Ignite Lab

It’s customary at this time of year for the media commentators to do one of two things:

• A retrospective on what 2010 brought – the events, mishaps and surprises.
• A look forward to 2011 – predictions and forecasts of what will take the world by storm and what, specifically, CIOs will need to be able to grapple with.

We’re well into 2011 now, so here’s our take on what we think the year has in store for senior IT executives, but with a twist.  We aren’t technologists; our focus is on what it takes to extract value from technology , and what we believe 2011 will bring is an increasingly loud and clear call for CIOs to go beyond project delivery and ‘keeping the lights on’ – into the whole arena of business value.  We see more and more evidence that senior management teams are waking up to the fact that delivering technology projects to time and budget is only part of the story.  More and more emphasis is rightly being placed on what you need to do to get value from the system long after the project team has gone away.

Will your IT team surprise you this year?

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In the current climate councils are faced with the challenge of cutting cost but do want to default to cutting levels of service.

But is the process of enabling the community to do more for itself just a polite way of dressing up a service cut. At Ignite we would argue not – what is important is using the scarce resources of the council to deliver outcomes for the community.

Building the capacity of the community also needs to go hand in hand with the sensible management of expectations of what the council will do and what the community – and individuals within it – need to take responsibility for. Read on →

Eric Pickles was recently heard saying that it is all about localisation/localisation/localisation, but not necessarily in that order. Whatever your view of localisation his point was well made.

So it is with managing change.  Engage/Engage/Engage, but not necessarily in that order.

Anyone who has attempted to manage change that does not have the support of the organisation knows that it is like pushing jelly uphill.  You can’t keep it all together and any progress seems to slip through your fingers. Read on →

It may sound perverse, but the cost challenges now facing local authorities may well present leaders with the biggest opportunity in a generation to change the face of local government. Stakeholders can see what is happening and will never be more open to fresh ideas.

 Local authorities now have an extra layer of clarity. The general consensus seems to be that at 28% the cuts are slightly less painful than the worst expectations.  What came as a nasty surprise was that the cuts are to be front loaded. Whatever the interpretation – it is time to act.

Being bold is a core value at Ignite so it is not too surprising that we encourage clients to follow the mantra. But what does it mean in practice to be bold and how do you convert the sentiment into something tangible.

We liken it to quitting your job and setting up your own business. The moment you make the decision to draw a line and part with the past is the moment when a huge burden is lifted.  Your focus immediately shifts to the design of a very different future – ideas start to flow and people around you become engaged with the creation of something special. Anyone who has done it will tell you how liberating it can be.

So it is with fundamental change.  Read on →

“Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted” (Einstein)

What gets measured gets done, and we recently had a fascinating conversation with the IT Director of a FTSE 100 company on the topic of IT performance measures.  He’d recently worked with business colleagues to come up with more meaningful measures of his own team’s performance.  ‘Availability across 100% of service desk hours’, for example, has been replaced by ‘availability of business analytic reports, on time, in full and accurate’.  It’s not that service desks aren’t important any more, but business analytics have more impact on the success of the business – decision-makers need timely and accurate information against which to plan and deliver business objectives.  It’s putting the information back into IT.

But these are still lagging measures of performance.  What are the leading measures that IT teams need to sign up to?  How can you measure in advance if IT is able to deliver what the business needs?

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They may be busy cutting every major IT project this country ever thought of, but just look at the leadership and sponsorship that oozes out of their every pore.  Forget their politics, they are in this together and are making every effort to take us all with them.

Not so different from what most big (or even small) systems implementations need.  Generally, you see an embattled IT manager busting all he has to meet the deadline, with the business sponsor giving the occasional set-piece motivational speech (or perhaps just an e-mail).  An exaggeration perhaps, but how often do you see business and IT leaders really showing that they share the same ground?  Let’s see what Nick and Dave are doing….

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Here are a bunch of things I find interesting from the net and tech, with a vague emphasis on innovation.

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A piece in The Guardian recently got me thinking about the impact of new technologies on the way in which we work. Dan Tapscott’s latest book looks at the way what he calls the ‘net generation’ is changing the world. He argues that this new generation of employees, which has grown up fully digital, has a different attitude to work than previous generations. As a result of their digital upbringing they are much more inclined to work collaboratively, expect work to be fun, and blur the boundaries between work and the rest of their lives.

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‘In the beginning computers were human.  Then they took the shape of metal boxes, filling entire rooms before becoming ever smaller and more widespread.  Now they are evaporating altogether and becoming accessible from anywhere.’ (About as brief a history of computing as anyone can make it, The Economist, 25 October 2008).

It’s hard to know where to start when thinking about the pace and scope of technology innovation.  Every aspect of our lives has been transformed and will be transformed again.  Some of the wildest predictions in the past have proved to be no more than pipedreams whilst others turned out to have understated the change that followed.  Consider these four quotes as examples:

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Earlier this month, as most of the world knows, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) opened the Large Hadron Collider in a 17-mile long tunnel beneath the Jura mountains in Switzerland.  When its teething difficulties have been overcome, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator will fire streams of protons against each other at 99.999991% of the speed of light, causing collisions that will re-create conditions that last existed in the first instants of time, fractions of a second after the big bang. 

The sub-atomic debris that is generated will, we are told, enable scientists to understand hitherto unanswerable questions such as why matter has mass, what makes up the extraordinarily large proportion of the Universe that is known to exist but cannot be seen, how many dimensions there are, and how nature is put together.  I don’t know how it will do this, but apparently it will.  Read on →