Todays talk was by Jerry Fishenden who has a huge amount of experience in IT, having been head of technology for Microsoft, Head of IT for the NHS, Lead Project Manager on the original Government Gateway project, Head of IT at the FSA, and most recently advising the government on IT development in the UK.
Jerry had a lot of interesting things to day on the way in which we develop IT, but what stood out for me was that long term IT projects always look different by the time you have finished them. They are conceived with one purpose in mind, and in a environment that is known at the outset, however, as the project develops the purpose of the system often changes and the environment it will operate in always does. This means that you are developing a system that won’t be what you expect it to be when you first start planning it.
Jerry is working on a methodology for the government that takes this into account at the outset to hopefully ensure that more projects are delivered successfully.
Today we discussed innovation models and the methods of classification.
We talked about Schumpeter, Tidd, Abernathy and Clark, Utterback, Trott and Wiley. Each with their own perspective on how to classify, categorise and grade different types of innovation. As we discussed the models that each of them has developed over the last 100 years or so, it became clear that they didnt quite fit, that no model covered all scenarios.
I think it is pretty easy to say that by its definition innovation is new, and classifying new things is always going to be difficult…they are new, and not like anything else, so how can they be categorised with things that have gone before.
That said, its seems to be a one way categoristion anyway. Its possible to try and squeeze an existing innovation into a category model….but how can you use those models to try and innovate….i’m not sure that you can, so what practical use are they? …I suppose that anything that gets the thinking process started is a good start though.
We had a very interesting lecture from Duska today regarding the way in which humans interact with each other, with technology, and how we use technology to interact with each other.
She talked about the way in which studying how we communicate with technology, has actually led us to understand more about the way in which we communicate with each other.
A few abbreviations were brought into the discussion:-
- CMC – Computer-Mediated Communication
- CSCW – Computer Supported Collaborative Working
- HCI – Human Computer Interaction
It was emphasized that understanding communication, let alone communication enabled or assisted through technology, was a complicated and diverse field.
One thing that Duska did mention was the complexity of human cognitive behaviour and that made me thing about the really, really, weird McGurk effect :-
After the lecture we did a couple of workshop excercises with Jo and Yasamen that highlighted the complex way in which we communicate.
Eye contact, hand gestures, body language, laughing and the need for feedback and reassurance are all important in effective conversations, and when technology stifles any of these elements the conversations become less effective.
We have finally decided upon a project and are ready to start….hopefully.
Our project overview has gone to Simon and we wait for a reply.
Today was our first with Dr Kostas Stathis
In this session we were given an introduction to Database technologies and structures. We talked about the need for databases, their proliferation in all aspects of organisations and their types.
The course is split into two sections – 6-7 weeks of 3 hour lectures, then a group project that lasts 3 weeks.
I think this diagram was intended to sum up what we were going to learn…
So far it all makes sense – fingers crossed that lasts all the way through.
The new term begins with a new course…People and Technology…and a new lecturer, Professor Duska Rosenberg.
Duska spent the session introducing us to the course and outlining what would be covered in each session.
We were also introduced to her two assistants – Yasamen & Joe.
We have some reading to do before next weeks class – iCOM – Interactions, Technology and Organizational Change.
Today’s guest speaker was Ben Booth of Ipsos. Ben has had an interesting career, starting as an Archaeologist, he then worked in museums, before making the transition into IT.
Ben is now the CIO for Ipsos, a global market research company, and leads the strategy for all IT solutions. As a company with operations in 66 countries, the IT team at Ipsos is substantial. A team of 310 IT staff, managing an expense budget of €35M, support around 10,500 users.
What was very suprising, and unusual, for a company of this size is that they do not have a dedicated sales team, instead they rely on their researchers to establish a relationship with their customers where incremental projects are routinely discussed, proposed and agreed. Ben likened it to the way in which an accountant or solicitor would operate, and evidenced by their continuous growth, it works very well for them.
During our conversation with Ben we discussed the challenges of managing an organisation that grows through acquisition, and the way in which change is managed from an IT perspective. Ipsos take a staged view of the process where there are essential elements such as desktop, OS and security which must immediately be brought into line. They then focus on the financial systems being used, migrating to a common platform as soon as possible, but taking a cautious approach. Lastly, they review the enterprise class systems being used and judge each case on its own merits as to replace or age out. Overall they do this very slowly, too slowly in Ben’s view, but always conscious of managing the change process contructively without jeopardising the value of the business they have acquired.
Today we had a very interesting session on security and encryption.
We started by talking through simple Caeser Ciphers where each letter of the alphabet is replaced with another, a fixed number of characters down the alphabet. A type of this used to be widely used online to disguise text and was called ROT13 (rotate by 13)
ROT13 would be used to hide the punchline to jokes such as this…
Q: What do you call a blonde that dyes her hair brunette?
N: Negvsvpvny vagryyrtrapr
After Caser Ciphers we talked about symmetric ciphers and block ciphers before talking about public/private shared keys. This was a particularly complicated subject and only really made sense after some reading. Essentially, if a chunk of data is encypted with a public key, only its associated private key can unencrypt it.
At first this does not make sense as you would think that by just reversing what you had done with the public key, you would get back the original data, so anyone could use the public key to unencypyt. However, the encyption algorithm includes modular functions that aren’t reversible, and are all bound up within the magic of very long prime numbers.
We then talked about cryptographic Hash Codes such as MD5, and finished by discussing digital signatures.
Filed under: BI5621: IS Design, Development & Management, Everything & Anything
Today we talked about the fact that software engineering is part of a larger engineering process and happens within the context of a total environment, not just the engineering environment.
One of the first slides that was presented was the Sociotechnical Systems Stack..
The stack illustrates that the engineering process in itself is effected by other factors within the organisation and society as a whole. It also emphasises that the software engineering process is surrounded by other engineering processes, at times interdependant, and all directly effecting the success of the overall system…
It was emphasised that in all these areas, people were a key component, and unlike digital systems, people can be non deterministic….they don’t always do the same thing, given the same set of circumstances. Combine this with the fact that all components will eventually fail, and you have a recipe for system failure.
In order to mitigate the fact that components can fail, and people make mistakes, fault tolerant systems must be designed so that faults do not cause critical system failures.
We then talked about the procurement, development and operational issues concerned with systems, especially the fact that these change within the dynamics of the sociotechnical stack.
Today we presented our assignment to the class, and were reminded of the meaning of “group work” 🙂
We then spent some time talking about business processes, reengineering and e-business. We talked about how you could use a set of symbols to model different processes..
Once a process was modelled, you could then use that representation to remodel it to make it more effective or efficient. Particular attention should be made to keeping it simple and you should only collect distinct data once, and use it wherever it is required.
We then spent the rest of the session doing a business process re-engineering exercise – Google Stationary.
Bamboozle My Noodle 