At a recent round-table of mid-tier IT bosses (organised ostensibly to discuss customers’ IT infrastructure challenges), the issue that most animated delegates was not the nebulous nature of cloud computing or the virtues of virtualisation, but the tutting, sucking-teeth topic of supplier-customer relations. Blogging over at the 360 IT Blog, Computer Weekly editor-in-chief Bryan Glick, [...]

I opened my post yesterday morning and found a T-shirt was enclosed. It featured the logo for the new Steria Infrastructure on Command service. So I took a photo (as you can see) and put it up on my Flickr page. Somehow, that photo of a T-shirt on the floor in my living room was [...]

We often focus on reducing ongoing costs through outsourcing. It’s all about reducing the cost of operation through automation and possibly offshoring. But it’s not all that inspiring is it?
Outsourcing used to be about reducing costs and then the industry spent most of the past decade trying to reinforce the other reasons for outsourcing. Allowing [...]

Last month I launched a book of my Talking Outsourcing blog, which I write for Computing magazine.
Many readers showed up at London South Bank University to see me talk about the blog and what’s contained in the book – thanks to all of you who did come that evening and the evening was made all [...]

By the end of the 1980s, my teen programming proclivities had given way to more usual youthful pursuits like pubs, clubs, gigs and festivals. I’d decided to pursue a career in tech journalism and in 1991 started work at the IT trade weekly Computing.
Ironically, the magazine was still produced manually, with pages painstakingly laid out [...]

Thinking back to 40 years ago I remember 1969 as the year man first went to the moon, that Richard Nixon become President, and the Beatles played their famous last gig on top of the Apple building.
For me, 1969 was also a groundbreaking year for higher education in the UK with the establishment of The [...]

Innovation is more than technical innovation - business innovation is also an important area, yet mostly ignored.
Innovation more broadly, is certainly welcome within the outsourcing industry. All too common, the industry is characterised by a “me too” mentality. Most vendors appear to only concentrate on price innovation and even that, not really very innovative. Take [...]

A recent examination of the UK higher education experiences in using wikis, virtual classrooms, Web 2.0, etc. has highlighted the obvious conclusion that the university experiences of undergraduates and academics will be radically different than that of their 2009 predecessors. One interesting point was that many students are often more advanced than their institutions in [...]

Innovation is a topic that is often raised in discussions about outsourcing, usually in the context that it’s impossible to contract for something as nebulous as innovation.
Well, it’s true that it can be difficult to write a contract that recreates the skunk works environment of everyone in the basement toying with new ideas that may [...]

Like other companies, and particularly during this period, IT service providers are facing a generalised slowdown in business.
The companies that are best prepared to overcome these difficulties and begin their recovery now, in anticipation of the resolution of the crisis, are those with innovation capacity. There are many definitions of innovation, but there are two [...]