Programmer’s Log Programmers Writing Stuff – Garry Bodsworth

Upcoming Cambridge Talks – Why Can’t IT Projects be insured?

Another month, another BCS SPA talk. The next SPA Cambridge meeting will take place on Wednesday 14th January at Microsoft Research Centre, Cambridge.

Why Can't IT Projects be insured?
Graham Oakes
January 14th 2009, 7:00pm (light buffet) 7:30pm (talk)
Venue: Microsoft Research Centre Cambridge

Synopsis:

Many organisations, especially small to medium businesses and public sector bodies, are failing to initiate valuable projects. They read statistics such as the Chaos Reports and get scared of the risks of project failure. They talk to IT companies and get confused by the technical jargon. They don't trust the consultancy industry to help them navigate this maze. So they don't initiate projects that might actually deliver a lot of value. Or if they do initiate projects, they bound them with such tight "risk mitigation" practices - heavyweight procurement processes, long contractual negotiations, burdensome project oversight structures - that an atmosphere of mistrust and bureaucracy is built in from the outset. This, perversely, increases the risk of failure even further, creating the conditions for an escalating "cycle of mistrust".

This mistrust hurts all of us. Organisations are forgoing potential benefits. Developers are forgoing potential work. Or if we do get work, it's set up for failure from the outset.

In the film industry, insurance is used to mitigate some of this mistrust. Independent film producers often need to arrange "completion bonds" in order to obtain financing for their films. These are effectively insurance policies that projects will deliver on time and on budget. The financier pays a premium to an independent third party (the guarantor), who then monitors the project and ensures it stays on track. And if it doesn't, then the guarantor repays the original financing.

Could this work for IT projects? This talk will look at the role of the guarantor, and the way they might help break the cycle of mistrust in many of our current IT projects. I don't have definitive answers, but I do have some thoughts and many questions, so I hope we'll have an interesting discussion.

Graham Oakes

Graham Oakes helps people untangle complex technology, relationships, processes and governance. As an independent consultant, he helps organisations such as Sony Computer Entertainment, The Open University, the Council of Europe and the Port of Dover to define strategy, initiate projects and hence run those projects effectively. Prior to going independent, he was Director of Technology at Sapient Limited, where he ran the project review process for the UK Business Unit. Before that he was Head of Project Management for Psygnosis Ltd (a subsidiary of Sony), where he ran Independent Project Assurance teams working across the UK, Europe and the USA. His book "Project Reviews, Assurance and Governance" was published by Gower in October, 2008.

Please preregister at:
http://www.bcs-spa.org/cgi-bin/view/SPA/WhyCantITProjectsBeInsured

Recent Cambridge Talks

I've been a bit lax recently so I thought I'd do a whistlestop tour of the talks I've been to over the past month.

Tim Campbell - Cambridge Business Lectures
Covered a lot of ground up from his start in business, through the Apprentice, up to his current venture. What you can tell from his talk is that he is doing what he wants to do now rather than what is expected of him. His current venture is a registered charity that helps young people start up business mainly if they are from disadvantaged backgrounds. I must admit business oriented talks don't really do it for me and this was no exception because it always ends up being about the bottom line.

When Good Architecture Goes Bad - BCS SPA Cambridge
For the restart of the Cambridge BCS SPA meetings we have Mark Dalgarno's talk. I've attended this one before. The talk is an interactive session where you have to spot architectural decay and how to stem it and possible reverse it. It's a good session for getting to know your fellow attendees as well.

Model Driven Development and Software Product Lines - Software East
There were two talks for the fee here. First up there was Danilo Beuche - Get started with Software Product Lines. This covered the theory behind building up a software product line and also showed some of the tool that is used to manage it through Eclipse. It is much more relevant for companies with many products all containing small variations. The second talk was Steven Kelly - Moving from Coding to Model-Driven Development. This was the stronger of the two talks. The way I read it was that it is a large layer of abstraction to improve productivity and to ower thebarrier for entry for solving problems in the problem domain. The examples mainly involve diagrams (or UML) for it but I think a good DSL would do the trick as well.

Liquavista - CHASE Cambridge
This was a talk about new monitor technology company and how you bring technology to market. It was about using electrowetting to make reflective displays (rather than the current backlit world). If the technology does take off you will get cheaper displays and lower power displays. They are currently pushing out actual product in watches in order to have something on the market rather than simply relying on being a technology and licensing company with no released product.

Upcoming there is Visual Studio Extensibility: Extend Your Development Experience.

Upcoming Cambridge Talks

It has been a while since I have said anything about upcoming talks in Cambridge.

The original Apprentice is coming to town - Cambridge Business Lectures
10th November 2008 5.30pm

Tim Campbell, the winner of the first series of The Apprentice, is coming to Cambridge. Tim will talking on “Much sugar is a good thing: the power of mentoring”.

Tim stands out from other Apprentice contestants - and winners - as being a man of substance and depth as well as charisma. Since leaving Amstrad, he’s set up two ventures. Most recently, his Bright Ideas Trust gives advice and funding to young people to help them get their ideas off the ground.

Tim will be talking at Robinson College, Cambridge at 5:30pm on Monday November 10th. The event is free, but you need to book a place.

I'm really interested to see what life after what essentially amounts to a "reaity" TV programme is like, because it sounds like he has accomplished some really good things. Unfortunately his era at Amstrad was recent so I guess no questions about the CPC464...

Software East
20th November 2008 7pm

There are two speakers for this event:

• Steven Kelly - Moving from Coding to Model-Driven Development
• Danilo Beuche - Get started with Software Product Lines - Key success factors and what to avoid

The cost of this event is £15 which includes light buffet.

Cory Doctorow Talk In Cambridge

This evening I attended a Cory Doctorow talk in Cambridge hosted by Cambridge Business Lectures. The lecture being about:

Cory Doctorow on Life in the Information Economy

We made a bet, some decades ago, that the information economy would be based on buying and selling (and hence restricting copying of) information. We were totally, 100 percent wrong, and now the world’s in turmoil because of it. What does a copy-native economy look like? How do everyone from barbers to musicians become richer, more fulfilled and more civilly engaged in a real information society. And what do we do about the fact that a couple of dinosauric entertainment companies are determined to screw it up?

Cory Doctorow is a blogger, science fiction writer and journalist. He is an editor of Boing Boing, the 11th best blog in the world (according to Time Magazine). He was the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He founded the software company Opencola which was later sold to the Open Text Corporation. He also writes regularly for The Guardian newspaper

All I can say is "Wow". I've never heard anyone speak so fast for so long with so much content. In an hour he covered DRM, three strikes and your out, criminalisation of the customer, and much more. He concentrated also on the strengths of the Internet and not fighting against them one of which being the ability to form strong groups.

The best part is that he offers solutions not just problems, even his own content he generates, blogs, lectures, books, graphic novels, is available under Creative Commons. In the question and answers session he provide excellent answers, especially about software developers in this brave new world.

There was so much content that I think it is going to take a few days for my brain to process it all...

I'm pretty sure there will be a video or audio file available online soon so I will update this post with that link then. In the meantime here is a link to his graphic novel featuring adaptations of his short stories available for free.