Government ICT 2013 – Part 2

(For part 1 click here)

The Government ICT 2013 Conference was completed with equal gusto by Mike Bracken, who admitted hot footing it up Whitehall to be at the QEII centre in time to give a dynamic and challenging insight into the Government’s drive to deliver digital by default.  His four key objectives as leader of the Government Digital Service are:  the creation of the Government Digital Service (now complete), fixing Government’s online publication of information by building a Continue Reading

The Government ICT Conference 2013 in the QEII Conference Centre kicked off the event season with traditional gusto and the key themes were focused on delivering change, supporting the Government’s reform agenda and enabling the delivery of more efficient public services.  All worthy themes but the core challenge still seems Continue Reading

Like many many proud parents I am sure the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will treasure their first picture of their unborn baby. Medical images such as these are stored across the globe by hospitals as part of the ever growing patient record databases. You will regularly read blogs about the use of data deduplication to reduce the amount of data stored and transmitted, however patient records is one area where deduplication seldom helps. As an example and in no connection to the Duke and Duchess except by name, the Cambridge University Hospital in the UK has been using EMC Centera for a number of years to store such data.

Many hospitals now find that storing this data can be a major obstacle  while EMC Centera can store this data perfectly well, few hospitals have the data centre space to dedicate to such arrays. ESG research in 2011 indicated in North America that total storage Continue Reading

 Lady Backup is a stickler for tidy work, both grammar and formatting.  My employees can vouch for the amount of corrections and comments I make to everything that passes my desk.  So of course dotting every “i” is critical…

But in the case of retailer Arcadia Group, they removed tape in the backup of their IBM i environments.  These systems run the supply chain applications, along with other mission critical applications – in other words they supply the lifeblood data.

Acardia’s IT staff was finding that their tape-based backup Continue Reading

I’ve just spent the last few days as the guest of the New Frontier Group as one of the keynote speakers at their CEO retreat in Austria. The theme of the event was “Shaping Future – Delivering Results”. The two day session was designed to stimulate the attendees thought processes in relation to business innovation.

New Frontier assembled one of the most impressive set of business thinkers I have seen in the last few years. Knell Nordstrom from Finland, the author of “Funky Business Continue Reading

It seems now as a consumer you are presented with a vast array of solutions in which to store your data. Pat Gelsinger spoke this week of a desire for VMware to become the “Apple of the data centre”, running all your applications and databases in a virtualised environment. This could be either in your own data centre or one of the many hosted now available for use by any size of organisation. And what about all this data, according to IDC data volumes will continue to double every two years, giving you possibly, a  Continue Reading

There is a well known quote – originally from author Rita Mae Brown, but often incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein, that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.”

So given the notoriety of this quote, why do so many organisations choose to ignore it when it comes to their approach to IT technology and how they go about sourcing it? Time and time again I get asked to meet customers to talk about their “Transformation” or we receive Requests for Proposal (RFP’s) that focus solely on a technology refresh without consideration of  business outcomes . Their focus is all about the technology being cheaper and faster and not about business benefits; the closest thing they get to a business outcome is a desire for the technology to be “greener”. Often when exploring their desired outcomes I find they haven’t included the business in the process – either in the definition of success or the decision-making and don’t appreciate the value of doing so.

Continuing to just buy some technology and expect it to make a material difference to the company is exactly what I think Rita Mae Brown would have defined as insanity. Technology alone won’t transform an organisation. Process changes need to be made to reflect the benefits the technology can bring; the server build Continue Reading

In my last article I suggested that regulation of the financial sector should be looking beyond the balance sheets of organisations and ensuring that their IT is being run in line with good practice and that undue risk isn’t being taken. Clearly I am not the only one with this train of thought. Just days after that post we have Continue Reading

There is  a lot of truth in the adage of what I was taught in the RAF and what has stayed with me in the form of the ‘5 Ps’ – previous planning prevents poor performance, and the work over the past 7 years that has gone into delivering and securing the Digital Olympics is a great example.

The core digital infrastructure, much of which was locked down months ago, has been relentlessly tested to ensure it can cope with the huge demand placed on it during the 17 days of the Summer Olympics and 12 days of the Paralympics.  Organisers of the London 2012 games are confident that the investment in testing the vast array of IT infrastructure and equipment deployed across London and the Olympic venues, and recovery processes in the case of a major cyber attack, will pay dividends.

With all this data flashing around the networks it is hard to visualise Continue Reading

So what do the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN and the announcement that scientists may have found the Higgs boson  particle have to do with the challenges faced by the UK Government and their drive to achieve savings?  The answer is ‘Big Data’ and the drive to develop new data analytic methods based on the manipulation of huge amounts of data.

The availability of affordable compute power and new platforms such as Hadoop and Greenplum HD designed specifically for big data analytics across unstructured datasets has changed the landscape of scientific research and will ultimately have a similar effect on public sector capabilities.  But the question is – how long will it take before Government leaders recognise the opportunity and act?

It is also worth noting that I believe that many people in Government find it hard to differentiate between the fundamental concept of ‘Big Data’ and the largely politically driven objective of ‘Open Data’.  But in the context of this blog post it may be worth holding this thought for a later article.

So how large is the big data challenge faced by CERN?  Well, apparently this year the LHC experiments will generate 22 Petabytes of data and that’s after 99% of the data from the experiments has been tossed.   That’s a big number with 15 noughts (a million gigabytes) and a big data challenge.

However, although it seems a big number, it is also comparable in size to data held by a number of UK public sector organisations.

But in many instances, the data held by Government is not considered a raw resource in the same way as CERN treats the data from the LHC.  CERN have focused on exploiting this data to complete humanity’s understanding of the standard model of physics and the latest development in our knowledge of the fabric of the universe.  The UK public sector probably doesn’t have such a profound rationale for exploiting big data but it still has a choice – it can either develop a strategy to exploit the value of the data it currently holds and make a real difference to public administration, services and outcomes or continue to cocoon the data it holds in costly retention practices missing the opportunity to achieve big savings.

So how big are the potential savings?  In a report released by Policy Exchange on ‘The Big Data Opportunity’ they estimate that ‘achieving cutting-edge performance could in time save the public sector up to £16 billion to £33 billion a year – equivalent to £250 to £500 per head of the population ‘.

So pretty substantial and an opportunity not to be missed!