Sarah Burnett's Web Musings

BCSWomen Blog Carnival – Editor’s Choice

2012-02-05T07:26:00.000-08:00

This is our first blog carnival and what better time to start than the beginning of the New Year. The response and the quality of entries have been fantastic and I am delighted to be featuring a great collection in this editor’s choice blog. The posts link the contribution of women to the key technology questions of the day. Each is a personal take, but they raise questions that this group considers key to IT and the future of women in our profession.

The submission from Amanda Clare, lecturer in Computer Science at Aberystwyth University takes us straight into the science of computing in a post about the work of Kathleen Fisher titled “We need more than one programming language”. In her writing Amanda discusses why we need many computer programming languages. She argues that the answer is in the bigger theoretical picture that computer scientists should be able to understand.

The carnival submission from Anita Lettink, Managing Director NL at NorthgateArinso, takes us from the science to the consumption of computing. She tells us how Apple has changed her life with its ease of use, design and innovation. It is really something when a technology company’s customers spontaneously blog about it. It is no wonder that Apple is the world’s most valued company by market capitalisation as noted by the Financial Times. Furthermore, the announcement of Apple’s latest financial results single-handedly erased a drop in Standard & Poor’s 500 Index earnings for the December quarter according to Bloomberg: Apple Restores S&P 500 Earnings With Enough Cash to Cover Greece Payments. Among Anita’s main observation is how Apple has completely changed her consumption of media, film and music.
As well as being featured in the editor’s choice blog, Anita’s post gets two other accolades: for being the first to submit a blog to the carnival, and being its only international participant. We hope to see more international participants take part in the future.

In her post titled “Female technologists speak out against imposed quotas. So what’s the solution?”, Maggie Berry, MD of Women in Technology (WIT), addresses the subject of proposed quotas for women board members. Maggie’s post provides an interesting infographic showing the result of a survey that WIT had carried out on this subject. Going by the result, I am among the majority of tech. women that do not agree with quotas. Yet we all recognize that something must be done to improve on the current situation. In her carnival post, Maggie eloquently puts the case for a number of measures that include mentoring and support.

Hannah Dee’s carnival entry titled “9 Reasons For Women to Study Compsci” takes us from women in the boardroom to women in science and technology. As the vice-chair of BCSWomen, Hannah has been actively campaigning for more women in science and technology for sometime. In this post Hannah gives nine good reasons for women to pursue compsci careers. Among them are interesting subjects, support for women, and availability of jobs. Hannah also mentions hot nerds, giving Bill Gates as an example. Some of us might think of other hotter nerds (a certain rock star professor comes to mind). Brian Cox’ star gazing appearances from fabulous mountain top locations on TV is rumoured to have boosted the number of applications to universities for physics this year. Who could do the same for Computer Science? What’s your view? Let us know by commenting below.

Anne-Marie Imafidon, Business Analyst at Global Technology Collaboration Centre of Excellence, eldest child in ‘Britain’s Brainiest Family’ [Sky News] and the youngest Mathematics and Computer Science Graduate from Oxford, gives us her perspective on women in technology in her carnival entry called “No women in technology? You’ve never been toGoDaddy.com!”. As well as describing the issue that we all wish to address, Anne-Marie discusses some of the initiatives that she has come across to increase the number of women techies in organizations, such as, female mentoring and female fast-track, and the Sony ’50/50′ scheme - an example of ‘positive discrimination’ to moving women up. Anne-Marie concludes her post by putting forward some more ideas to bolster existing schemes.

The submission from Elizabeth Harrin titled “What's the future of project management software?” takes us to the project management arena, focusing on the use of technology in project management including collaboration software, mobile technology, and the potential that biometrics offer for secure access to project information on the go. I first came across Elizabeth when we were both shortlisted for Computer Weekly blog awards in 2009 and then again in 2010. My admiration for Elizabeth grew when she went on to win awards in some categories both years and again in 2011. She is a brilliant role model for budding bloggers and I am delighted that she has taken part in BCSWomen’s first ever blog carnival.

We move from project management to the broader subject of management through a number of submissions by Jacqui Hogan. She is a management and leadership mentor currently working for MentorSET. As part of a series titled “7 Habits of Effective Managers” Jacqui takes us from the need to be proactive to reviewing and learning from outcomes. She succinctly describes a set of guiding principles for management who could easily come unstuck in the increasingly complex world of business.

Last but not least is a submission from Roger Boyle, Professor of Computing at the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, called “3 Things About Women in IT”. Roger raises the interesting question about the rapid drop in women A-level students in 1984. He also tells us that just once was he the only man in a full theatre, and that was introducing a BCSWomen event.

I hope you enjoy the carnival. Before I finish I would like to thank all the participants and those who promoted the carnival.

Please join the conversation by adding a comment to this post or by taking part in the next event.

About the Author: Sarah Burnett is research director for Public Sector BPO at NelsonHall. She has worked in the ICT industry for over 20 years, often in charge of implementation and service delivery, both directly for public sector and commercial organizations, and also on their behalf as an outsourcing services provider. Her past roles and responsibilities have included e-Government program management in the public sector, e-procurement services and application outsourcing and testing.

Sarah maintains a presence on the web on twitter: sarahburnett and her blog: Sarah Burnett's Web Musings.

BCSWomen Blog Carnival

2012-01-05T13:39:00.000-08:00

I am delighted to be hosting the first ever BCSWomen Blog Carnival. The aim of the carnival is to encourage the sharing of ideas and personal perspectives on IT and the role of women within it, to get debate and discussion going and to give recognition to talented bloggers.

I am going to be the editor of the first carnival and will host it on this blog in February.

Here is how to enter:

Publish a blog post about IT, the IT profession or women in IT on your blog during January. Please do not submit older posts; only those with a January 2012 publication date will be considered.

E-mail the URL of the blog post to .... and include:

A brief description of the blog (not the post but the blog)

A brief description of the author and a link to the author's profile (e.g. on LinkedIn or Twitter) if you have one

Visit this blog in February to read the featured blogs and tell your mates about it.

Happy blogging and happy New Year.

2011 - Best of Three Years for UK Central Government BPO Contracts

2011-11-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

A review of BPO contracts awarded by UK central government sector this year to date shows contracts of total value of £7bn awarded to the end of September. The total value is dominated by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Work Programme contracts that could be worth up to a maximum of £5bn over 7 years. The rest comes from a small number of large contracts including:

The award of a £105m pensions administration contract by U.K. Pensions Regulator to Capita
The award of a central managed print services contract by HMRC to Williams Lea for use by all government departments with a value of circa £250m
The £100m Vehicle Excise Duty and Continuous Insurance Enforcement services contract (CIE) awarded to Capita by DVLA
The 5-year contract for Blue Badge Improvement Service (BBIS) awarded to Northgate Public Services by the Department for Transport
Mouchel and Thales UK joint venture being awarded £57m National Traffic Information Service (NTIS) contract by the Highways Agency
Capita wining the Teacher’s Pension Scheme administration tender awarded by U.K. Department of Education worth £80m.
The U.K. Ministry of Justice (MoJ) renewing Serco’s prisoner escort and custody contract worth £420m
The National Offender Management Service (part of MoJ) renewing Serco’s prison management contract worth £250m
MoJ selecting G4S to run HMP Birmingham and Featherstone 2, a new prison in Wolverhampton, at a total contract value of £750m.

A review of contracts awarded in the same periods in 2010 and 2009 shows smaller deals with estimated total value of £1.3bn and £3.6bn respectively. The Work Programme contracts awarded in 2011 have made this year the best for BPO services in the sector since 2009. More awards are expected in the final quarter of 2011 including MyCSP and BBC Licensing contracts.
The drop in BPO contract levels in 2010 is unsurprising, given the change of government and the austerity regime that has followed. Ironically, the austerity measures are increasing demand for BPO; the primary driver for contract awards this year being the need to cut expenditure on the country’s benefit and justice systems. The DWP and the MoJ contracts fall into this category.

The second driver for change is the need for departments to comply with new or changing regulation, e.g. Continuous Insurance Enforcement that came into force this year. The DVLA and the Pensions Regulator contract awards fall into this category.

The third driver is the need for increased efficiency that applies to all of these contracts. The approach to efficiency is driven by government policy which is focused on centralization of core delivery capabilities to achieve outcomes to the same standard across the country e.g. BBIS, the pooling of resources, e.g. the Williams Lea MPS contract and sharing more of programme risks with suppliers, e.g. the Work Programme that pays on outcome.

The drivers work together and not in isolation, for example implementing change to comply with new legislation also provides an opportunity to modernize and fix service issues.
I will be analysing the market in much more detail in my major market analysis report for NelsonHall “Targeting U.K. Central Government BPO” to be published in December.

The Rapid Evolution of BPO in U.K. Public Sector

2011-09-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

The need for reducing costs or increasing revenues in the face of budget cuts in U.K. public sector is creating a host of new BPO opportunities that are pushing the boundaries of the model in the sector. There is a mix of both the expected and the unexpected that is changing the dynamics of the market:

The Conservative-led coalition government has been promoting the concept of “big society” (use of volunteers to you and me) for some time and so outsourcing the National Citizen Service pilots to a group of mostly not-for-profit organizations came as no surprise. This week the Cabinet Office published a list of 19 organizations that have been selected to run the pilots for 2012. This is one example of how, from a sourcing point of view, the concept of big society is introducing a new layer of micro outsourcers that, in turn, need capabilities to deliver services. Thus government policy is changing the dynamics of public sector sourcing and the supply chain of products and services
The award of preferred bidder status to Assura Medical Limited, a company wholly owned by Virgin Healthcare, by NHS Surrey to deliver community health services in South West and North West Surrey received some coverage by the broadsheets but not so much about privatization of healthcare by the NHS, but because Assura Medical beat Surrey’s own Central Surrey Health to win the contract. The irony that the media picked up on was that Central Surrey Health is the social enterprise that has been praised by the Cabinet Office in its promotion of mutualization of public services. Here is not only outsourcing of health services but a public sector mutual competing for the work
For me, the development that wins the prize for the most evolved model is Birmingham City Council’s legal department winning places on NHS legal services framework. We have had public services delivered by the public sector and public services delivered by the private sector. The Birmingham City Council inclusion in the framework takes us to an advanced case of public services for one organization delivered by another public sector body. Here too public agencies are competing with the private sector.

The dynamics of the market are changing fast and if you are a service provider, you may well be wondering where all this leaves you and your company. My short answer is to focus on your strengths but to keep a watching brief for opportunities and likely acquisition targets to broaden your portfolio of services - more on this in my day job at NelsonHall.

Links for 2010-12-10 [del.icio.us]

2010-12-11T00:00:00-08:00

Stark Materials Part 4 – the Cell Universe

Stark Materials Part 4 – the Cell Universe

2010-12-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

In this light-hearted post I draw attention to the similarities between cell phones and the daemons in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy!

According to the Sunday Times there is a Bluetooth device available for key rings that screams to alert the user when he/she becomes separated from his/her cell phone by more than a set distance. The distance can be anything from 18 ft to 60 ft. Like the daemons in the Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman, the cell has become an inseparable companion to the human race.
In Pullman’s epic tale of parallel universes, Lyra, the protagonist, lives in a universe where everyone is permanently accompanied by his/her daemon - a part of their soul with a physical manifestation that has the shape of an animal that best represents the person’s character, e.g. Mrs Coulter’s cunning and cruel monkey, Lord Asriel’s powerful snow leopard. Although the daemons have a separate physical form from their human masters, they can not be separated from them by more than a small distance and dire consequences follow if a person is forcefully separated from his/her daemon permanently.
If Lyra was to come into our world, she would find that we too are always accompanied by a thing that has a physical form: the cell phone has become so inseparable from us that we need devices to alert us when we accidentally leave them behind.
Although inanimate objects, the phones provide insight into our souls and character like the daemons in Lyra’s world; through our contacts and our history of social networking, web browsing, search, shopping, entertainment etc. Our personal preferences for cell or smartphone brands, models, styles, colour covers, ring tones and other accessories, provide further insight into our taste and personal preferences.
If Lyra was to come to our universe in a few years time she would find that our daemons have become even more integrated into our being. By then cells will be helping us with everyday decision making and almost give us a sixth sense as demonstrated by Pattie Maes at TED in 2009. If you have any doubts check it out here:
http://bit.ly/hKguoh

Last Chance to Vote in Computer Weekly Blog Awards 2010

2010-10-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

Here is an update on the Computer Weekly Blog Awards:

Voting will end on 15th November - last chance to vote here: http://bit.ly/9jC0Ij - My blog is in the Individual IT Professional - Female category.

More information here:

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogawards

A big thank you to those who have already voted and for your messages of support.

IAIDQ Data Quality Blog Carnival - October 2010

2010-10-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

Each month the IAIDQ (International Association for Information and Data Quality) (@iaidq) asks the data quality blogging community to submit blog posts for the El Festival del IDQ Bloggers. The carnival is hosted by a different blogger each month and I am very proud to be hosting it for October 2010. We have a great community of data quality professionals on Twitter many of whom are also prolific bloggers that contribute regularly to the carnival.
Rich Murnane (@murnane) was the first to submit a post this month. Rich has 14 years experience designing, building and supporting database systems and data management programs. Rich and his team at work are responsible for the collection, processing, monitoring and quality of the company's data. In his submission to the blog carnival this month "Have you filled a data bucket today? ", Rich refers to his children’s favourite book called “Have You Filled a Bucket Today: A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids” to highlight how data quality happiness can be attained with a few steps - including but not limited to "Profile", "Monitor", and "Clean".
Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen (@hlsdk), is a data quality, MDM and data architecture professional who contributes to the data quality community through his blogs, recommendations and tweets. Henrik’s submission this month is “Top 5 Reasons for Downstream Cleansing” in which he writes about downstream data cleansing. In this post, Henrik’s practical approach to data quality shines through.
Jim Harris of the Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality blog (@ocdqblog) is an independent consultant, speaker and writer in data quality and related fields. He is a prolific blogger and tweep who has contributed enormously towards building a data quality community on Twitter over the last couple of years. The first of Jim’s submissions this month is an ode to data quality perfectionists: “To Our Data Perfectionists” – the poem should resonate with all those who wish for: “critical business decisions empowered” “before the organization’s limited money and time are devoured”. Next is “Holistic Data Management (Part 3)” - Jim’s third post in a series where he uses a brain metaphor to "compare and contrast operational and analytical data management as two half-brains designed to work together as a single, integrated whole in one complete data management brain". Jim’s other data quality posts this month include: “There is no such thing as data accuracy...” and finally one of my favourites:“Why isn’t our data quality worse?” in which Jim advocates positive thinking about data quality.

Links for 2010-09-03 [del.icio.us]

2010-09-04T00:00:00-07:00

http://www.datamonitor.com/store/Product/Default.aspx?productid=BFTC2608

Links for 2010-08-14 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-15T00:00:00-07:00

Go with the Flow - Adapting Performance Management in Response to Web 2.0 Trends

Go with the Flow - Adapting Performance Management in Response to Web 2.0 Trends

2010-08-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

In this post I return to my favourite subject of performance management, after a long break since I wrote a major report on the topic. The Internet and Web 2.0 developments such as http://www.data.gov.uk/, and social networking sites such as Facebook, are raising people’s expectations of levels of access to information, of collaboration and participation in whatever is going on. These rising expectations are finding their way into the workplace, and enterprises should take note. Policies should be adapted to allow organisations to go with the flow - to develop a more participative approach to performance management that increases employee engagement. Failure to adapt performance management will simply backfire on the organisation.

There has been much talk about the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies in the context of democratisation of knowledge, freedom of information, social networking and influencing. Another angle to these developments is that people’s expectations are changing; we now expect to find contacts on social networking sites as easily as we can find the information that we need via search engines. We can join internet forums or find groups of people with similar interests to swap notes and share ideas with. More importantly we are learning that our opinions matter, that we can suggest ways to improve public services or contribute to government consultation papers on-line.
The age of accessibility of information and transparency is changing the behaviour of our politicians as well, with the UK Prime minister, David Cameron for example, making himself available for questions from the public in his PM Direct sessions.
Barriers to information are coming down everywhere with sites such as www.data.gov.uk making government information openly available, and WikiLeaks and Twitter providing access to information that would otherwise be hidden from the world (e.g. the Afghan war diary and eye witness reports of violent suppression in many parts of the world).
Change, though, happens very slowly inside enterprises. Employees can be taking full advantage of Web 2.0 technologies at home but, for many the privileges afforded to them by these technologies stop outside the walls of corporate offices. Inside, many face hours of frustration everyday as they struggle to find subject matter experts for specific requirements or an all important piece of business information that eludes them tucked away on somebody else’s hard drive. Most have no interactions with senior managers as executives either do not take part in their enterprise’s social network or if they do, they just stick to interacting with their immediate reports. Most employees have no means of giving the top dog in the company any feedback even though outside the organisation, they can post questions to the top dog in the country, the Prime Minister, via channels on Number 10’s web site. Those top dogs might have different roles but the shifts in expectations and culture affects them both.
The employee frustration continues when they are asked to use a new system that was developed behind closed doors with no effort made by the development team to collect input on requirements from the user community even though a simple wiki could have enabled easy exchange of information on the subject. Every obstacle to smooth working and collaboration takes its toll on good will, making staff increasingly dissatisfied with their work. They become disengaged.
Even in companies where collaboration and enterprise social media software have been deployed there is often a lack of take up because working practices are not updated to take advantage of the newer technology.
One area that can seriously suffer from a lack of communication and the failure of the organisation to engage with staff is performance management. Problems often arise when performance requirements are set in the boardroom without any reference to the teams that have to deliver the requirement. That is the ivory tower syndrome where management can be totally isolated from the workforce. Although there are plenty of enterprise collaboration and social networking software solutions out there, many organisations are still failing to take advantage of these to develop policies that allow staff to get involved and to feel part of the process. Performance indicators that are set without input from the relevant teams can give the wrong impression of what is going on in the organisation. These issues lead to what can only be described as a significant misalignment of business objectives and deliverables, where there is a huge gap between what the management expects and what staff deliver. It also leads to dissatisfaction all round - management with staff and staff with management - and a downward spiral starts that leads to a high turnover of employees and increased costs of recruitment and training of new staff.

Staff expectations and behaviour will continue to be shaped and influenced by their superior web-enabled experiences outside of work. In my view, companies that fail to go with the flow, to adapt their performance management practices to take account of external trends, will find it increasingly difficult to retain staff. The Internet and the Web 2.0 revolution are impacting our work culture whether we like it or not. The technology is out there and it has been adopted by billions of people across the globe. That very same technology can be taken advantage of inside the enterprise to implement more progressive performance management and communications strategies.
Organisations that fail to adapt their corporate performance strategies will face a fate similar to that of the dinosaurs.

Links for 2010-07-30 [del.icio.us]

2010-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

Wanted: a Data Quality Standard for Open Government Data

Wanted: a Data Quality Standard for Open Government Data

2010-07-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

The trend towards transparent government is gathering momentum with more government data being made available to the public. On the UK government’s public data web site, http://www.data.gov.uk/, the option to list all data sets brings back 3714 records as diverse as Treasury data, juvenile re-offending rates and wild bird population. The government has also released the Combined Online Information System (COINS) - the database of UK Government expenditure provided by departments. I think it is great that we are getting access to this information and the move towards transparency is to be encouraged but being a proponent of data quality the first question that comes to mind is what is the quality? What is the source of the data and what data quality procedures are in place around the source system to ensure data accuracy and reliability?
The data sets are one thing - another development is the increase in government requirements for departments to publicly report on performance and on expenditure on an on-going basis. Some of my thoughts on this subject were noted by Computer Weekly in an article called “The technical challenges of increasing transparency through open data” following an interview that I had with Rebecca Thomson (@rebeccats) of Computer Weekly.
Government departments have always had to report on progress and in 2009, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported on its assessment of underlying data systems that were used by eight government departments to report on progress towards Public Service Agreements (PSAs).
The report, "Measuring Up - How good are the Government’s data systems for monitoring performance against Public Service Agreements?” mentions the need for departments to ensure that there is “adequate systems of control to mitigate the risk of significant error in the accuracy of reported data, the specification and operation of the data system and whether Departments have reported results transparently”. It goes on to indicate that whilst progress has been made since the last assessment, there is still room for improvements and refers to a requirement by the Treasury to improve the quality of PSA reporting data in government departments.
There is always a need for transparency in reporting and for proven provenance and quality of data that is being reported, be it for internal government consumption or for the public. The government needs to foster a culture of data quality in the public sector and related practices that get embedded in internal procedures. The transparency increases the pressure on the government to do so. Open and transparent data requires a defined standard for quality with an indicator alongside the data set to show that it has been checked for quality.
There is no time better than now, the dawn of transparent government, to start working on it.

Visualising Data Uncertainty

2009-10-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Given that good data quality is difficult to manage and maintain in organisations, considerations should be given to designing BI reports that either visualise data uncertainty or indicate the margin of error instead of displaying information as being 100% accurate. In this way, decision-makers can be made aware of the risks that they might be taking when acting upon a BI report and be in a position to plan better and manage expectations.

Data quality issues often begin at the point of data entry into a transactional system and find their way into BI applications. Some data quality issues can not be totally eliminated even with a good data quality programme. The main problem is that the operational priorities of the organisation are usually quite different to its analytical requirements. For example, to complete a transaction, a call centre operator might have to complete a form on a sales system, whilst talking to the customer on the telephone. Faced with a long set of fields to complete on the form, the operator is likely to pay careful attention to the fields that are important for the completion of the transaction, e.g. the name and the address of the customer, and not so much attention to the fields that are needed for later analysis of the data e.g. the location of the office in which the operator is based. A long list of options for office locations drops down on the form but the system is slow and the operator accidentally clicks on "Aberdeen" - the first from the drop-down list, as opposed to "Watford", the last option on the list that happens to be where s/he is actually based. The system gets a valid answer but a wrong one that if repeated over a period of time, will show the wrong totals for sales per call centre.

The important thing is to recognise that data quality can be less than perfect and not to delude the organisational-self that there is no possibility of errors in BI reports.

The Bank of England has been using fan charts for many years to indicate the degree of uncertainty in its various reports e.g. the GDP report shown below. It is interesting to note that the fan chart is used to indicate both past and predicted changes in GDP, but the trend is clear and given that, decisions can be made based on this data within the clearly indicated margins of error or levels of uncertainty.

This is a very visual way of indicating data uncertainty but other ways, e.g. simply stating the margin of error, could work too .

Links for 2009-10-26 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

Visualising Data Uncertainty

Search: Next Big Thing for Mobiles

2009-10-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

The adoption of mobile phones to access information and digital content on the web is growing fast, but the mobile search user experience still leaves much to be desired. If mobile search doesn’t see dramatic improvement, it will hinder device sales and delay the advent of what could become a huge market for mobile advertising. Mobile search should be easy and give results focused on answers, not links.

Read the full article here: http://www.telecoms.com/15178/searching-for-the-next-big-thing

Links for 2009-10-13 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-14T00:00:00-07:00

Search: next big thing for mobiles

Links for 2009-06-27 [del.icio.us]

2009-06-28T00:00:00-07:00

I Predict a Riot of Analytics in the Media Sector

I Predict a Riot of Analytics in the Media Sector

2009-06-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

There is much talk of next generation broadband - speeds of 50 Mb/second - becoming generally available. Fast broadband will bring growth in on-demand media downloads, TV viewing on the Internet, games, etc. thereby opening up more opportunities for analytics - a riot of analytics.

We already have Web site visitor data such as: number of visitors, clicks and downloads, traffic sources, map overlays, first time visitors and other visitor trending data such as loyalty, browser capability, language, and more.

In the future we are likely to see other data delivered by analytics applications. For TV and radio programmes that could mean more than just numbers of views/downloads. It could mean detailed data on viewer behaviour such as tuning out from a programme at an advert break, at a particular scene, at the point when an actor entered the scene, or when a presenter started to talk, following a comment, at specific points in the script etc.

This type of highly granular analytics would enable media companies to learn customer behaviour and likes and dislikes really well. It would enable the companies to promote and deliver personalised programmes of entertainment to returning viewers. The advertising could also be customised for the viewer’s taste, with special offers timed to last for short periods of time e.g. whilst a movie is being viewed.

This is just scratching the surface, the possibilities are huge.

Operational Efficiency in the Public Sector

2009-04-30T01:04:00.000-07:00

Here are some of my initial thoughts on the OEP, extracted from a Butler Group OpinionWire published on 29 April 2009:

Last week, in the UK’s annual budget statement, the Chancellor of the Exchequer set out his plans for efficiency savings of UK£15 billion per year across the public sector. The plans include savings of UK£7.2 billion from annual IT and back-office costs. These are significant figures and are going to be taken into account by the Government in departmental settlements. On the face of it the pressure is on the sector to act quickly, but we question if that is likely given the sector’s ongoing commitments and existing programmes for efficiency savings.

Modernisation of public sector services through IT has been going on for some years. The e-Government programme of the early ‘noughties’ led the way, largely through modernisation of front-office systems. Since then the focus has shifted to shared services (Transformational Government) and to business processes such as reducing avoidable contact (The Varney Report and National Indicator 14), that is aimed at making the customer journey through public services a positive and efficient experience. The IT element of the Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP) announced alongside the budget last week takes modernisation to the next level; it increases focus on back-office systems with efficiency gains of UK£4 billion estimated in back-office operations such as Human Resources and Finance. Widespread benchmarking and targeted performance reviews across the public sector are set to drive out inefficiencies, such as a 300% variation in the cost of Human Resources per employee. A further UK£3.2 billion a year of savings is expected to be realised by strengthening IT project governance and transparent scrutiny. This is to be achieved through standardised benchmarks to drive up performance and improve IT procurement.

One of the recommendations of the report is that management information on IT expenditure is fully integrated into departmental processes to be collected on a regular, consistent, and auditable basis. This is to enable public sector IT efficiency to be compared and contrasted to derive efficiencies. However, with only a month to go to the start of the programme, some organisations will be forced into taking a manual, labour-intensive approach to OEP data collection and reporting. Although Performance Management (PM) software is not essential for this kind of reporting, it would be very advantageous in automating an otherwise manual process. Furthermore, without PM it would be very difficult to integrate performance requirements into departmental processes to derive efficiencies at granular levels. According to Datamonitor’s Technology Trends CIO Survey, as of 2008, only 33% of public sector bodies in the UK had invested in PM software. A further 38% were planning to invest in the software in the following six months. Assuming that all of those intentions turned into completed projects, we would still have 29% of organisations without PM software. Moreover, the Datamonitor survey showed that 50% of respondents were planning to invest in this type of software in the next six to 24 months. This implies that some public sector organisations are dissatisfied with existing PM deployments and would be currently engaged in projects to replace them. Therefore, for many, there is still work to be done in this area.

During the e-Government programme of the early 2000’s, local authorities received funding for the modernisation of systems and were required to make annual Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) statements to the Government. That process started as a basic form-filling exercise but over the following couple of years developed into the Electronic Service Delivery Toolkit (esd-toolkit) that semi-automated the process and enabled local authorities to complete their IEG statements online.The esd-toolkit was used to develop standardised service definitions that has further simplified the work of reporting by local authorities and has evolved into a shared services vocabulary. The Cabinet Office is working on standardised metadata that can be used by the whole of the public sector. However, this is work in progress and metadata has to be published and widely adopted before it starts to be of use – and so the automation of reporting across the whole of the public sector has to wait for a while yet.

Another IT issue that the sector faces in the wake of the OEP report is that many have already committed to IT projects that are driven by other Government mandates: e.g., the single view of customer for the NI14 requirement, the National Programme for IT in the National Health Service, and the ID Cards programme in the Home Office. The OEP is a well thought-out and much needed programme but it comes during a tough economic period and after a number of other similar requirements and initiatives (e.g. Transformational Government, the Varney Report, and CSR07).

There is work to be done in preparing for the OEP and achieving its objectives in the way that they are intended but given the public sector’s ongoing commitments, existing efficiency drives, and the proximity of a general election, the OEP is likely to end up largely as a numbers exercise – that is for the short term anyway.

Metadata Standards for Public Services

2009-03-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

Public sector services typically involve inter-organisational collaboration to deliver complete outcomes to customers. So much so that what would appear as a simple request from the customer’s perspective could be a complex process involving a large amount of information crossing organisational boundaries. The processes are seldom automated and often involve the customer having to give the same information to different government bodeis a number of times. In the UK, there is currently a lack of standardised information about services, and accessing information and securely processing related data causes, delays, and inefficiencies. This has led to a new initiative by the Government to eradicate avoidable contact – that is contact with the public sector that adds no value to the service that is being sought by the customer. The move is throwing new light on the importance of semantic clarity for inter-organisational processes. Semantic clarity is needed to help customers find the right information as well as to help the public sector deliver joined-up services . The objectives can be achieved through the standardisation of metadata, data that defines information and services. The metadata would help bring semantic clarity across the board to establish a common service vocabulary to be used in all collaborative service delivery scenarios. Furthermore, metadata is closely linked to processes and where inter-organisational processes are concerned, efficiencies can be gained by integrating and automating those processes. Therefore a standardised metadata can help the public sector with process integration too.

Many public sector bodies have already developed their own metadata standards to use as part of Document and Records Management or Enterprise Search and Retrieval deployments. Therefore, they are familiar with the benefits that standardised metadata can deliver. A common standard for all the public sector would extend the range of benefits; for example, it would enable content to be accurately classified and linked to the standardised metadata so that information could be found more easily and automatically through search and discovery processes across not just one but all government Web sites, delivering a vertical search capability.

It would allow a customer’s request for information, to be linked to detailed electronic content structured around the metadata. Moreover, it would allow the most relevant service being requested by the customer, to be automatically identified regardless of the terminology used and linked to other appropriate services. For example, a request for information on registering a child at a school in the area could be processed irrespective of the wording of the request. It could also automatically link school registration information from the education authority to the free school meal service offered by another local authority such as the district council. Additionally, highly relevant content can be structured around the metadata for use in Frequently Asked Questions, electronic forms, and contact details.

There are already several metadata standards in operation in the UK public sector: e.g. eGovernment Metadata Standard (eGMS) and its subset, Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV). These are in need of updating and are not adequately supported by the sector. Furthermore, they do not have a governance structure, and have gaps and duplications in the definitions. There is also the Local Government Services List (LGSL) that is well supported and widely used and which has communities of practice too, but it is limited to Local Government. The Cabinet Office in the UK is working on developing a broad metadata standard to optimise the use of IT resources in the sector, and to align organisation and IT strategies as part of the Transformational Government agenda. The work is being led by the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Council. The CTO Council has representatives from various central and local government bodies who are jointly working on defining a Cross-Government Enterprise Architecture Reference Model (xGEA). xGEA consists of a number of domains and the metadata work is being carried out as part of the Information Domain by the Metadata and Vocabularies Working Group (MVWG). The group is working on developing the metadata standard, its governance, support, and long-term maintenance. It is also looking at doing proof of concepts on transit formats and mechanisms for sharing information and metadata to determine the easiest ways for interoperability to be achieved across boundaries. However, the metadata development process itself is not well publicised as yet, with the MVWG only just starting to formulate a communication strategy. We look forward to the group going public with its work.

First published in Butler Group Review on 04/06/2008.

Twitter – the New TV?

2009-03-23T05:53:00.000-07:00

Twitter is known for its capability as a public relations and networking channel but the increase in the number of users makes me think that may be there is something bigger afoot. When I saw the latest follower figures for celebrity Twitterati such as Britney Spears (512,712 followers) and Stephen Fry (328,193 followers), it struck me that they have almost as many followers as some TV shows have viewers. To find out how the follower numbers compared with viewer numbers I did a search on the Internet and found some interesting data. For example, on October 2^nd 2008 according to the Guardian newspaper, BBC4, the digital TV channel, had a very successful evening in terms audience figures. It ran a series of programmes on a theme of "the golden age of steam" and pulled in an average audience of 390,000. This is already lower than the number of Britney Spears’ followers and Stephen Fry’s is not far behind. BBC 2’s Never Mind the Buzzcocks, the music panel show (and a cooler programme than anything to do with the railways) on the same evening had 2.2 million viewers which is a lot more than the most followed Twitterati, but this is only the beginning for Twitter. The following charts on Twitter Grader show how the number of Britney Spears’ and Stphen Fry’s followers have increased over the past few months and as you will see if you click on the links, the graphs indicate fast rates of increase for both:

http://twitter.grader.com/history/britneyspears

http://twitter.grader.com/history/stephenfry

If these continue it will not be long before followers of Twitter elite outnumber viewers of mainstream TV programmes. This will increase the pressure on TV channels to compete with Twitter and I expect to see more TV programmes establish a presence on Twitter for publicity. Other developments are likely e.g. we might even see characters from soaps perform on Twitter to compete with the real life drama of its ordinary users. That would have some interesting effects on ratings and advertising.

Despite its success, two uncertainties hang over Twitter: The first is regarding scalability - can it scale up sufficiently to cope with the increase in demand for its services. The “Twitter is over capacity” and “something is technically wrong” messages are starting to appear a little too often again after a smoother run in the last few months. Secondly, the longevity of Twitter is not guaranteed given the market that it operates in has a steady flow of disruptive technologies and concepts.

A year can be a long time on the Web.

Defining IT Strategy in the Public Sector

2009-02-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

This post covers one of my other areas of interest: Public Sector IT. The following is a copy of an article that I wrote for Butler Group Review last year.

The pressures on the Public Sector to do more with less and deliver further efficiency savings are mounting by the day. Many organisations in this sector are grappling with major projects that require software systems and cutting-edge technology just to respond to Government targets, let alone their own on-going business needs that require support and enablement from IT. The need for an IT strategy that tightly aligns the organisational drivers and IT capabilities has never been greater in the public sector than it is today. However, defining an effective strategy that builds a sound foundation for execution of objectives with flexibility can itself be challenging. A well defined and clearly communicated IT strategy would enable the organisation to respond to changing drivers fast and efficiently.Through a good strategy, an organisation would be able to develop its IT infrastructure and business processes to automate core capabilities, from which it can become more flexible and therefore responsive to business requirements. The IT strategy must take into account the aggregate demand on the IT function, including all drivers – internal and external, the current situation (work in progress and on-going commitments), and proposed actions in support of the strategy.This must be factored into the total of available resources and the current programme of work. In this article I will examine each of these areas .

To set the scene we will first look at some of the many drivers that affect the UK public sector, as an example, and thence the need for strategic planning for IT. In terms of funding the sector is required to do more with less, and deliver further efficiency savings. It is also expected to become much more citizen and business centric and implement data sharing on an unprecedented scale to make the customer journey through public services as short and positive an experience as possible. This requires major work on data quality and integration as well as process integration to allow disparate organisations within the sector to deal with the citizen’s requirement in a way that minimises “avoidable contact”.The data sharing requirement has come at a time when a number of high-profile data loss scandals have made the public wary of how the sector treats personal data, thereby pushing data security onto the investment agenda for this sector.There are further pressures from the Transformational Government programme to share services to deliver more efficiency savings, from employees requiring flexible and mobile ways of working, and citizens and businesses demanding improved electronic service delivery channels, and better connectivity. Finally there is a requirement from the Government for professionalism in IT, in skills, project, and programme management. The aggregate of all these requirements is indeed a tall order for any organisation and it is essential that when the objectives are driven from this long list of drivers, they are clearly prioritised and matched to resources and timescales.

The IT strategy should address the following areas:

The vision – This is the aspirations of the IT division for a specific period of time. The vision outlines the role that IT is to play in delivering the corporate objectives, the division’s own overall high-level objectives, and expected levels of performance and efficiency to be attained including Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The high-level objectives – It is important to be clear about the business objectives for IT and the role that the business expects IT to play – the vital aspect is that the expectation is defined and understood at all levels, so that there are clear objectives against which the IT function can deliver.These would be in support of the vision and are in response to internal and external drivers. Examples of the former include the needs of business units, internal customer relationships, and bottom-up drivers arising out of technological advances. Examples of the latter have already been supplied. Often there are overlapping requirements between the drivers. Therefore, the objectives can be defined in a way that links those overlapping drivers and works towards satisfying several of them at the same time, e.g., the external driver to become more customer centric and to deal with customers efficiently can be linked to employees’ demand for flexible and mobile ways of working. Therefore, one objective could be to increase the availability of handheld devices and connectivity for field workers e.g. social workers, so that they could complete their case work in-situ, in the customer’s home rather than both of them having to go to the relevant office to complete the task.

Current situation – This highlights the work in progress and on-going commitments of the IT division e.g. existing SLAs, resource levels, and budgets. It also defines known issues and bottlenecks to highlight the need for action and change, e.g. too many departmental software solutions that add little value but cost the IT Management organisation a lot of time and maintenance effort.

Proposed actions in support of the strategy – These are the key actions, in the form of projects or programmes, that the organisation needs to take in response to the identified and prioritised objectives, e.g. decommission a legacy application in favour of a modern vanilla package, build on existing infrastructure for capacity for increased data storage and/or network traffic, and initiate a data quality and integration programme.When defining the actions, it is important to take into consideration how they affect each other and existing work and resource levels. It is also important to plan with the future in mind and take into account scalability and flexibility. These actions would be managed and controlled using a high-level governance structure and procedures, and a measurement, monitoring, and reporting plan. The strategy should examine at a high level the expected impact and resulting requirements for change, how different parts of IT will be affected by the strategy, e.g. procurement, existing supplier relationships, maintenance and upgrades, and IT operations.

Supporting strategies – The IT strategy defines the high-level goals for all of IT. When documented, it would provide a top-level plan which can then be broken down into more detailed component strategies that address specific areas. An upside down tree structure is produced with the IT strategy at the top and others branching off from it.The lower down the branches you go, the more detail would be provided, until finally leading to project- and programme-related documents that define the implementation of the IT strategy. The areas to be addressed in supporting component strategies include but are not limited to:

desktop; communication and connectivity;
infrastructure; Information Management (IM);
Procurement and Supplier Strategy; Integration
Strategy; and in some organisations,
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Strategy.

Some of these break into further strategies e.g. the IM strategy leads to the data management strategy. To summarise, the IT strategy must tightly align the organisational drivers and IT capabilities. It is important to be clear about the business objectives for IT and the role that the business expects IT to play. It should help the organisation develop a ‘foundation for execution’ that gives the organisation a flexible platform to deliver new business projects rapidly.The IT function should also feed into business strategy based on current and future technologies.

To summarise, the IT strategy must tightly align the organisational drivers and IT capabilities. It is important to be clear about the business objectives for IT and the role that the business expects IT to play. It should help the organisation develop a ‘foundation for execution’ that gives the organisation a flexible platform to deliver new business projects rapidly.The IT function should also feed into business strategy based on current and future technologies.

Why Shared Services are Good News for BI & data integration Vendors

2009-01-03T12:50:00.000-08:00

The Transformational Government initiative in the UK public sector is finally gaining momentum albeit at a slower pace than anticipated. At the heart of it is the concept of shared services, enabled by technology, to derive efficiency savings. The approach to implementation of shared services is evolving on a supplier/customer model - some Government departments or public sector bodies will act as shared services providers to others, for example, for HR, finance, procurement, revenue and benefits (revs & bens) etc. Shared services call for a good deal of reporting and analysis. Therefore, public sector bodies who are looking to become customers of shared services are examining their reporting and analysis requirements to prepare for negotiations with potential service providers. At the same time those who have ambitions to become such providers have started to look at how they can either improve their BI competency or quickly develop a BI capability in order to prepare for delivery of shared services.
Transformational Government may well prove to be the catalyst for wider adoption of BIby the sector. This is good news for BI and data integration vendors. It is also good news for citizens, as the increase in visibility of costs could well give the sector much bigger efficiency savings than it is anticipating.

BI in 2009

2008-12-29T07:11:00.000-08:00

Here is a summary of my predictions for BI in 2009 from the user/customer perspective:

• The emphasis on risk management, greater regulation and therefore proof of compliance will lead to a new impetus for joined-up, consolidated enterprise-wide solutions.
• Those who already have BI will want to do more with it: make better use of it and/or extend it to more users. We are likely to see a surge in take up of BI by business managers who will want to check business facts and figures for themselves rather than rely on others for business intelligence.
• The mood of the world has turned risk-averse. I believe potential BI customers want to have tried and tested solutions and avoid unknown and uncertain propositions unless there are clear and demonstrable benefits, which leads me to my final points:
• Those who do not have BI will look for cost effective ways of gaining the capability: This is good news for Microsoft that has a high market penetration of SQL Server, SharePoint and Excel all with built-in BI capabilities that existing customers can tap into, as well as PerformancePoint that can be added to the stack.
The search for cost effective BI will play well for Open Source BI with first-time BI customers wanting to try it before they buy it. It makes sense as reducing costs is a high priority but nobody wants to lose key skilled staff. Putting tech staff on to a BI prototype using an OSS BI tool provides more options than spending £50k on a package up-front. Those prototypes could well turn into production solutions if they are good enough. Good support and training from OSS BI vendors would make a big difference and help establish the leaders in this sector.
• BI SaaS can gain from the current penny-pinching mood of business. Firstly, there is the success of cloud/hosted CRM which will lead to BI in the cloud becoming more accepted. Then there are opportunities for BI SaaS vendors to provide specific and focused functionality that offer clear and demonstrable benefits e.g. sales management / pipeline analysis. Finally there is an opportunity for BI SaaS vendors to offer additional skills that organisations lack in-house, e.g. analytics skills for hosted fraud loss-prevention.

My “BI Trends in 2009” article (that also covers technology trends)will be published in Butler Group Review journal in February 2009.

More on GreenIT and the financial Crisis

2008-11-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

There is more on this subject on the GreenBiz.com group on LinkedIn.

Will the Credit Crunch lead to a Green IT Crunch?

2008-10-26T03:26:00.000-07:00

I am looking into the effects of the Credit Crunch on Green IT initiatives. Will it set Green IT back by years? My view is that it will – although some basic aspects will be boosted by the need for businesses to cut costs, bigger initiatives, e.g. a change to renewable sources of energy, will be put on hold for the time being.

Opinion amongst my Butler Group colleagues was divided and I would like to hear your views. Would you please take a minute to vote on the subject? Voting buttons are provided in the side panel.

Risk Management in the Financial Sector

2008-10-15T14:23:00.001-07:00

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister (PM), is calling for a global financial risk management system to provide early warning of potential problems to stop the financial meltdown of recent weeks from ever happening again. The system would alert regulators of excessive risk to stop problems turning into a major crisis. In a speech earlier this week, the PM listed a number of issues that contributed to the crisis: money lent at almost no chance of being repaid and then re-packaged and sold on, deep conflicts of interest, excessive risk taking and failure to understand the nature of risks that were being taken on. The PM was certainly not mincing his words and those words raised my interest in the area of risk management in the financial sector which has hitherto been very silo-based. Indeed, to put it in the words of a risk manager contact of mine “it is difficult to join the dots to see the full picture (of risks and liabilities)”.
Even before the financial crisis, risk management systems in the financial sector were providing only a fraction of the value that can be realised with an integrated and consolidated risk management system. Today, any value realised from risk management in recent times, will be wholly overshadowed and lost against the major losses suffered by the sector as a result of the credit crunch. However, enterprise-wide risk management is not all that easy to deploy. One issue is the size of the organisation; major banks, for example, are very large organisations with many divisions each with hundreds of their own systems and it is not easy to deploy a single solution that would provide an enterprise-wide, holistic, and integrated view of all risks. It is therefore common to have departmental management of risks, with silos such as fraud detection, credit risk, operational risk, and so on. These silos are supposed to provide in-depth understanding of each specific risk by using relevant data to underpin any decisions and management information. The drawback is that because they are not joined up, there is no overall view. Another major problem is having a good enough knowledge of the complex operations and packages/instruments that the sector deals with to be able to understand the risks and develop a system to manage them.
Another key stumbling block to effective Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is the lack of co-ordination between the different organisational entities that have responsibilities and tasks related to security and risk. Separately, but related to that, different compliance aspects are dealt with by different departments, and often are not examined for linkages. And finally, some risks continue to get underestimated because companies neglect to consider how risk factors that may in themselves be small could easily add up to something much larger.Although ERM has been around for some time, it is still a concept that needs careful understanding and application to each set of requirements, but has the potential to deliver greater benefit as a strategic whole rather than as the sum of its parts.
I will be covering this topic in more detail in my research for Butler Group.

Actionable Information

2008-08-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a colleague about how organisations can extract the latent value of information that they have. On that subject, I have extracted a couple of paragraphs from an old article of mine called "Actionable Information" written and published in Butler Group Review a while ago:

"Problem solving and decision making are an everyday part of business and consume much of a manager’s time. However, decision making in the complex world of business today is not easy. There are often complicated links between situations in different departments that lead to problems that have to be resolved, but resolution cannot be achieved easily due to a lack of pertinent information. This type of situation often results in an urgent information gathering exercise that can be very time consuming, and lead to an inadequate outcome. One of the major problems with gathering information only when a problem has been identified is that it leaves companies exposed to risks in terms of timeliness of decisions and speed of problem resolution.

Many companies invest in Business Intelligence (BI) software to gather and share information continuously. BI should enable organisations to first of all identify problems early, have pertinent information at hand for decision support, and then monitor the outcome of the chosen course of action. However, the output from BI tools has limited value unless the information provided is actionable – that is, it makes it easy for the recipient to take an appropriate course of action based on the results presented.

Actionable information is data whose latent value has been extracted and put into context, and compared with other data elements in order that it then portrays information. Extracting valuable business information (actionable information) from stored data should be the prime objective for BI deployments, to lead directly to business benefits and better outcomes.
The output from the system must be reliable and in context, combined from multiple sources, and delivered at the right time. The information must not be viewed in isolation, but in relation to other variables, and to historic data and predicted trends. Actionable information is easy to assimilate and share, enabling discussion and collaboration with colleagues. Reliability is very important to give users confidence to take action on the basis of the results delivered. "

BI in the Public Sector

2008-07-09T01:19:00.000-07:00

Recent research by Datamonitor reveals interesting information about BI in the public sector. Enterprise and analytic Business Intelligence software revenue opportunities are expected to grow by double digits in the sector from 2007 to 2012 CAGR. BI investment in the public sector has been behind others in terms of existing BI deployments; it was only last year that I wrote about my findings into the use of BI in the public sector. The findings were based on my analysis of the results of various Datamonitor surveys from 2006 and revealed that the sector was missing out on the benefits of BI with only half as many deployments as the private sector. The outlook for planned investment was equally low for the following two years. Going by this year's forecasts it seems that the penny has dropped (or more likely is still dropping) with regards to BI.
The reason for the expected growth in BI spending is the pressure to modernise public services to reduce costs, build capacity, increase efficiency and quality of service - in other words do more with less. In the UK for example, there have been numerous reviews and targets set for the public sector from joined-up policing, to large scale standardisation of IT in the NHS and single notification of change of circumstance across local and central government departments. These are major exercises in change. The latter alone has many complex requirements including single views of citizens, data sharing/integration and process harmonisation if not integration. It would first require a single view of citizen within each public sector body/department before the data could be shared with others, something that is not widely available in the sector yet. None of these are easy given the organisational stovepipes that form the public sector. BI technologies can play an important part in many aspects of the modernisation. I intend to cover these topics in more detail in my Butler Group articles in the next few months.

Cognos Running on System z – What next for BI?

2008-07-01T01:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday IBM Cognos announced the availability of Cognos on Linux on System z. This was expected after IBM took over Cognos but the speed of its implementation is interesting. The mainframe is going through something of a renaissance and the move by IBM is to help bring on the age of mainframe enlightenment. The timing is good as growing data volumes especially in mission-critical, high-volume transactional environments such as financial services demand more processing and storage - IBM has promoted analysis of information on demand in operational scenarios e.g. for transaction optimisation. Although I do not have any details on Cognos on System z at the moment, I expect that adding one of the leading Business Intelligence solutions to System z would appeal to IBM’s mainframe users.
Business Intelligence environments are also growing and data warehouses are getting bigger. System z is a key part of IBM’s dynamic data warehousing strategy and its pre-packaged data warehouse, the Balanced Configuration Unit (BCU). The announcement did not make any references to those but as and when it becomes available, Cognos on the same platform can potentially reduce a lot of complexity.
Another angle to consider is the market for BI in the cloud. Although some vendors are experiencing low levels of interest in this mode of software delivery, others report significant growth e.g. SAS and BI-based risk analytics. The rebirth of the mainframe could come at the right time to take advantage of cloud computing.
Finally virtualisation is gaining a lot of momentum in all its guises and is available on System z. This could lead to some interesting developments in BI. I will be watching this space with interest.

Business Intelligence Going Down the Drain

2008-05-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

The British Government’s lack of up-to-date population figures hit the headlines again last week. The out of date figures have led to inadequate funding of services for many Local Authorities (LAs). Funding is based on estimated number of residents per LA but the problem is that since the last national census, the population has increased a lot due to high levels of immigration following the expansion of the European Union. In an effort to get more money out of central government, some LAs have examined data from a variety of sources at their disposal: CRM systems, council tax and housing benefits software, the register of electors, also changes in the number of children attending local schools, and the number of people newly registered at doctor’s surgeries. However, all of these have limitations and fail to reveal the true picture e.g. council tax is typically paid by the main breadwinner and does not indicate how many people live in a house, the register of electors does not include children, and young and fit twenty something year olds from eastern Europe seldom need doctor’s appointments. To gain a more accurate measure for the increase in population, some LAs have even resorted to looking at increases in the levels of raw sewage – that is literally shite for BI!

This is a classic problem of not having the right data to make the right decisions. Intelligence from the 10 yearly census goes out of date very quickly and clearly the established model for estimating figures for the future does not take into account external factors (high levels of immigration). An even bigger problem is that there is no standard metadata to enable central and local government to share business intelligence to arrive at the right figures – no standardised metadata for citizen, resident, occupancy, etc. If you have not defined it, you can not measure it and if you can not measure it you end up with problems (the least of which is a number of court cases by LAs to get more money).
The CTO Council (a part of the Cabinet Office) is working on a metadata standard for the public sector but how far that will extend and to what level of detail remains to be seen.