Why the government needn't stick with IE6

One of the features of the web that I initially found exciting was the concept of platform independence. One could build a page in HTML and anyone using any browser on any machine running any operating system would be able to see that page and use it just the way its author intended.

I will pause here to allow the hollow laughter of web developers everywhere to fade to an echo and so not interrupt my thoughts.

The truth of the matter is that over the last fifteen or so years we have had a multitude of browsers that work differently on various platforms and that has made both the development and testing of web pages and applications far more time consuming and, therefore, expensive than necessary. At Meantime we develop in whatever we consider to be the most standards compliant browser at the time and test primarily in whatever is the most popular, and both of these are moving targets.

As you would expect, Microsoft have a major role in the history of browsers but it is a surprisingly chequered history. Bill Gates was famously dismissive of the Internet at the outset and, if memory serves me correctly, it was not until IE4 was released that Microsoft really found their feet in the marketplace. Their success lasted 18 months until early 1999 when IE5 was released.

The extent of IE5's problems can be inferred from the fact that, on this one occasion, Microsoft released an interim version of the browser, IE5.5. And when IE6 came out, it was widely agreed that unhappy IE5 users would have been better waiting for that than 'upgrading' to IE5.5. (I remember all this vividly; I was responsible for the team testing the Royal Bank of Scotland's Internet banking software at the time.)

Of course, all of this made life incredibly torrid for those people in organisations who were responsible for the software and applications architecture. It was a period beset with problems and costs, and this was during the period immediately following the nasty surprise cost of the Millennium Bug. But IE6 was stable and remained Microsoft's browser offering for five years.

Despite that long period of stability - or, arguably, because of it - there did not appear to be a strong appetite for change when IE7 came along or, a couple of years further down the line, IE8. And so we find ourselves in 2010 with many large organisations and particularly government departments still using IE6, which is now nine years old.

The problem is that an awful lot has happened in those nine years and right now is a particularly exciting time with the new HTML5 and CSS3 support in the latest browsers: Chrome already has it, as does Firefox 4, which is out in a mature beta, and so will IE9's public beta, which is released in just a couple of weeks' time.

And in the middle of all this excitement, the government has announced that they won't be upgrading from IE6. Such a move, they say, would be "a very large operation" potentially at "significant potential cost to the taxpayer". They say that it will be "more cost-effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware-scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users."

This is such a short-sighted option that I don't feel I need spell out the various reasons why it is a bad idea. Indeed, the quote above makes it clear there is an attendant security risk which is a strong argument in itself.

What is perhaps less obvious is that as software is increasingly web-based, software that is used by local authorities, it is not a straightforward transition to move between browsers: there is a lot of regression testing and consequent redevelopment to be done.

But it's not satisfactory for government IT strategists to simply throw their hands up and say it's too difficult or too expensive to change. Yes, I understand this is supposed to be a time of austerity, but that doesn't mean that an economical solution can't be found. In six months' time we will have a clear view of which of the current crop of browsers is the best and, as a first step, this can be deployed across government departments. From there, a two year plan to migrate applications from IE6 to the new browser will get departments to the point where they can look at their next upgrade. Because this is a rolling process and not a one off. Government needs to recognise that fact and start to make the cultural change that will enable them to leverage the benefits of what is still a fast moving (and exciting) technology.

Bespoke software is alive and well.

In a recently posted article on the Business Computing World website, Haseet Sanghrajka of ST Consulting writes under the byline "How Application Platforms Are Killing Bespoke Software'.

Now, I can only assume that the title comes from a bit of over-enthusiasm for his offering because this is certainly not what Mr Sanghrajka succeeds in demonstrating. What he does argue is that application platforms are the best way forward for companies needing software solutions, as opposed to either package or bespoke solutions.

Let's tackle the package argument first, as it is the easiest. I would certainly agree that more complex business software, when taken in package form, is limiting for any business. However, there should be allowance made for packages such as QuickBooks or MS Office: there are times when a package solution is entirely appropriate.

His argument against bespoke software seems to be related to development time, cost and maintenance. So, let's return to those arguments after we've had a look at what Mr Sanghrajka is proposing, which is an 'application platform'. Although this is not particularly well explained in the article, in his terms it consists of some packages - that is, Microsoft Dynamics, Office and Outlook - plus a bespoke development language, .NET. (Packages and bespoke development are, of course, precisely what he is campaigning against.)

Those of you who have any experience of Dynamics will be aware of its eye-watering price tag (although MS have now introduced a cheaper version to try and encourage take up in smaller businesses). Microsoft themselves are pleased to tell their resellers that they can anticipate many times the cost of the package in terms of consultancy fees. Readers of Mr Sanghrajka's article won't be surprised when they reach the end to see that his company sells precisely this type of consultancy.

But back to our argument. Dynamics is more commonly known as Dynamics CRM and it is for this purpose - customer relationship management - that the product is most commonly sold. Extending the product out to cover other functions takes us into the territory of square pegs and round holes, and it is for this reason alone that I struggle to see how this particular application platform can compete with bespoke software.

So, to pursue the argument, perhaps the article is only really supposed to be about CRM. One of the touted benefits of Dynamics is just how powerful, configurable and flexible it is. I don't disagree with that. But you can deduce from those features that it is a complex piece of software, which is why companies such as ST Consulting can make a business out of configuring it.

It is this complexity and the cost of the consultants needed to maintain it that is seeing organisations move away from Dynamics (and SAP, as well) to simpler, bespoke solutions that do exactly what their companies need and nothing more. Certainly any bespoke provider worth their salt can provide a CRM for less than the cost of a configured Dynamics solution.

So, the argument was that bespoke software is too expensive, takes too long to develop and needs maintenance. But Dynamics will frequently be more expensive as a whole, takes time to configure and is too complex for organisations to manage themselves, resulting in ongoing consultancy costs. What's more, working with a good software house - with business and systems analysts, experienced developers, and a strong testing and change management process - will lead to cost-effective software being delivered to spec, on time and on budget.

I'd like you to indulge me in a couple of very specific ripostes, too. Quite apart from the fact that the argument has not been raging for decades (two perhaps, which is technically plural, I suppose), Mr Sanghrajka has it plain wrong when he says "Unlike traditional bespoke development that relies on software coders, application platform technology allows organisations to build on the underlying relational database using point and click development tools. Key concepts such as database fields, data relationships and workflow are automatically handled by the underlying application platform layer." This is disingenuous, at best. Building and maintaining relational databases requires good understanding and experience. Whilst a casual user may be able to add an attribute here and there, by the time they are creating entities and connecting them, they are only a short step from having to call those Dynamics consultants back in to sort out the ensuing problems with performance, reporting and data integrity.

Secondly, Mr Sanghrajka states that "it is estimated that an organisation can create a new solution from scratch in the same time frame it takes to deploy a traditional packaged application." Does this need much more than common sense to disprove it? Unless the new solution is, perhaps, a VAT calculation and the package is, say, Microsoft Dynamics.

My argument here is not with Mr Sanghrajka, who has a business to run and who no doubt has a lot of belief in Dynamics. What I dislike is the false argument. By Mr Sanghrajka's own admission, bespoke is the best solution. However, his arguments against it are flawed and actually apply more acutely to Microsoft Dynamics. Or the 'application platform' if you prefer.

Everybody's talking; why your business can't ignore social media.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.