enterprise – Dave Briggs

Five for Friday (16/6/17)

Another week in which technology seems the least important thing in the world. Still, I’ve got nothing else to give, so here goes.

Join the DH digital communities and channels team – two great jobs going on a great team at the Department of Health.
Slack is raising another $500 million — and has attracted interest from a range of big buyers like Amazon – Slack is a really interesting tool. I swing wildly from thinking it’s not really that signficiant to considering it the harbinger of a new way of doing technology within organisations. As ever the truth is somewhere in the middle. The idea of Amazon buying it does not make a huge amount of sense to me. Amazon have inroads into big enterprise IT through their web services division of course, leading the way in the infrastructure as a service bit of cloud. They don’t have much (any?) of a footprint in software as a service – tools that actual users actually use. Do they want to get into that space? I’ve no idea but surely Google would be a better fit for Slack, and it would help out with the moribund and confusing state of the G Suite’s communications tools (Hangouts seems to have stagnated for years now).
Survey points to digital skills gap in civil service and Public sector struggling with cloud due to skills shortage – to both of which my response is “yes, and?”. Seems to me that we see a lot of reporting of the problem with digital skills/confidence/mindset but very few examples or ideas around how to tackle it. If you’ve ideas to share, then please do so in the Digital Skills in the Workplace group on LinkedIn.
History by lawsuit: After Gawker’s demise, the “inventor of e-mail” targets Techdirt – fascinating mixture of computer history combined with out and out oddness. The man who wrote a program called EMAIL claims this means he invested the generic tool e-mail.
Minimum Viable Architecture – good enough is good enough in an enterprise – nice bit of myth-busting around the supposedly special requirements of IT in a larger organisation. The word ‘enterprise’ is used to justify all sorts of crap: higher prices, costly maintenance agreements, hard to use and complicated tools. The fact is that the only difference is one of time – bigger organisations have existed longer than most small ones and thus have built up baggage around infrastructure and process. Achieving change in such organisations means trying to reduce that cruft… as James notes in his post “If enterprises are going to drive a successful digital transformation, and develop a culture that supports agile development and devops, then they need less architecture, not more of it.”

Minimum Viable Architecture — Good Enough is Good Enough in a Startup from Randy Shoup

These have mostly all been tweeted during the week, and you can find everything I’ve found interesting and bookmarked here.

Anti-patterns of behaviour in big organisations

Michael Coté has written an excellent post describing seven anti-patterns of behaviour in big organisations.

Number six is a particularly egregious crime, in my view:

Pay people to ignore them — BigCo’s love hiring new employees, paying them well, and then rarely listening to them. Instead, you hire outsiders and consultants who say similar things, but are listened to. In fact, the first task of any good management consultant team is to go interview all those bright, but ignored, employees you have and ask them what they’d do. The lesson is to track how many ideas come internally vs. externally and, rather than just blame your people for low internal idea generation, ask yourself if you’re just not listening.

Go read the whole lot – it’s good stuff.

What Does “Enterprise Grade” Mean, Really?

Bookmarks for October 30th through December 10th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Living with rats: Nine signposts towards Our Society – Good stuff from @juliandobson
Wikileaks and the Long Haul – Shirky on Wikileaks
What the attacks on WikiLeaks tell us – John Naughton nails it on the Wikileaks saga.
Budget consultation approaches by Michele Ide-Smith – Nice summary of some of the recent work from Michele.
I’m not anti-SharePoint – chieftech’s blog – Yup – Sharepoint's problems are usually in its implementation, not in the software itself.
Government data in the public domain – intrinsically good, right? – Great stuff from @rossferg
Connected Kingdom – "The UK has a thriving internet economy. It has the potential to grow even bigger. We want your ideas for ways to make that growth happen."
Learning about content strategy by Michele Ide-Smith – Great stuff on organising your website contributors and getting processes and systems right from Michele.
Innovation functions in large organisations – Great insights from @katebennet on innovating.
eDiplomacy: The US State Department’s Global Collaborative Backbone – Interesting stuff on collaborative tech in US.gov

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for August 18th through September 8th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Civic Commons code-sharing initiative bids to reduce government IT costs – "Around the United States, city governments have created a multitude of software. Unfortunately, most of the time the code from those projects is not shared between municipalities, which results in duplication of effort and redundant, static software."
Anonymity, trust and openness on the social intranet – "In some organisations, the cloak of anonymity could help to establish the first part of that trust relationship, and reassure colleagues that leaders are, in fact, really listening; once it exists, it’s easier to step out of the shadows with a greater degree of trust and openness."
The end of history – "History will, of course, look after itself. It always has. But the future history of our time will be different from our histories of past times, and that will not be because we have an eye to the future, but because we are always relentless focused on the present."
Why aren’t we all working for Learning Organisations? – "…the authors suggest a way for managers to switch from a ‘command and control’ to a ‘systems thinking’ mindset in order to achieve genuine organisational learning."
Quixly – Cool way to host and deliver paid-for content, such as e-books.
Understanding Marin County’s $30 million ERP failure – It's not just UK government that cocks up IT projects.
Google Wave open source next steps: "Wave in a Box" – "We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box.""
Should Governments Legislate a Preference for Open Source? – "It's easy to legislate a preference for Open Source, and difficult to implement a level playing field upon which Open Source and proprietary software could compete fairly. Thus, a number of governments have enacted the preference as an easy-to-legislate way of solving the problem, but I submit not optimally. Having a preference gives proprietary software an opening to portray themselves as the "injured party", when the reality is that historically there has been a preference for proprietary software in both legislation and internal process of government purchasers, and this still exists today."
Wiki life – "The point, in the end, is that Wikimedia by its DNA operates in public and benefits accrue — not just as product and engagement and promotion and distribution but also as strategy. That’s the next step in creating the truly public company or organization."
First Impressions: VaultPress (WordPress Backup) – Nice summary of the premium backup service for WordPress (sadly just in beta at the moment).
Sink or Swim – Donald Clark on the birth of Learning Pool and why the public sector needs it more than ever.
Damien Katz: Getting Your Open Source Project to 1.0 – Great notes on successful open source development.
Harold Jarche » The Evolving Social Organization – "For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost."
O’Reilly, Open Government and the Ingenuity of Enthusiasm – "It is quite clear that performance management and procurement, as well as many other government processes, need to be revised, reformed or radically changed. But this won’t happen unless we recognize that government and its employees need to remain in charge, need to stay as the custodians of neutrality and transparency, and we, the people, developers or users, can just help them do a better job but not replace them in any way."
Research findings and recommendations for Councils – Some fantastic shared learning here from Michele.
sigil – "Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format."
Enterprise 2.0 Perceived Risks: Myth or Reality? – "…security is a personal thing, a personal trait that everyone needs to nurture and treasure accordingly."
Using Free, Open-Source Software in Local Governments – "…how is it that local governments have failed to capitalize on the cost-saving and productivity-enhancing benefits of using open source software, especially given the budget crises they face?"
Open Government Data – "This event will bring together movers and shakers from the world of open government data — including government representatives, policymakers, lawyers, technologists, academics, advocates, citizens, journalists and reusers."
WordPress › Email Users « WordPress Plugins – "A plugin for wordpress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Wave goodbye

So, Google Wave will soon be no more:

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

I guess it was always a technology looking for a problem to solve. However, I did think they might have tried pushing it into organisations a bit before giving up – it seemed a potentially really powerful tool for collaboration amongst teams, and Wave hasn’t been a part of the Google Apps suite for that long.

Word is though that Google are working on a Facebook style social network and maybe some of the Wave stuff will make it into that.

I guess the other thing is that at least they are open sourcing bits of the code, so someone else might be able to pick it up and do something useful with it.

Thanks to Google, then, for innovating and trying new stuff publicly, and not being afraid to fail. A lesson to us all.

Tag: enterprise