Category: General

Mention the term blockchain in IT circles and you may still come up with blank looks. Perhaps it’s the bitcoin background or the faint whiff of hacking that comes with non government sanctioned cryptography, but blockchain doesn’t seem to have hit the coal face of business computing in a meaningful way yet. But, think back a generation and the whole distributed network concept was out of reach of the average person, now we browse, communicate and transact over the ether from pocketable devices.

There are some aspects of IT that remain monolithic: banking and other sectors that hold personal, private, big data still remain as non distributed (in the internet sense) single repositories of information and trust. It is that trust aspect that enforces the monolithic nature of the data – you’ve got to place your data with someone or some organisation whom you trust completely.

But what if trust could be distributed? What if we could verify authenticity of data outside of those monolithic institutions? Wouldn’t that truly revolutionise our data storage and transactions? Blockchain is the technology that will allow this to happen. It already underpins bitcoin, allowing for a distributed trust mechanism for this digital currency.

The major banks and technology companies are already actively looking at what blockchain can do for them. For those of us involved in IT, particularly in consulting to business, now is the time to start reading up on this technology. The distribution of trust is coming our way, and understanding it now will help us advise our business clients on what it will mean for them.

A Strategist’s Guide to Blockchain

BBC – Blockchain Tech and Business

Wired – The Renaissance of Money

Recode – What is Blockchain and why should you care?

Welcome to 2016, the year after the Back to the Future future. What’s in it for business IT? What are the trends and issues that we are facing, what are the benefits brought by the latest technology?

I’m still firmly convinced that the migration to the cloud will continue. For the startup it’s the quickest way to corporate quality tools for your business – only need a couple of email addresses, then why pay for a server that will handle hundreds? Use a cloud provider that scales all the way up but only charges for what you use. Online collaboration is becoming the norm, cloud computing allows this to come to the fore – use Google Hangouts or Skype to make that transatlantic call – or a local one.

Storage is still the weak point of cloud computing – it’s a matter of how fast you can get that information up there, or back down. One option is to use online tools to create those documents, then nothing needs to be downloaded. With larger files, such as images or video, then it may be that a local cached storage device will give you the best of both worlds. Remember that cloud providers have a much better chance of keeping your data safe than you do.

At the other end of the scale cloud computing can provide cost and management savings by doing away with the endless hardware upgrade cycle – management, backup, disaster recovery all becomes much more simple, and easy to budget for with monthly payments according to user count.

Whatever the size of your company, what do you think are the benefits of cloud computing?

Interested in taking your business collaboration and communications to a more professional level? Consider Google Apps for Work as the simple solution for the business startup or SME.

One of the great things about modern web design is that it can be as complex or as simple as you like. Web sites are complex – HTML, CSS, Javascript and a host of other technologies mean that hand crafting a web site is a highly skilled and time consuming business. But for those who don’t need to build from scratch and understand how the bigger blocks fit together it takes very little time to put together a functional and effective web site. WordPress is probably the go to application in this respect for the smaller end of the SME market and for not for profits.

Having moved over to Northern Ireland and to Crumlin Baptist Church I realised that they didn’t have a web site or even a domain name. Having the infrastructure already in place it was a straightforward matter to register the domain and create a simple WordPress site. Now that it’s up and running, control over the content can be delegated to the actual users.

We all know what we need when we start a new project – that’s why we start it! Or do we?

Just because we have identified a problem or an opportunity to improve a process or piece of software doesn’t mean that we see all the issues or all of the requirements. It may seem obvious, but we can easily jump to defining the problem or the solution before we’ve determined the stakeholders.

I have a confession: when I think of the word stakeholder I have an image in my head of a Buffy type character about to stick a pointy stick into someone! That’s a good image to have, because stakeholders who are ignored in a project can come back to bite you (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor)!

The forgotten Stakeholder

The most commonly forgotten stakeholder, and coincidentally the one with the longest memory is the end user. We know that there are business process experts, programmers, project managers and a whole host of experts, but no-one knows the ins, outs and quirks of your business systems like the end users!

In most business processes that have been around for more than a year or two there are tips and tricks, fixes and work arounds that never get beyond the end user – unless someone asks. These are often show stoppers when a new or improved process is considered. If there is a particular feature that is used daily, but unknown by the project experts then that is the one feature that the end users will complain about post implementation (pun definitely intended).

Search out the Stakeholders

The first order of business, therefore for any project is to search out all the stakeholders – not just the ones who have a perceived expertise in the production of the new or improved process, but the workers at the coal face, the end users who know the process because they use it daily. The problem with unknown stakeholders is just this: they are unknown. The only solution is to cast your net far and wide at the outset of any project. It’s much better to have someone say ‘no, I’m not involved with that’ than to have them complain about lack of input after the fact.

Redefine the problem if necessary

Once you have cast your net and identified all the genuine stakeholders you can then begin to remap the process. You will inevitably find that there are differences between the theoretical process and the actual. All these modifications to the originally defined process must be included in the process definition before moving on to consider the direction of the project.

Happy Holders

If you conduct this pre-project discovery process fully you will find that your project will have a smoother ride to completion. You will also find that the stakeholders will have acquired a sense of ownership that not only makes them happier about the project, but, because of the sense of ownership will also have a vested interest in the project’s success. Being a stakeholder, therefore, is a two edged sword – it can work against the project manager if he has failed to cast his net wide enough, but for the savvy project manager who has included everyone  all these stakeholders in the project will have a determination to see the project succeed.