I was recently invited by Drapers magazine – the retail fashion industry bible – to comment on what UK fashion retailers are doing with mobile technology. To be honest, I struggled to think of genuinely innovative activity that put customers – not the product, brand or retailer –  first, certainly in the UK. If you check out the Neiman Marcus ‘Service’ app   you will see something that genuinely helps customers and staff, delivering a better customer service experience. Let me know if you have seen any ambitious use of mobile technology in current UK fashion retail that actually puts customer need first – all comments welcome”. Please see my article below.

Drapers Mobile Fashion article

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

This year, we’re bringing back EMC Forum to the UK and Ireland. This essential one-day event shows you how cloud and Big Data are transforming our industry — and how you can transform your business to stay competitive.

At EMC Forum you can learn, connect and network. You will hear local and international insights from high calibre keynote speakers and presenters, and case studies featuring the latest integrated solutions from EMC and our partners. A hand-picked selection of partners, such as Cisco, Computacenter and MTI, will be exhibiting their products, and our VLab will offer technical training from EMC engineers.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the latest solutions, products and services direct from EMC specialists and partners, network with the EMC Community and
discover our vision for the future. 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

The financial services sector continues to be headline news for all the wrong reasons. We’ve had the banking crisis, government bailouts, rate fixing allegations and huge outages of IT systems impacting customers, some of which have rumbled on for days or even weeks.

While all this has been going on the regulators have been encouraging the banks to increase their capital holdings, while also increasing their lending to try and stimulate the economy. The Governor of the Bank of England went so far as to suggest organisations increase their capital holdings by not paying dividends Continue Reading

Last week I found myself doing some analysis around how I spend my time and established that I spend over 70% of my time on customer related topics – either direct customer meetings or preparing for them or doing follow ups based on the conversations. So, that was the good news, but the data also showed that I am not a prolific blogger – although I didn’t need to look at data to know that: My absence from the Thought Feast site since January says it all! So I apologise for that. I’d make a New Year’s Continue Reading

Greetings from a hot Las Vegas!  Lady Backup traveled thousands of miles and many time zones to join 15,000 of my closest friends for EMC World 2012.

This is my 7^th EMC World and in the time I’ve attended, the show has gone through lots of change.  It’s not just the number of attendees – which is 10x more today compared with the first EMC World 11 years ago.  There is also a feeling that people are looking for change.  Continue Reading

This week I was invited to attend a multi-supplier strategy workshop with one of our clients.  The purpose of the workshop was to look at their future storage strategy and all the major industry vendors  were there to present. This style of workshop provides clients the ability to see consistencies and opinions from each supplier. When it was my turn to present , I decided to push things a bit and discuss how sourcing storage and technology would change in the next 5 years.  I started by suggesting that come 2017 the major vendors will not be selling hardware. This may seem a bit of a ridical theory, but by how much? If you follow my reasoning to come perhaps this statement Continue Reading

As part of my day job I regularly come across a wide range of multi-disciplined individuals who all have skills and experiences that I can only hope to one day match. They come from all sorts of backgrounds and have a plethora of views and visions of not only the end game but also the approach needed to ensure a successful implementation of the holistic IT department of the future.

Through their enthusiasm and desire to ‘fix’ legacy IT they sometimes fail to recognise that they are all working towards the same end goal, that in fact by working together and learning from each other and taking the best aspects of each others frameworks, definitions, libraries and experiences we can deliver true Cloud Computing solutions. The IT industry is maturing and we have a number of proven techniques to ensure that we meet business requirements, address operational processes and deliver robust solutions.

It is only now as part of Cloud Computing are we seeing many of these come together. Cloud Computing is not only a set technologies, or just some service management, process re-engineering, high level architecture definitions or Infrastructure delivered on-demand to meet your businesses IT processing requirements.

Cloud Computing is all of these any more.

More and more business leaders are understanding the financial benefits that can be delivered by leveraging Cloud Computing. IT Consultants, Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s), Value Added Resellers (VAR’s) and Systems Integrators (SI’s) are beginning to comprehend the technical, service and operational aspects of Cloud Computing. Cloud based software companies are becoming synonymous with Cloud Computing and when discussing business application strategies share a common ground with legacy vendors.

When a business is setting it’s IT (or Cloud) Strategy it needs to understand the benefits and risks associated with the Private and Public Cloud models. Where should it look to provision business services from in terms of data security, reliability, Continue Reading