An unusual blog this one as it’s not based on, or linked to online sources, but instead comes about from a series of meetings, including my participation in a roundtable event with a number of companies on Master Data. I have been struck by the vehemence of business managers against the IT department on the topic of ‘master data’ which they see as holding back essential changes in ‘processes’ that they want to make to …

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Here is a blog piece from Ivar Sinka which I hope will trigger some interesting comments.
In his blog piece on the 11th of March, Andy Mulholland raised the point that the only form of innovation that many CIOs and IT departments are judged on is in reducing the cost of supporting administrative operations. He added that an increasing number of CIOs recognise that this is not enough, but are frustrated in how they break out to play the role of business innovator.
Those of you who have been to management school (sadly, I haven’t) will have come across the name Peter F. Drucker. He has a fascinating biography: he was first published in German in the 1930s, is the author of thirty-nine books, was an editorial writer on the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and now has an institute that bears his name (The Drucker Institute). We used his definition of innovation: “change that creates a new dimension of performance” in our 2008 annual Global CIO Survey. The survey investigates the role of the IT function in business innovation.
When we had gathered the data for the survey, we decided to take a deeper look at Drucker’s analysis to inform our thinking about the IT department and its involvement in business innovation. In 1985, he published “Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles”, in which he set out seven sources of innovation: 1. The Unexpected—unexpected successes or failures or external events. 2. The Incongruity—identification of a discrepancy between reality and what is generally assumed. 3. Innovation based on process need —spotting weak links in processes. 4. Changes in industry or market structure—opportunities arising from fundamental changes in markets or industries. 5. Demographics—changes in population indicators, such as size,age or education levels. 6. Changes in perception, mood and meaning—general changes in society’s attitudes and beliefs. 7. New Knowledge—important technological or other advances.

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I guess like many people I am frustrated by the topic; on one hand there is no lack of outpourings on the topic, and on the other it’s difficult to find well thought through and substantiated material. I was pleased to find a new report that actually takes a detailed look at ‘energy’ usage in the IT sector in an analytical manner. Well done to the 451 Group and their report with the fully descriptive …

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I want to quote from the homepage of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), a joint endeavour of MIT and University of Southampton: ‘The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to understand what the Web is, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science. The Web Science Research Initiative brings together academics, scientists, sociologists, …

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Bit of a disjointed series of connections; first I read how a single major trunk connection failure in India takes out a significant amount of the Indian Software Industries online capabilities until it’s fixed. Then there has been another Blackberry outage in the USA affecting around 50% of users, plus a few other less headlined stories, all of which can be summed up as extremely large scale system use involving numbers and ‘infrastructural’ services that …

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