Business-Link-to-be-scrapped-by-Government.870 Now, depending on your experiences with Business Link, you might think that is the loss of a resource that is valuable to small business or you might think it's about time. (Personally, I enjoyed my meetings with my local advisor- he's a nice chap - but I'm not sure I ever got anything out of it apart from a bit of local business gossip).
But one thing in the article really caught my eye: "the total cost of developing the Business Link website is a mind blowing £35 million". Now, I can honestly say, having been in IT for 22 years and in web development since 1997, that I have no idea how they have managed to spend that much money on that website. Certainly at that price - and notwithstanding the fact it is government funded - I would expect it to be compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act (it isn't) and not have obvious bugs (like its CSS errors).
Even a quick scoot round the site - which you can find at http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/ - will demonstrate that it's feature rich and has plenty of useful resources. But you could speak to any number of web development companies of a certain size and find they have developed sites on a similar scale for a fraction of that cost (the exception, of course, being the company that built the Business Link site, who are presumably maintaining it from their summer offices in the south of France).
Of course, this is ultimately about government's widely acknowledged yet never tackled problems around IT procurement. All too often, the tail wags the dog, with government suppliers telling their clients just what they will deliver and at what cost. Yet the solution is simple: start talking to and dealing with smaller suppliers rather than the handful of large companies who have been fleecing the taxpayer for years.
I might say £6,000 and you'd think maybe a second hand car or low spec Skoda. Somewhere between £15,000 and £40,000 and you'd probably assume that I was looking at a new car. And how about if I said £100,000 or £200,000? Then, perhaps, you'd get really interested in what kind of car I was buying (and where I'd got the money from).
But what if I told you I was spending a million pounds? Now you'd be a bit bemused. Can you buy a car for a million pounds? you might ask. What is it, armoured? Jewel encrusted?
Which brings me, perhaps not obviously, to the Business Link website.
Yesterday, the government announced they are scrapping Business Link: http://www.bmmagazine.co.uk/Business-Link-to-be-scrapped-by-Government.870 Now, depending on your experiences with Business Link, you might think that is the loss of a resource that is valuable to small business or you might think it's about time. (Personally, I enjoyed my meetings with my local advisor- he's a nice chap - but I'm not sure I ever got anything out of it apart from a bit of local business gossip).
But one thing in the article really caught my eye: "the total cost of developing the Business Link website is a mind blowing £35 million". Now, I can honestly say, having been in IT for 22 years and in web development since 1997, that I have no idea how they have managed to spend that much money on that website. Certainly at that price - and notwithstanding the fact it is government funded - I would expect it to be compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act (it isn't) and not have obvious bugs (like its CSS errors).
Even a quick scoot round the site - which you can find at http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/ - will demonstrate that it's feature rich and has plenty of useful resources. But you could speak to any number of web development companies of a certain size and find they have developed sites on a similar scale for a fraction of that cost (the exception, of course, being the company that built the Business Link site, who are presumably maintaining it from their summer offices in the south of France).
Of course, this is ultimately about government's widely acknowledged yet never tackled problems around IT procurement. All too often, the tail wags the dog, with government suppliers telling their clients just what they will deliver and at what cost. Yet the solution is simple: start talking to and dealing with smaller suppliers rather than the handful of large companies who have been fleecing the taxpayer for years.
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Building in bad practice - another BBC adventure
A few years ago, I was working as a freelance test manager for JPMorganChase in London and at the end of the contract I was invited to work on a problem project in New York. The project in question was having difficulties delivering to an aggressive schedule that required new releases every three months, with each release having a six month life cycle. This meant that at any given time there would be at least two releases in development.
The team on the project were very good, including a project manager, David Hodges, with whom I had worked before and held in high regard. At the first meeting we sat down and had a rather dispiriting couple of hours look at the project's history, where it was now and the future requirements.
Applying a bit of common sense, we decided on an initial release that was limited to correcting some live issues and started a conversation with the business unit to whom we were delivering about what they really needed in the very short term. Understandably, and given the frustrations they had endured, the business team wanted as much as possible in the next release; they had been waiting some time for important functionality.
So, we explained the challenges we had on our side and in the end, with their cooperation, we defined a manageable release. When we sat and looked at it, it didn't look too ambitious and, indeed, it was delivered on time, fully tested and functional. This set the pattern for subsequent releases and, despite their initial misgivings, the business unit ended up very happy with a steady stream of change, delivered every three months as required.
Yesterday my colleague, Steve Parker, sent me the following link: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-06/28/project-canvas-youview
Of course, I was interested in this from a technology point of view and also for the details of the predictable spat over the question of public money distorting the private market for which I have some sympathy (although little for Virgin and BSkyB, specifically). However, what really caught my eye was the following sentence: "If all that's met, and the project doesn't go more than 20 percent over its budget (which has also been prohibited by the BBC Trust), then Project Canvas is expected to launch in the early part of 2011."
This strikes me as symptomatic problems with IT development in the public sector. i.e. the acceptance that IT projects will go over-budget. Whether it is conscious or not, the trust is tacitly approving a budget overrun of 20%. This means those running the project, who should be responsible for the budget, won't begin to worry until that figure of 20% is approached. They certainly won't worry at the point where they are approaching the limit of the official budget.
Furthermore, previous experience tells us that if the budget limit is reached, no one will want to throw away millions of pounds worth of work and more (licence payers') money will be found to shore up the project. We may get the minor satisfaction of seeing a slapped wrist or two.
The point of this blog, as you will probably have guessed by now, is that there is no reason IT can't deliver to a budget, whether it's a financial or, as in the case at JPMorganChase, time limited. If the BBC have a budget for this development, then their suppliers, whether they are in-house or external, should learn to work to that budget. To deliver a successful IT project, it is important to be realistic, not ambitious. Software development is both technical and creative and consequently there is plenty of scope for issues to arise and cause slippage. Furthermore, technology is a moving target and their is no doubt that the environment around this development will evolve as it progresses. The BBC should set their project milestones now, so that this project can be cancelled early if it is not going to deliver to the proper budget and they should remove the 20% safety net immediately.
The team on the project were very good, including a project manager, David Hodges, with whom I had worked before and held in high regard. At the first meeting we sat down and had a rather dispiriting couple of hours look at the project's history, where it was now and the future requirements.
Applying a bit of common sense, we decided on an initial release that was limited to correcting some live issues and started a conversation with the business unit to whom we were delivering about what they really needed in the very short term. Understandably, and given the frustrations they had endured, the business team wanted as much as possible in the next release; they had been waiting some time for important functionality.
So, we explained the challenges we had on our side and in the end, with their cooperation, we defined a manageable release. When we sat and looked at it, it didn't look too ambitious and, indeed, it was delivered on time, fully tested and functional. This set the pattern for subsequent releases and, despite their initial misgivings, the business unit ended up very happy with a steady stream of change, delivered every three months as required.
Yesterday my colleague, Steve Parker, sent me the following link: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-06/28/project-canvas-youview
Of course, I was interested in this from a technology point of view and also for the details of the predictable spat over the question of public money distorting the private market for which I have some sympathy (although little for Virgin and BSkyB, specifically). However, what really caught my eye was the following sentence: "If all that's met, and the project doesn't go more than 20 percent over its budget (which has also been prohibited by the BBC Trust), then Project Canvas is expected to launch in the early part of 2011."
This strikes me as symptomatic problems with IT development in the public sector. i.e. the acceptance that IT projects will go over-budget. Whether it is conscious or not, the trust is tacitly approving a budget overrun of 20%. This means those running the project, who should be responsible for the budget, won't begin to worry until that figure of 20% is approached. They certainly won't worry at the point where they are approaching the limit of the official budget.
Furthermore, previous experience tells us that if the budget limit is reached, no one will want to throw away millions of pounds worth of work and more (licence payers') money will be found to shore up the project. We may get the minor satisfaction of seeing a slapped wrist or two.
The point of this blog, as you will probably have guessed by now, is that there is no reason IT can't deliver to a budget, whether it's a financial or, as in the case at JPMorganChase, time limited. If the BBC have a budget for this development, then their suppliers, whether they are in-house or external, should learn to work to that budget. To deliver a successful IT project, it is important to be realistic, not ambitious. Software development is both technical and creative and consequently there is plenty of scope for issues to arise and cause slippage. Furthermore, technology is a moving target and their is no doubt that the environment around this development will evolve as it progresses. The BBC should set their project milestones now, so that this project can be cancelled early if it is not going to deliver to the proper budget and they should remove the 20% safety net immediately.
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