There remains a lot of gobbledygook talked and written about “Cloud” computing, as anyone who has been around the industry for any time is very well aware.  For the most part it is a species of marketing for a particular consumption model which does not pay enough (or sometimes any) attention to underlying business need.

Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman made well known assaults on “Cloud” when the term first began to gain currency around 2008. Other veterans I met referred to it as IBM Bureau Computing reborn, Network Computing for the broadband age or, my favourite, from a gleeful representative of a well-known multinational, “outsourcing without service level agreements”.

The early criticisms were valid in the context they were made and might have remained valid had something not changed. But something has changed, very rapidly.

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UK Government procurement reform is being “stifled by departments” being tardy in moving to new central contracts based on large-scale aggregation of demand. Because of a lack of enforcement of the use of centralized purchasing of goods and services maximum savings are not being achieved.

No doubt a disbelieving nation will swoon in horror at this dispatch from no man’s land, brought to us by the UK’s National Audit Office in a new report.

The conclusions of the report beg a sackful of questions, the most pressing being whether centralized purchasing and contracting actually represents best procurement practice in government. Also, is the large scale aggregation of demand really compatible with one of the strategic targets of the reform programme – ensuring that SMEs receive around 25% of government business, albeit that target is somewhat cynically wrapped around with the proviso that it includes the use of SMEs as subcontractors. continue reading…

One of the interesting things about the debates around financing models is the notion of paying “early” and the use of paying “early” as a negotiating tactic to secure a discount.

The obvious question is “early” in relation to what?  The answer is usually “early” in relation either to existing terms and conditions or to custom and practice. It may possibly be “early” in relation to an uncertain payment date – I heard recently of one company which simply settles accounts on an annual basis. continue reading…

Back in the sunny long ago when I was a student and Tomorrow’s World on the BBC offered us silicon chips with everything, I remember a discussion with friends about how “New Technology” would usher in a new leisure society. We were young and wide-eyed and didn’t think it through, didn’t consider the capability of  technology to damage while it transformed. continue reading…

The debate on e-invoicing here and elsewhere has been interesting, entertaining and informative but not, I think, without problems. Those problems have been swept discretely under the carpet. continue reading…

In my last piece I finished with a throwaway remark “And there’s another thing: social media – don’t get me started….”. That quip generated more private correspondence than the rest of the article.

I have been around the internet for a long time – long enough to remember when Mosaic was the hot new kid on the block. Many of my attitudes were formed then, by the absorption of ‘netiquette’ (remember that?) through cultural osmosis and also through a willing acquiescence in the projection of West Coast psychedelic world views onto the emerging medium (feed your head with John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said). To this day the ongoing bending of the internet to the will of corporate and political interests is a continuing source of profound disappointment. continue reading…

I don’t think of myself, much, as a grumpy old man but I seem to have spent a lot of time recently reading blogs, LinkedIn, tweets and press releases, scratching my head and wondering “is it just me”?

There is a saying of which my old boss used to be fond: things that are ‘well known’ are rarely known well.  These well known things tend to form our basic day to day operating assumptions. It is sensible to haul these assumptions into the sunlight every so often to give them a good dust down and re-examination.  I am going to mention five of them today: continue reading…