To truly be effective, today’s boards need to keep pace with new technologies, security threats, and economic developments. Board management software can drive efficiency and collaboration, while remaining secure and adoptable across the organisation.

When evaluating board management software providers, it’s critical to find a solution that provides a streamlined, secure experience not just for board members, but anyone else who will be using it.

Download this whitepaper to learn how the right board management software can:

• Increase efficiency & streamline communications
• Improve security
• Save time and money
• And practice better governance

Provided by

.

Basecamp is a web-based business collaboration, project management, and communication platform that allows you to create dedicated workspaces for your business’s teams and projects. Unlike many online collaboration tools, the subscription includes an unlimited number of users.

It also does a lot of hand-holding when you create your account, prompting you to create projects and add colleagues, before presenting its core layout in a video and giving you some sample teams and projects to play with.

You’re also guided through creating welcome messages and check-in questions for your colleagues, with pre-drafted introductions to the system that come in handy if your creativity is running low.

Basecamp is keen to introduce you to its systems through the medium of video and interaction, but there’s also an extensive manual and guide series for the latest Basecamp 3 system, making it easy to distinguish current documentation from that for previous incarnations of the platform.

It’s a fundamentally simple system. There are three categories that you can add colleagues to. HQ is for company-wide announcements and comms. Teams provides a home base for individual departments, such as your finance, marketing or customer support divisions. Finally, Projects allow you to create spaces where people in different roles and departments can communicate and share resources about a specific project they’re collaborating on.

Basecamp 3 review: Features

Each HQ, Team or Project has various tools available to it. A message board, to-do lists and scheduling all work much as you’d expect. Document and file sharing includes support for Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive, but not WebDAV. Some document formats, such as PDFs and images, display previews, but spreadsheets and word processor documents have to be downloaded or accessed via their home cloud service if you want to look at them.

Campfire is a simple chat system with support for emoji and file attachments, including animated gifs, and the ability to tag specific people if you need their attention. It’s not very sophisticated compared to Slack or even Microsoft Teams, without threading, hashtags, multiple channels within a team or an in-chat search.

However, you can quickly view all posted files and enable or disable notifications when people post, depending on whether you can be disturbed or not, and it’s fine for quick communication with whoever happens to be online.

Automatic Check-ins regularly ask team members a question and collect their answers, with suggested questions asking people what they worked on today, what they’ll be working on this week, what inspires them and whether they’ve read any good books.

The feature seems to primarily be oriented towards team-building and exchanging tips, but could also be used to collate friction points on a given project or, for that matter, photos of your team’s pets. However, it feels intrusive compared to the more natural flow of chat and forum communication.

Finally, and disabled by default, Email Forwards allow you and your team to forward emails – for example from clients or collaborators – to Basecamp. The first time you forward a mail, you’ll get a reply via email asking you to select which team or project area to save it under. Basecamp will at this point generate an email address for that project, and any email you forward to that address in future will be automatically sent there, including any attachments.

Once imported into Basecamp, the Email Forwards interface in the relevant project area will allow you and your colleagues to discuss and reply directly to the message. The interface here, again, isn’t particularly sophisticated – there’s no keyword tagging, for example. But it does the basics well, includes an archive for anything that’s been actioned and finished with, and provides change tracking and sharing options.

Basecamp 3 review: User experience

Each of these tools can be enabled or disabled for individual team and project workspaces, so if your team doesn’t need a given feature it doesn’t have to clutter up their interface.

On top of that, each user has access to the Pings private chat system; an inbox called Hey (not to be confused with Basecamp’s Hey email service spin-off) which flags up anything awaiting your attention; personal and company-wide activity summaries; quick access to your bookmarks, schedule, assignments and files, and a powerful search feature.

Because Basecamp doesn’t limit the number of users you can have, admins can add as many colleagues as they like, and give them access to whichever sections of Basecamp they need; that means even external contractors can be included without needing to provision and pay for an extra seat.

You can also invite clients to access projects they’re involved in – your teams get to set each item as viewable by the client or not, and client-accessible content is clearly marked.

Basecamp has a generally clean, pleasant UI to work with, and its web interface resizes tidily across a wide range of resolutions and window sizes. Unlike many SaaS web apps, Basecamp lets you use your browser’s back button freely and without breaking anything.

The only element that slightly interfered with our workflow was navigating back to previous pages, which is a little non-standard. When you click from, for example, your HQ or Project’s main page to its To-do lists, you get what looks like it might be a pop-up over the previous page.

In fact, this is an entirely new page with a dedicated URL, and if you go looking for an X or similar to close it, you won’t find one. Instead, the name of the previous Basecamp area can be found at the top of the page, and you click on that to return to it.

Basecamp 3 review: Apps & integrations

Mobile apps are available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store and provide access to all the same features as the web interface. When you click into any of the company HQ, team or project areas, you’re presented with a list of all the currently enabled tools.

From there, you can access message boards, Campfire chats, project schedules and so on just as you would via the web interface. Most helpfully, you get all your Basecamp notifications on your phone.

In its vanilla state, Basecamp is better suited to communication and knowledge sharing than formal project management. However, a wealth of integrations are available to provide tools such as Gantt charts, customer support integration, time tracking and automatic cross-communication between Basecamp and widely used services such as G Suite, Outlook and Slack.

Unfortunately, many of these integrations require you to subscribe to a third-party service, which adds to the total cost of your project management toolkit. Even with integrations, some features are entirely missing, conspicuously the ability to create polls, surveys and proposals.

Basecamp 3 review: Pricing

The service’s pricing is refreshingly simple: Basecamp Business costs $99 a month. That’s regardless of how many user seats, teams, projects or external clients you have. If you have more than a few staff, that quickly starts looking very competitive compared to rivals such as Microsoft Project, which starts at $10 per seat or Facebook Workplace Advanced, which costs $4 per user.

Bear in mind, though, that Basecamp is a communications and collaboration solution as much as it is for project management, and some features that are standard in Microsoft Project, such as Gantt charts, have to be bolted on to Basecamp as extensions.

If you’re a freelancer, micro-business or other very small enterprise, then all the Basecamp Business features may feel like overkill. If so, Basecamp Personal is free, giving you three projects, 20 users and a gigabyte of shared storage. You don’t get teams, customer relations features or company-wide announcements, but it also costs zero pounds and can be upgraded later if needed.

If you’re not sure whether the service does everything you’ll need, the 30-day free trial of Basecamp Business doesn’t require a credit card. If you don’t keep the subscription, Basecamp Business downgrades itself to Basecamp Personal.

Basecamp 3 review: Verdict

Basecamp provides an excellent way of allowing colleagues to communicate both among themselves and with clients, and the fact that it’s a flat-rate service is incredibly appealing, particularly for businesses that work with a lot of external clients or contractors.

Although heavy-duty project management will still call for extra features such as time tracking and charts, Basecamp covers the basics well. Unfortunately, there are a few small quality-of-life refinements that are conspicuous by their absence, such as the ability to look at your project spreadsheets in situ or create a poll to work out the best time for a meeting.

The service is best suited to businesses with multiple small, fast-moving teams and projects whose members need to keep in touch and keep track of core documents and project milestones. It’s definitely a comfortable environment to work in, just not a particularly powerful one.

The role of a project manager is to manage business projects and make sure every objective is met on time and within the agreed budget. There are a number of frameworks that help guide the planning and strategy around delivering such projects but PRINCE2 is one of the most flexible.

Fully compatible with agile delivery, PRINCE2 is also one of the more versatile frameworks out there too, with the ability to be applied to projects in a range of industries and tailored to each project’s individual criteria.

Seven key principles, sometimes referred to as ‘obligations’, define a PRINCE2 project and every one must be applied at all stages throughout. Without sticking to the seven core principles of PRINCE2, you don’t have a true PRINCE2 project.

Public sector projects run by the UK government back in the 1990s are thought to have initially championed the methodology first owned and created by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA). Since its acquisition in 1996, the PRINCE2 framework has been owned and developed further by AXELOS which also created, and still maintains, the methodology’s official documentation.

According to AXELOS, PRINCE2 is hugely popular worldwide with more than 1 million certified practitioners across more than 150 countries. It’s available to learn in 18 different languages, can be used in a number of roles and once you pass the course, PRINCE2 practitioners receive a globally recognised certification to use their skills abroad, should they wish to take their skills into their company’s global offices.

PRINCE2 Principles

Copyright 2017 AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

PRINCE2 is classified as a ‘principles-driven’ project management methodology, built around the idea of seven principles interacting with seven themes and seven processes. These principles are designed to be universal in their application, able to be shaped to fit any project regardless of scope, application, language, or culture.

The seven principles are:

• Business justification: the weighing of risks against potential benefits
• Learning from experiences: building upon mistakes from previous projects
• Defined roles and responsibilities: a clear organisational hierarchy - team managers that handle the day-to-day tasks, who report to project managers, who in turn report to an overriding executive board
• Managed by stages: provide control points for the board to review progress to assess justification. Authority for managing the stages is delegated to the project manager
• Managing by exception: the idea that authority should be delegated using 'tolerances' - threshold ranges for cost, time, quality, scope and benefits of a project
• Focus on products: agreement on the amount and quality of the product being delivered should form the basis of any project and its reports
• Tailor to the environment: PRINCE2 is generic by default, and needs to be tailored depending on risk, complexity, project size and importance

These form the fundamental philosophies that project managers should consider when approaching a task. However, the overall framework relies on the interaction between these principles, and what are considered 'themes' and 'processes', both of which are also split into seven elements.

PRINCE2 Themes

PRINCE2 practitioners can view the seven core themes in a similar way to the seven principles, in that each must be considered at every stage of the project. The themes represent the considerations project managers must make when choosing the optimum strategy of the project to achieve its goals most efficiently.

In fact, they help coordinate any priorities identified in the planning process as well as make sure that the team members involved all have the same idea in mind, especially when it comes to keeping deadlines and staying within budget. Simply put, themes should be interpreted as the most basic commandments for the project’s best practice.

The main themes worth considering when planning out a project are issues such as:

• Costs and benefits, which is a classic business case pitch
• Organisation (the maintenance of a clear hierarchy of reporting)
• Product quality (a focus on the product itself)
• Plans (regular reporting between team members)
• Risk (a clearly-defined plan for risk management)
• Change (a comprehensible structure for facilitating amendments to the products)
• Progress (the continued communication about the progress of the project).

PRINCE2 Processes

While we compared the above-mentioned themes to commandments that should be strictly followed, the processes function as descriptors to the particular activities and stages which comprise a project. What's more, they should also name specific persons who will be responsible for making sure that they are handled correctly and in a timely manner. These include the following:

• Starting up a project: initial information is filtered to the project executive board, so they can filter out good ideas from the bad
• Directing a project: regular points within a project for the board to decide whether it has continued business justification
• Initiating a project: this sets out the firm foundations for the project; it's when the project plan and the detailed business case are written, as well as strategies for managing risks, communication, and quality
• Controlling a stage: performed regularly by the project manager, it involves dictating the various responsibilities, including allocating work to teams, managing risks, and ensuring the subsequent stages remain within tolerances
• Managing product delivery: during this stage, all the specialist products are designed, built and checked to ensure they conform to the requirements
• Managing a stage boundary: performed by the project manager at the end of each stage, this prepares the information required by the board to help them decide whether to continue
• Closing a project: involves gaining agreement from the users and operation teams that the products are satisfactory. It is also an opportunity for the project managers to report on the achievements of the project and any follow-up actions required

The Principles, Themes, and Processes combine to form a highly structured roadmap that a project is able to follow in order to meet its goals, as well as ensuring a high level of visibility and frequent opportunities to assess progress and make changes.

PRINCE2 Certification

Since its conception almost three decades ago, PRINCE2 has grown to be one of the most widely-used project management methodologies in the world, making it an established and acclaimed certification with a multitude of benefits for its holders. Its flexibility and universal application has made it an attractive tool for companies undergoing change, particularly through businesses transformation. If you're looking to go into project management, a PRINCE2 certification looks great on a CV. But depending on the type of project you're looking to manage, you might be better served by an agile methodology. Check out our article here for how to generate buy-in for an agile approach.

AXELOS operates its own exam-based certification programme available through its website. However, there are hundreds of accredited course providers throughout the UK, offering opportunities to learn either online or through weekend classes - just be sure to look out for the AXELOS accreditation badge.

IT teams are no longer workers consigned to ut of sight, out of mind in a company's lower floors. Technology has taken over and assumed a greater part in the business world and as such, IT workers are now more important than ever. This has placed a greater responsibility on their leaders - the IT manager.

Back in the days of simple desktop computers, phones and fax machines, most issues could be solved with the cliched "switch it off and on again" but we no have cloud computing, remote working and the IoT. There's greater responsibility with the job and that falls on the shoulders of the top man.

Not only do they have to ensure they're capable of fixing a wide variety of tech problems, but they must also make sure the same is true of their team. This is not just fixing phone and laptops, it's upgrading software, connecting whole departments to apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams, making sure they can connect with international clients and partners. This is just a tiny segment of what's now involved.

Dealing with all this and keeping an entire workforce happy is all about strategy, about making sure the equipment being used is in tip-top condition and also secure.

To do all this an IT manager must lead a team of technology professionals, software developers and system analysts, and ensure an entire department is an efficient unit.

Their role will also include working with IT vendors or resellers to guarantee they are getting the best deals on equipment and systems, and that every piece of technology solves a problem the company has.

Other duties include evaluating the viability of proposed projects, talking with staff and managers about their IT needs, and developing systems customised for the needs of an organisation. IT managers also are expected to review plans and recruit, train, and coordinate technical personnel.

An IT manager can also be responsible for creating training materials to help new employees understand how to make the best use of technology within an organisation. This ranges from designing in-house training manuals, to walking staff through using essential applications and logging into systems.

A day in the life of an IT manager

An IT manager's daily activities vary. For the most part, it will involve personnel management as opposed to tasks like programming and database administration. An IT manager will also be responsible for ensuring the people responsible for such tasks are able to complete them.

Additionally, they will keep track of budgets and update senior management and key stakeholders on the progress of any current projects or upgrades. Another daily task will be to stay alert for any possible security breaches to the infrastructure and take appropriate action if an incident happens.

How to become an IT manager and the skills you need

Most organisations will require their IT manager to have a degree in computer science or an equivalent. To be a manager, organisations will also want evidence of work-related experience.In general, the first steps to becoming an IT manager involve becoming a team leader, rather than a fully-fledged manager. This guarantees that by leading a team of web developers, for example, a future-manager would remain comfortable with technical details while also honing management skills.

It is also recommended to supplement technology training with business or management courses as this will help in gaining the necessary skills in management and communication.

In the long term, success as an IT manager rests on how well the team performs. Make them perform to the best of their abilities, and you will shine as a manager as well.

How much are IT managers paid?

An IT manager in the UK can expect to be paid around 46,000 a year on average, and companies will likely include other bonuses and incentives as well. However, this amount can range from 30,000 to 76,000 depending on the company and the IT manager's level of experience.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) has become one of the building blocks of programming, replacing - or working in tandem with - the concept of procedural programming. Whereas the more traditional idea of procedural programming puts action and logic at the centre, OOP utilises objects and data to produce outcomes.

On the simplest level, OOP focuses on the objects a programmer wants to change rather than the actions needed to make that change. This makes it easier for programmers to run a code analysis and also, because many of the objects are reusable for other projects, the time it takes to develop an application, for example, can be shortened significantly.

The majority of modern programming languages such as C++, Object Pascal, Java, Python use a combination of object-oriented programming, as well as procedural programming where required, meaning OOP has become a very important evolution in the world of development.

Core components of OOP

The main idea around OOP is that it's a more efficient method of software development for collaborative working because it allows developers to place in and sort objects by class, allowing them to look at the relationship between them, rather than the objects themselves.

There are four principles to OOP which are encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism, all of which sound more intimidating than the last but a simple explanation will surely get you on track to a full understanding.

Polymorphism is used when objects need to be used for different things in different contexts. It allows a child class to act like the parent class while also keeping its own methods as they are. Within the polymorphism bracket, there are two types of function: overriding and overloading.

Overriding (also known as run-time polymorphism) is used when two objects have the same method name and parameters (i.e. method signature), but one method is in the parent class and the other is in the child class. Overloading (compile-time polymorphism) happens when two or more methods in one class have the same method name but diverse parameters.

Encapsulation is used when objects in a project need to communicate with each other but have mutually exclusive logics that define them. Encapsulating these objects in their own states means other objects cannot change it unless it's explicitly allowed to.

Abstraction can be seen as an extension to encapsulation, its aim is to only expose the necessary information objects need to interact with it and conceal everything else. Using this principle decreases complexity and allows developers to make changes more easily.

Inheritance is used when dealing with several objects which share a lot of common logic, but each has slightly different unique logics. Using inheritance, developers can easily reuse the common logic and extract the unique logic into a different class to maintain a unique hierarchy, ensuring better accuracy.

Examples of object-oriented programming languages

There are many different languages that use object-oriented programming. Among them are Java (which was developed in 1995 by Sun Microsystems, now Oracle), Python (created in 1991 and emphasises code readability), C++ (which has imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features and is an extension of the C programming language), and Objective-C (which adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C and was the main programming language for OSX and iOS).

Gartner thinks that AI will become so powerful in the next ten years that 80% of project management tasks will happen autonomously by 2030, including tasks such as data collection, tracking and reporting.

However, Gartner notes that the automation of these tasks will not wholly replace project management roles, but rather will allow them to fulfill their duties more efficiently by eliminating the need to perform repetitive and time-consuming jobs.

"AI is going to revolutionize how program and portfolio management (PPM) leaders leverage technology to support their business goals," said Daniel Stang, research vice president at Gartner. "Right now, the tools available to them do not meet the requirements of digital business."

As is the case across the board with AI, the focus will be on generating better user experiences for project managers, helping them plan their projects with more precision.

In just four years, Gartner thinks those using AI to push their project management processes forward will cause disruption of the PPM market and lead legacy providers to transform their operation.

The growing sophistication of AI-based project management tools will improve the outcomes of everyday tasks, eliminating the need for project managers to undertake such responsibilities and instead allowing them to focus on recruiting teams that can manage the AI and smart machines rather than analysing the data themselves.

"Using conversational AI and chatbots, PPM and PMO leaders can begin to use their voices to query a PPM software system and issue commands, rather than using their keyboard and mouse," Stang added.

"As AI begins to take root in the PPM software market, those PMOs that choose to embrace the technology will see a reduction in the occurrence of unforeseen project issues and risks associated with human error."

Twilio has appointed Google Hangouts inventor Chee Chew as chief product officer, helping developers create more immersive experiences for customers.

Chew has more than 25 years of experience helping businesses such as Amazon, Hewlett-Packard, Google and Microsoft improve the ways customers engage with their brands.

For example, in his latest role as vice president of consumer engagement at Amazon, he helped improve its mobile shopping experience.

As vice president of engineering at Google, Chew was instrumental in the development of Google Voice, Google Hangouts Seattle/Kirkland's Google Chrome, enabling customers to communicate more effectively and be more productive throughout their day.

"As an engineer by trade, I'm extremely passionate about helping Twilio continue to build APIs and SDKs that will empower developers," said Chew. "I'm excited to join Twilio and help developers and innovative businesses around the world build contextual and intelligent communications that will reinvent how companies engage with their customers."

Chew will use his experience working with developers to help Twilio focus on customer experience, enabling other businesses to offer enhanced contextual and intelligent communication to their clients.

He will sit on the executive leadership team and report to Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson.

"Chee brings an incredibly unique combination of skills and experiences to Twilio - from running customer engagement for the world's largest e-commerce company to leading the invention of Google Hangouts," said Lawson.

"Chee's leadership in building outstanding products, teams and companies will be a great addition to the Twilio executive team."

A publicly-exposed cache of 66 million records has been found in the wild containing employment information such as career history, and skills.

Researchers have stumbled on a "treasure trove" of 66,147,856 unique records across three large databases, including a MongoDB database, that contained a wealth of scraped business-centric information.

The exposed records include full names, personal or professional emails, location details, skills, and work histories; all information that would typically be found on a LinkedIn profile.

Although the entries do not contain any sensitive personal information, such as financial details or passwords, they do contain private information, such as a person's background and their IP address.

Malwarebytes' lead malware intelligence analyst, Christopher Boyd, said that such databases will typically be used to power large-scale phishing campaigns, although there's no way of knowing if the information is being exploited in the wild.

"It could also prove useful to anyone wanting a ready-made marketing list. The big problem is that even if the ones doing the data scraping had no harmful intentions, that may not apply to anybody finding the treasure trove.

"Given how this information was stumbled upon in the first place, there's no real way to know how many bad actors got their hands on it first."

This data-scraping incident is also connected with a host of complaints by many LinkedIn and GitHub users that they have been receiving breach notifications lately, Boyd added. The users affected can also expect to be targeted with phishing attacks alongside a string of fake job offers and "poor quality" job offer spam.

Data scraping, the method which the data was obtained, is considered a grey area legally-speaking, given it does not involve hacking, or breaching an organisation's defences. Rather, the data is very efficiently gathered by threat actors from information that users themselves choose to make publicly available.

But HackenProof, which first discovered the three exposed databases, argues data scraping "without first obtaining the prior individual's written consent" is illegal, especially in light of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. But the platform conceded this can vary from case to case depending on how the extracted data is used.

HackenProof also suggested several steps employees and bosses can take to minimise the chances their personal information isn't reaped in such a way in future.

These include only providing the bare minimum data when creating online profiles, using different email addresses for bank accounts versus social media, and assessing whether personal data volunteered may potentially be used in a malicious way.

ISO 9001 is an international standard that specifies the minimum requirements for quality management systems (QMS). It's the only standard that organisations can certify themselves for in the ISO 9000 group, which all relate to quality management and assurance a vital part of project management.

The group of standards was established in the late 1980s to ensure businesses could serve customers better and meet regulatory requirements for their particular industry by following a set of quality assurance guidelines. It has since been updated several times, most recently in 2015, with amendments made to make it more relevant.

It comprises individual standards such as ISO 9000 itself, which lists the QMS fundamentals and vocabulary, ISO 9004, which refers to continuous improvement of QMS, ISO 9001, which we'll examine in more detail in this feature and ISO 19011, which deals with auditing management systems.

The principles of ISO 9001

ISO 9001 is based upon the methodology of plan-do-check-act, with a process-oriented structure governing everything it does.

It outlines the basic requirements for a QMS, including supporting documentation that can guide those who may not be familiar with QMS as a principle and help determine how the process is communicated across the business.

Other key considerations included in the standard cover the responsibilities of management, how a QMS filters through HR needs such as resources and the working environment, plus notes on the product development lifecycle and measurement, analysis and ways the QMS can be improved using techniques such as auditing to ascertain its effectiveness.

The most recent iteration of ISO 9001, ISO 9001:2015 introduces a range of updates to terminology referred to in the standards and also a bigger emphasis on risk-based structure to aid a company's innovation. It also introduced more responsibilities for the project and business leaders to address the changing structure of the workplace.

Why is ISO 9001 so important?

Certifying for ISO 9001 isn't a legal requirement, but it can significantly improve the way businesses keep track of and evolve their QMS to make sure they're compliant with regulations for their specific industry and are producing the best innovations possible, whether software, hardware or services.

It will also improve the customer experience because quality management processes have been specifically developed to target the end user and this will result in a more profitable, targeted business overall.

Which businesses should certify for ISO 9001?

One important point about ISO 9001 is that it's open to all businesses, whatever their sector. It isn't a legal requirement for any industry, but it is a recommendation.

As long as an organisation is developing products and services for customers, it should consider becoming certified, however big or small it is and however many customers it has.

Therefore, any business that wants to improve the way it monitors quality and ensure its products are meeting customer expectations should be ISO 9001 certified.

So you've decided to adopt an agile approach to software development. Agile has plenty of benefits over more traditional methodologies like waterfall, with its focus on speed of delivery and working software - but chances are you already know that . What you need to know now is how to implement it.

This is no easy task - as with any behavioural change, you can't force people into it. Rather, you need to make a convincing case to the business about why agile is the way forward for your organisation, and you need to show your developers why it will make their lives easier, too.

Find people who agree with you

The first step is to find people who share the same goal as you.

"People are important as they are the ones that drive as well as adopt change," says Andy Cureton, MD of DevOps specialist ECS Digital. "Finding people that are tired of their current ways of working increases the likelihood of buy-in and adoption of proposed change as they will be looking for ways to improve."

Forming a small group (or groups) filled with these people, rather than focusing on people with specific knowledge of the projects you want to tackle, is essential.

But while it's key to identify developers who support an agile approach, it's harder to get the business to buy into it upfront.

"What we find is that by and large it's relatively easy to get the IT staff on board," says Nathan Wilson, principal research analyst at Gartner for agile development. However, business people used to a more confrontational relationship with IT will not be won over as easily.

"[Businesses are used to] an IT model that says every few years we will do a big project, make something a whole lot better, then go away", says Wilson. Asking businesses to adopt to a continuous delivery model, where improvements are fractional but constant, is a difficult jump for them to make.

"It's really hard for the business to do this because they are used to thinking 'if I don't get my change now I will never get it'," Wilson explains. "The strategic goal is to earn the trust of the business and to build on it."

Or, as Tirrell Payton, managing consultant at SolutionsIQ, a management consulting firm, tells IT Pro: "Organisations are like living, breathing beings in that they have 'organisational antibodies' that will seek to derail any major change and keep things the way they were. People hate change."

To gain business trust, the next step is to find a project that you and your developers can embark on to show how agile benefits the business.

Find the right project

However, picking that project is a difficult step itself. You probably don't want to take on an important IT project with a lot of risk involved for your first agile endeavour.

"You are pretty bad at agile the first time because it's completely different to anything you have ever done before," explains Wilson. "Do it in a controlled environment and build competency and then expand."

But while a small project is a good choice to try out agile, you also want it to demonstrate success, so your business people see the value of the approach.

"Pilots, proof of concepts and MVPs require minimum investment to demonstrate the potential for the organisation," says ECS Digital's Cureton.

Wilson added: "A most effective project to apply this to is one with very low expectations. If everyone is expecting it to fail, that seems to be the broad benefit. I do get the call saying 'we want to try agile out on this major SAP deployment', and after I get done screaming no, I say 'we want to start a little small and someplace where the risk is different'."

But both acknowledge that while small projects are good choices, they are by no means the only choice.

"We don't believe that there is an ideal type of project," says Cureton. "A 'greenfield' project developing a new application or service may have less complexity, but selecting such projects may fuel speculation that agile can only be successful for 'new'."

As Wilson says, if you believe the benefits of agile can apply to a big, problematic IT project, then perhaps that's a logical place to start.

"We have clients where they have an innovation group doing agile stuff but their [bigger, more traditional IT projects] are over-budget and under-delivering, and we see it makes sense to implement agile there first," he says.

Focus on business goals

Once you've picked your project, it's important to focus on the right outcomes, and to ensure your team is set up to reflect those values.

Tirrell Payton, of SolutionsIQ, tells IT Pro that agile leaders should focus on the following questions: "How clearly is the product strategy [aligned with] the people that are implementing it? How strong and explicit is the connection between the strategy and the daily work? Crucial for this connection are the product owner and product manager roles, and the way these roles specify and prioritise work for the development team."

It's also essential to talk about the project with business stakeholders, to keep the development aligned to those outcomes.

Achieve business values

One common mistake on early agile projects is an all-consuming focus on speed, rather than quality, according to Gartner's Wilson. This won't produce the right results for businesses to gain trust in what you're doing, however.

"A danger of the speed is sometimes where clients fall into the quick and dirty trap - but it's better to be quick and small," he says. "You don't want something of very low quality - whereas if it works well and is very small, then you create the business opportunity to scale."

This is especially true if you've picked an agile project centered around innovation and exploring a new business opportunity.

In that case, "by definition there's no current revenue based on what you're doing", Wilson says. "You can produce a very small solution that doesn't do much very quickly, but if it's the first thing in an area then it's worth doing."

This is also the stage of an agile project where experience counts, according to Payton.

"An agile framework on its own, though, is not sufficient; teams need good execution practices as well," he says, explaining that execution refers to the technical process of building, testing and deploying software products.

Executing a project well within an agile framework leads to project management discipline, greater value delivery, and better predictability - all great and measurable benefits that will impress the business.

How do you know if you've achieved agile buy-in?

After doing all this work, how can you tell if you've made any progress on moving your business towards an agile model of operations?

"This will be different for every organisation," says Cureton."There will be key business objectives associated with the adoption of agile and if they have been met then you can argue success, at least for that project."

If you've managed to do that, this goes towards building more trust between the business and IT, and the two will be much more closely aligned on business goals.

He adds: "One key element of agile is continuous improvement. A culture where people are constantly challenging the status quo and looking to raise the bar demonstrates that agile principles have become part of the fabric of the organisation."

From Wilson's point of view, it depends on whether your organisation's mindset has changed. "What I ask CIOs is what happens if someone says, three weeks in, this project is in big trouble? If your response is 'go back and try harder', then agile won't work in your organisation.

"If your response is 'how do we change the plan or stop doing this?' then you will succeed."

But in one sense, agile is not a process that can ever be fully completed, Wilson adds. "At some level if you are ever done, you are in trouble," he warns. "When you realise that you are never done, you are probably there."

CIOs must take risks and focus on culture issues to succeed, according to Etihad Aviation Group's chief information officer.

Their main challenges now include security, privacy and IT complexity, as well as the cultural challenges of communication, partnership and speed of change, said Robert John Webb, group chief information and technology officer at Etihad Aviation Group.

"That's to do with risk taking," Webb said. "If you get comfortable with a higher risk tolerance and you start making decisions together, you're going to be able to go fast to win. If you're not transparent, and you're slow, you're going to lose.

"How do you communicate the risk of [your business] not going fast? CIOs also need to be prudent, because it's a risky job: stuff goes wrong in IT. So you need to be able to balance, we want to go fast, but we don't want to hit the wall'. That's the science and the art."

Sunny Gupta, Apptio CEO, was present at the Technology Business Management conference roundtable in London, and offered the company's own research on what the top priorities were for 24 CIOs surveyed.

"Eighteen of the CIOs noted that the big shift was digitalisation, they were being asked become digital officers and drive digitalisation," said Gupta.

The respondents also felt that shifting budgets from maintenance to innovation was equally important.

Image: CIO priorities survey 2016 table. (Apptio, June 2016)

Pedro de Freitas, CIO at the Scandinavian arm of insurance firm RSA, added that financial services firms face significant issues ensuring that cloud integrates with their legacy systems.

He said: "Some of the key priorities are security and compliance, definitely. And then, after that, comes the agility. But, for me, it comes down to balancing act of addressing [sic] alteration versus exploration. There's no magic formula."

Accounting for the balance between migrating to new SaaS and budgeting for existing kit maintenance, Etihad's Webb explained: "In today's world, you turn on software-as-a-service. You turn on SAP Simple Finance in the cloud. When you use a subscription service, you need to be able to compare what your investment levels are when you're doing something in the cloud versus in the old ways. There are dozens and dozens of domains that you have to go through that exact analysis [for] to make those types of decisions."

He added: "How do you consider lock-in? And your rate of interest is different. So our rate of interest in mobile in the transportation and airline industry is much, much faster than in online or these back-office systems. How do you track that that we're investing enough in these next-generation systems to keep up with expectation from consumers?"

This need to stay current in the most cost-effective manner possible leads some CIOs to believe their entire IT departments need to work differently.

"We are seeing the IT operating model, the culture, and the skills needed changing fundamentally," said Gupta.

"[I met with] a very large customer in the UK. They told us: Apptio needs to help my people become business people rather than technology people. They are so used to talking technology. Yes, we expect them to talk technology, but they have to become commercially-minded."

Even if you're not a project manager by trade, it's likely you'll either need to lead or be involved in company projects at some point in your career.

These apps will help you keep projects, however, big or small, under control with collaboration at the heart of everything they do.

Casual

Format: Android, Desktop, iOS

Price: From $9/month/user

URL: Casual

Casual is a visual project management tool, allowing you to create flow charts of information rather than the usual linear approach. Although only available on desktop and iPhone, all of the information is fully synched between devices and displays perfectly, even on smaller screens. You are able to access archived data including tasks, notes or project history from within the simple UI simple UI and edit tasks in real time so the whole team is aware of where the project is and what you're working on at any time. For the more visual project managers, Casual helps you visualise projects and is perfectly crafted for on-the-move working.

Clarizen

Publisher: Clarizen

Format: Android, Desktop, iOS

Price: From $30/user per month

Clarizen aims to offer users a more tailored approach to project management. The cloud-based service is customisable and can be adapted to the working roles of different staff. A reliable, scalable software package, this project management suite is including project planning, resource management, document management, templates, social collaboration, task list and budget management, among other things. The software integrates with a host of commonly used softwares, including Outlook, Salesforce, Google Docs, iCal, Chrome extensions, and others. The software starts from $30 per user, per month – steep by comparison to its competitors, but its reputation is strong.

Freshdesk

Publisher: Freshdesk

Format: Android, Desktop, iOS

Price: Free for three months

Freshdesk comes with just about everything you need to track and manage your projects. IT offers features such as issue tracking, SLA management, smart automation, SEO ready FAQ section, knowledge base and customizable self-service portals. IT also allows the integration of a cloud-based telephony service into an organisation's helpdesk. Freshdesk sports a slick user interface and is easy to use. It can also scale from one user to a whole enterprise.

Huddle

Publisher: Huddle

Format: Android, Desktop, iOS

Price: From $20/month/person

Huddle makes it easy for teams to securely collaborate on projects, share and edit files, assign tasks and track team activity from one place. Not only can your internal teams share everything with each other, they can also share outside of the organisation, with clients or customers too. Every change made is logged, so you can ensure everything is tracked as it happens and perform an audit if needed. Huddle is available across iOS and Android, plus on desktop and everything is seamlessly synched so the entire team can discover, review and approve content anywhere, anytime, on any device. Huddle integrates with additional tools including Salesforce and Sharepoint too, for a fully-featured sales, marketing and project management solution. Huddle allows you to collaborate with internal and external teams and track the entire audit trail too, with sales and marketing integrations to boot.

OmniPlan

OmniPlan helps you stay on top of your projects with a visual interface enabling you to see the progress of your teams.You can break down projects into to do lists, optimise the resources so you have the right people working on the right element, control costs and montiro progress. Everything can be shared with colleagues and it'll sync with your calendar too, making sure everyone knows when you're available or when others in your team aren't. Everything is presented in easy to understand Gantt charts and network diagrams for easy reference, making it simple to use, but effective to manage.

Publisher: OmniPlan

Format: Desktop, iOS

Price: $74.99 (Standard plan, iOS), $149.99 (Standard plan, Mac), $149.98 (Pro plan, iOS), $299.99 (Pro plan, Mac)

Podio

Publisher: Podio

Format: Android, Desktop, iOS

Price: From $9/month/person

Podio, from Citrix, doesn't just help you manage projects, but customers too. The app uses a very structured approach compared to some of the other tools here, but it does help keep your entire team organised on the go. Podio is also a lot more customisable than other project management tools, so you can change the way you track projects, responsibilities, deadlines and share content according to how your team works best. Collaboration is at the heart of this tool, with content sharing and live activity streams including chat available. Additionally, Podio can be integrated with other modules of Citrix's product ecosystem such as cost tracking to make it a real enterprise tool. Podio is suited to enterprises running lots of projects in tandem and is very sophisticated.

Trello

Publisher: Trello

Format: Android, Desktop, iOS

Price: From free

Trello is a drag and drop-based project management tool. Each project is a board while each element or task of a project is a card. It's simple to create cards, assign deadlines, assign members and set up notifications so if anything changes in a column or on a card, you're instantly alerted. One of the best things about Trello is its range of integrations including Google Drive, meaning you can attach documents to a card that open up instantly in Google Drive for viewing or editing. Trello runs a referral programme so not only is it one of the simplest and best tools around, it can be free if you invite enough collaborators.

Wrike Project Management

Publisher: Wrike

Format: Android, Desktop, iOS

Price: From free

Wrike is a more traditional project management tool, with Gantt charts tracking progress. It allows you to create, assign and schedule tasks from inside the desktop or mobile app and instant messaging means you can catch up with team members while you're on the go. Like Trello, integrations with Dropbox and Google Drive are supported, plus you can take pictures from inside the app and add them to cards instantly. Push notifications make sure you're alerted when something needs your attention too, so you'll never miss an important update. With an attractive and simple to use interface, Wrike is suited to more traditional project managers.

Forget Myers-Briggs tests, if you want to know how your colleagues think, turn to Saberr.

The British start-up claims it can predict the performance of your office team based on how well you get along, using an algorithm informed by online dating. We spoke to its founder, Alistair Shepherd, who uses the software to make all his hires and even spot which startups are about to fail so he can poach their staff, which is how the company picked up its current CTO.

What does Saberr aim to do?

Our software forecasts how teams and individuals will perform based upon their ability to interact with each other.

When you work with people who you like and get on well with, your performance is at its best you use your skills to the best of your ability. But when you work with people who frustrate you and who you don't particularly respect, it's much harder to feel motivated at work.

Personality tests, such as Myers- Briggs, are very interesting, but not particularly useful. You can't forecast performance with that. We look at what really drives a person from a very data-driven perspective.

That sounds an awful lot like online dating.

We did a lot of our early research from online dating. What we're looking at is what makes people click, what makes people like each other? What makes people not like each other? The things that make a good long-term romantic relationship are also the things that make a good long-term friendship, or a good long-term professional relationship you're able to respect each other under varying degrees of stress over a long period of time. We looked for patterns in the data from online dating to see if that could help us when we were developing our early algorithms.

Of course, we're not trying to foster romantic relationships, because that would land us in a bit of trouble.

How do you know that people answer honestly?

When you're using data to try to analyse a person, it's easy to get bad data.

To give you a very crude example, if one of the questions was and it's not "are you hard-working?" There's an obvious right answer to that in the workplace. It takes a lot of effort to carefully design a survey.

More interesting is being able to get the same level of accuracy from data that you're producing in your daily life, because that means there's less chance for you to play the system. We're working on things such as analysing your email history to help give you a better assessment.

So how do you know it works?

The way we [test] it with current clients is, if they're a big company with hundreds of employees, we can go in and look at teams that they've had operating for the past couple of years, where they've got performance or outcome data. We'll run our analysis and compare which teams we think should have had the highest performance over the past couple of years with the actual outcome data.

They match up remarkably well. It's surprising because we don't look at people's skills; we don't look at their experience; we don't look at their demographics all things you consider when you're interviewing somebody. All we look at is the nature of the relationships. It's surprising how predictive that is when it comes to forecasting performance.

Has anyone ever refused to answer the questions?

We make the questions in our survey optional. It would be poor practice for an employer to force somebody to do this if they didn't want to. But we try to make it clear that this is for the benefit of the employee, so we get far fewer refusals than I would expect.

There's a big danger that, when you're developing a system such as this, you end up being seen as Big Brother and that it's just another tool to put you in a box. However, I think the real power of data is not giving it to Big Brother, but giving it to you as the employee to help you manage your career better. Which employee doesn't want to be happier at work and have a more successful career? I think we all strive for that.

Business leaders must put technology at the heart of their companies, or risk compromising their potential for success, according to technology consultancy Outbox.

Nicholas Mobbs, managing director of Outbox, a CRM implementaton firm now being acquired by PwC, tells IT Pro that modern thriving businesses are discerning adopters and users of technology.

"The technology market is incredibly challenging because it's changing every day," he says. "It's very difficult for any company to do anything successfully without adopting technology properly."

He adds: "A few years ago, companies could get away with doing stuff without having any technology in place, or having technology in place but not properly adapting it. Now I think that is not possible."

Mobbs names Uber and Airbnb as two success stories that few people had heard of five or six years ago, which both used technology to transform their industries.

The first step on that journey is getting tech workers involved in business strategy, says Bola Rotibi, research director at analyst house Creative Intellect Consulting.

"Bringing the technology people to the heart of business is fundamental. The problem has always been that people have been in their silos: You have the IT department, marketing, and so on," she says. "The challenge is getting people to collaborate that's much more of a business mentality, though.

"You don't want to overload people, but if you don't bring the tech guys in on the business, you're working blind everyone's working blind."

Rotibi explains that involving those with tech know-how with strategic decisions allows businesses to determine what risks they face, but also what the most apparent, and achievable, solutions may be.

Analyst and founder of Quocirca, Clive Longbottom, agrees with Rotibi, saying: "Tech people need to get embedded into the business thought process. They need to be able to listen to the business's needs and then go away and rapidly come back with a range of possibilities on how tech can enable the desired outcome.

"As long as the tech person can provide information on how the proposed systems impact the business's risk and cost, as well as how much it adds to the value of the business, the business can then make a decision based on its own corporate risk profile."

Technology can also break down gaps that exist between departments, like the sales division and the marketing division, according to Mobbs.

It is something that Outbox helps achieve by setting up CRM software, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

Mobbs says: "Marketing and sales basically have to work as a single solution. Marketing can't any longer be fire-and-forget, it has to be a continual process. Sales have to response to what marketing does, and marketing has to respond to sales they can no longer be siloed."

However, even with technology in place and those that know how to use it involved in strategic decisions, Longbottom warns that such a thing does not guarantee a business will thrive.

"Tech is incredibly important, but good tech married to bad business processes will just help an organisation go out of business faster than it already was doing," he points out.

"Good business processes on top of pre- or proscriptive tech will also be bad news. As the markets change, the tech can't, and so becomes a constraint on the business."

The solution is for business and tech to work together.

"The platform has to be flexible, the software needs to be modular, and the techies themselves need to accept that the best solution may not be one they own' or build and manage themselves," Longbottom says.

But digital strategist Lisa Talia Moretti believes that to succeed, companies must focus on people, rather than tech.

"For a company to simply keep up with technology is a tremendous effort. To tackle the challenge requires very holistic thinking," she claims. "People should always be at the heart of a business, because ultimately, the end users of all products and services are people. And that will never change."

Ongoing economic uncertainty is driving a greater number of business transformation projects and programmes with higher expectations for results.

So claims analyst firm Gartner, which believes such a shift requires engagement outside basic programme and portfolio management (PPM) practices.

Such uncertainty means IT-enabled business transformation projects are going well beyond the scope of previous practices and existing workplace experience. As a result, PPM leaders must take action to prepare for them, Gartner warned.

"Today, due to the turbulent nature of business, supporting strategic initiatives and adapting to market changes brings greater scrutiny upon all PPM leaders," said Robert Handler, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

"It will also drive the acquisition of much-needed organisation change management and business process change management capabilities. The increased severity of coming changes will serve to highlight PPM skill and practice deficiencies, and bring about increased recognition of the value of advanced practices."

Gartner predicted that most senior executives in the largest global organisations will rely on activist enterprise program management office (EPMO) leaders by 2017. This prediction is driven by two distinct factors, according to the analyst firm. The first is the increasing pressure toward innovation and differentiation as economies and businesses emerge from the recession. The second is that organisations need to significantly improve their ability to execute on strategy.

"Over the past five years, we've seen a significant trend toward interest and adoption of an EPMO leader, where the "P" might stand for program, portfolio or a combination of both. The majority of EPMO leaders currently have the task of providing visibility and decision support to business executives," said Donna Fitzgerald, research vice president at Gartner.

"What most of them haven't been asked to do is actually get something done. We see that situation changing as the concept of the EPMO becomes increasingly accepted."

All this amounts to a new PPM leader role emerging, according to Fitzgerald.

But there will be a shortage of skilled labour to fulfill the demand for such roles, according to Gartner. Professional service organisations will be unable to fill the void, because the role will require organic, internally developed power and influence through existing relationships across organisations.

Successful organisations will promote from within, Gartner suggested, while technology vendors offering program portfolio tools, primarily as dashboards to support visibility of strategic change initiatives, will emerge or evolve.

"The vendors that provide both the technology and methodology to connect these dashboards to the actual change initiatives will be the ones with staying power," Fitzgerald added.

A new report by networking giant Cisco suggests that, while global confidence in IT departments is on the up, the UK is lagging behind in many areas.

The company's annual IT Impact Survey shows that while on average 63 per cent of IT professionals are very confident in their department's ability to respond to business needs, this figure drops to 53 per cent in the UK.

Similarly, while the global average for the involvement of IT during the planning phase of rolling out new applications is 59, that figure drops to 53 in the UK.

Additionally, at 35 per cent, IT decision makers in the UK are amongst the least likely to currently be evaluating software defined networking, and are the most likely (30 per cent) to know nothing about the technology.

Finally, UK-based IT professionals have the least frequent contact with business leaders within their company, with only 34 per cent reporting they collaborate on a minimum weekly basis, compared to an average of 47 per cent.

Nevertheless, the overall picture across the 13 countries surveyed by Cisco is positive. 89 per cent of IT leaders collaborate with their business leaders more than once a month and 71 per cent say IT is deploying more applications than a year ago.

Across the board, moving applications to the cloud presents the greatest challenge to IT, followed by virtualising the data centre, virtual desktop infrastructure (the biggest problem in the UK), supporting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives and deploying software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Rob Soderbery, general manager of the Cisco Enterprise Networking group said of the results: "More than ever, IT has the potential to make a profound impact on the business ... by building a network architecture that can leverage multiple technology transitions.

"The most successful IT professionals are those who acknowledge that fast decision-making within the enterprise is directly tied to the readiness of the network."

Robots are not taking over the world and there's still hope for the human race, according to a new survey from the Economic Intelligence Unit.

According to the research, nearly three out of four respondents disputed the idea that automation was making employees less creative. In fact, 58 per cent of them thought technology actually improved the creative thinking of their employees.

But it's not all good news. European managers are more concerned about their ability to keep up with technology, and 45 per cent of them felt they were losing their competitive edge, compared with 35 per cent of Asian managers and 37 per cent of those in North America.

Introducing the report, Dennis McCauley, director global technology research for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said the aim had been to look at how the human and technology interaction was playing out within organisations.

"There are a lot of concerns about machines approaching on the domains of human; fears that the robots were taking over. To take some examples, look at Google's driverless cars and what that would mean to taxi drivers or IBM's Watson and its work in heath diagnostics."

But, he added, the fears were unfounded with most businesses using technology for greater creativity.

That being said, there were other concerns. "The people we spoke with said the biggest reason for problems was that systems weren't connected properly."

The survey found that managers considered process failure, rather than technology itself, to be the biggest cause of technological problems. Forty per cent of respondents claimed this, higher than the 38 per cent who claimed the fast-evolving nature of technology was the biggest problem.

McCauley said this system disconnect was the cause of technological failures, such as last year's New York Stock Exchange glitch, where a surge in trading caused a massive loss, and the NHS electronic patient records fiasco. "In both those cases, the processes were not right, they were human issues rather than technological ones," he said.

There was one area, however, where technology is hampering creativity, said McCauley. Eighty-two percent of respondents said the time taken up responding to email had increased in the last three years.

He agreed this was an issue that needed to be looked at but said the overall picture for industry was healthy. "The surprising thing for us was how positive the respondents were towards technology. It doesn't have to narrow the scope for being more imaginative and in future, there will be greater harmony between humans and machines."

A mix of legacy software, and staff bringing their own applications to work, is putting companies' software strategies under severe strain, according to a consultancy firm.

Avanade, the IT integrator part-owned by Accenture and Microsoft, believes that companies are creating their own "application strategy Hell", as they struggle to manage the pressures of employees to bring in unauthorised personal applications, and to update or replace legacy software.

Research by the firm suggests that two key developments have come together to create an application crisis: the upcoming end of support for Microsoft's Windows XP, in 2014, and the trend for individual employees to bring personal devices to work.

Those devices, mostly tablets and smartphones, are increasingly coming in to the business with personal apps too. These, rather than being selected and provisioned by corporate IT, are being bought from app stores by staff, or downloaded over the web.

The risk of malware infection, data loss, or simply the use of apps that are inconsistent or ineffective is all too real.

Avanade argues that the two trends are creating inefficiencies in business processes, and in turn, a loss of profits and of customer satisfaction. As many as 52 per cent of companies surveyed by the firm did not yet have a strategy in place to deal with Windows XP going out of support, and 91 per cent said that employees bringing their own apps posed a risk.

According to Nicholas Merriman, chief architect, at Avanade, organisations are better-placed to deal with legacy applications than they are with app proliferation (or Bring Your Own App), but for too many businesses, the enterprise software strategy remains, at best, disjointed.

"Legacy is a known issue in many organisations today," he says. "They have assessed the landscape and understand the issues, the potential impact and the mechanisms to mitigate. However BYOD, apps and SaaS, are relatively new and so the risk is, comparatively, not as well understood."

The increasing ease with which individuals, or departmental managers and project teams, can buy apps either from app stores or the cloud. Firms buy SaaS or cloud-based applications, as a way of bypassing slow or unresponsive internal IT. Frustration with current business applications is at least one reason, says Merriman.

"In our experience is this is due to two things. One is lack of agility; the other is the lack of apparent priority within IT due to competing business demands. In the past if IT couldn't deliver then the business had to wait or spin off their own IT function, which is a costly and risky approach. Now businesses don't need to wait: they can simply, with a credit card spin up services without involving IT at all," he says.

The answer, though, is not to ban people from downloading apps or using the cloud: even if it were practical, that would cause as many problems as it solves. Instead, IT needs to be quicker at identifying legacy applications, gaps in capability, or simply areas where a business application no longer works in the way the business needs. "The trick," Merriman says, "is to make the assessment process quick , and develop a model for remediation or replacement."

After all, no-one really wants to pay for business IT on their credit cards, do they?

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro.

The public cloud is the worst environment for a project manager (PM). You subscribe to the service you don't own, you access via the internet, you've got no control and no title over the cloud system and pretty insecure ownership of the data you upload. Talk about putting your assets on the line!

A good PM is always a bit paranoid because we like to know everything and control it. That's the only way you can guarantee to hit the targets and deliver the service. So project management, in these circumstances, is a nightmare. If service level agreements (SLAs) are involved, you will need to devote a major part of your budget to a good lawyer, as did many of the pioneers of outsourcing and application services.

While CIOs might understand the dangers of the public cloud ‘black box’, the line-of-business executives and managers don't. Your PM discipline is the barrier that protects the sanctity of the SLAs involved in a cloud implementation. But the cloud creates all kinds of pressures that threaten to crash through that barrier.

Here are some of them:

1. Compression of time

People expect enterprise-ready applications in hours now.

Most public cloud offerings have deceptively easy looking configuration management options through a so-called control panel that is nothing of the sort. This sends the business manager wild with anticipation and drives up expectation. Which puts pressure the project manager to speed up the completion. Succumbing to this pressure can be fatal, as you are the one who will get it in the neck later. All those people who thumped on the table demanding instant gratification will suddenly change their tune when service levels aren't met later. They will argue that you should have withstood the pressure on you – even when it was them was exerting it.

As a PM, you will argue that the necessary stages - requirements gathering and analysis - are the foundation on which SLAs will be built. They will look at the deceptively easy management tools, appoint themselves as instant IT experts and conclude that you are an IT jobsworth.

Comprehensive due diligence must be carried out before production scales up. In the rush to market, this is often ignored during cloud projects.

2. The ‘viral cloud’ phenomenon

A viral cloud is a cloud installation that starts off local and goes 'out there'. A bit like a YouTube sensation – the type that's generally out of your control and you end up losing your job.

You start the project with all your parameters mapped out. You have an initial user pool and you are omnipotent (like all good project managers should be) in your approval of workflows, access documents, process information and so on. But then, as so often happens, you can become a victim of your own success. Additional subscriptions are bought and it's often outside your consciousness and so beyond your control. You are literally sleep walking into service level problems.

The cloud's accessibility makes is that it makes it much easier for subscriptions to ramp up. Unless you baton down all the hatches and lock every window to outside interference.

The low barrier to entry could mask the potential for additional cost, unmitigated risk and breach of minimum governance standards.

One university fell victim to an unauthorised cloud deployment that was bought using one of the Faculty’s discretionary budgets. The PM only discovered this when data integrity issues arose over the student enrolments database.

3. Managing project boundaries

It's not just the users and the subscriptions that threaten to get out of control, the project manager in the cloud has another lively set of variables that could affect his ability to meet service level targets.

The cloud has provided the ideal environment for development APIs. These interfaces are everywhere and there are loads of variations. So not only are there thousands of vendor apps, there are swarms of satellite apps written by third parties that have easy access. These are of questionable quality. Not only are the barbarians at the gate, but they've got a key.

The Salesforce App Exchange, Android Market and the Apple iStore are the homelands for these agents of doom. They all have cute names but a more honest description would be Project Hijacker, SLA-killer and Damage Wreaker. These apps can extend the boundary of projects in an uncontrolled manner. The PM needs to decide what project governance controls they can impose to mitigate these adverse consequences.

4. Challenges for standard methodologies such as PRINCE2 and ITIL

Prince2: I've been there, done it and got the certificate. Like Pilates it gives your body of work a good core strength but it doesn't provide the flair a PM needs.

The cloud can even undermine the comprehensive large scale project methodologies of Prince2. Why? Because Prince2 works best for the largest of enterprise IT projects. Granted, key elements of it are universally applicable to all projects but the volatile nature of cloud projects, which seem to be unstructured working cultures - implement first and modify as you go – aren't consistent. You can still be a cloud innovator, but you must keep the disciplines you learnt when all your computing resources were kept in house.

5. Use of cloud technologies by project managers

One of the clinching business arguments for cloud computing is universal access. Lowering the barrier to entry for applications - using handheld applications on tablets and smart phones – lowers your costs. This even applies to Project management software, which you can use for the life of a project, rather than take out a mortgage and buy the package.

As a project manager on geographically distributed projects, this can be a tremendous boon. Whenever information sharing and regular status updates of project activities are important to mobile project stakeholders, the cloud is a revelation.

But there are still nagging questions that need to be addressed. Can you scale down at the end of the project? Can you find a home for your project management data that's now being stored in the cloud, so you can use it later if needed. If you leave the cloud what happens to the data and can you still make use of it?

Formula 1 is all about pushing the boundaries of speed, so it's no surprise technology plays a huge role in building cars, let alone getting them to the end of a race.

The Marussia F1 team uses enormous amounts of technology including 3D printers to build prototype parts, a Sage ERP system to monitor inventory and a mammoth 60 Teraflop cluster to carry out simulations.

Before we delve into the technology, lets get a bit of background about one of the newest teams in the paddock. Marussia F1 debuted back in 2010 under the Virgin Racing banner.

So far the team has a best-placed finish of 14th, in what is considered to be one of the most high-tech and competitive sports in the world.

Kevin Lee, operations director at Marussia F1, has set an ambitious target of achieving a podium place at the inaugural Russian GP in 2014.

We took a look behind the scenes of the company's factory in Banbury to see the effort that goes into building a Marussia F1 racing car.

The team creates prototype parts to ensure they fit together before commissioning them

There are over 4500 parts on each car, but constant enhancements mean this number rapidly increases throughout the season. Lee estimated around a third of the parts on the car change between the first and last race of the year.

Every part is designed in-house and then custom built by a supplier. Marussia F1 does not manufacturer any parts in-house at present, but engineers are able to create prototypes, as seen above. These parts are made using a 3D printer, which builds layers of Resin to create the piece. This process can take around 24 hours, depending on the size of the part.

To keep track of parts, Marussia F1 uses Sage ERP X3. The integrated resource planning system allows employees to carry out purchasing, inspection, inventory control, and keep track of invoices and receipts.

Each part is inspected before it can be used on the car

To ensure reliability, all parts are thoroughly inspected. A measuring probe with an industrial ruby on the end is used to check the tolerance of parts. It is possible to measure up to a Micron (0.001mm), which is smaller than a particle of dust (0.004mm).

Formula 1 car parts are extremely complex. A team of engineers is needed to simply start Murussia's Cosworth engine, which must be warmed for 40 minutes prior to doing so.

Cleanliness is extremely important in Formula 1. A spec of dust in hydraulic fluid can cause a catastrophic part failure, for example.

The team seals off the hydraulics department to help keep it dust free.

The walls, tiles and ceilings are cleaned regularly. There are numerous extraction fans and a special washer is used to clean parts.

Currently, Marussia is using 40 Teraflops

Testing is pivotal and can give teams the edge on race day. Marussia F1 has a Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Cluster with a capacity of 60 Teraflops on site, but is only using 40 Teraflops so it can use part of its budget to test in wind tunnel.

The CFD provides virtual simulations, but is typically used to test the front of the car as it becomes difficult to replicate the dirty air, which will flow over the rear wing. Data is collected from the CFD and combined with information from the wind tunnel and track testing to measure performance and make changes.

Such computation power is typically used by military, aerospace and film studios, such as Disney. The room is water cooled and draws so much power, it requires a separate generator.

Data from the wind tunnel is used to make aerodynamic modifications

The engineers build a 50 per cent scale model for use in the wind tunnel. It is important there are no errors on this model because any mistakes will be doubled when the real car is made.

This is last year's model and is used by the pit crew to practice pit stops on a daily basis during off-season.

Countless man hours go into the preparation of the final car before it even hits the track, where success is ultimately determined. Race cars are typically shipped back to Banbury between races to be stripped and checked before the next race.

The next race will be the at Circuit de Catalunya in Spain, with qualifying on 12 May.

Dealing with larger volumes of data ranks highly on most IT directors' lists of priorities for the coming year. But research by economists suggests that big data could do more, and deliver a significant boost to the economy over the next five years.

There is little point in IT building sophisticated new analytics tools, if the business lacks the skills needed to interpret the results, and turn the data into decision making.

The report, from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (and funded by SAS, an analytics tool vendor), suggests that improved use of "big data" could boost the UK economy by 216 billion, and create some 58,000 jobs.

Calculations by the Cebr suggest that big data delivered economic benefits of 25.1 billion last year, with the contribution rising over the next few years as more firms adopt advanced analytics techniques. This would equate to a boost of about three per cent of GDP, something that will be very welcome given the UK economy's current fragility.

The idea behind the calculations is simple enough: if businesses have access to better information, they will be more efficient, and more profitable. The Cebr splits the benefits into three main areas: business creation, efficiency, and innovation.

Big data, for example, should help companies start up, because they will be better placed to identify and target their markets. Companies should become more efficient, for example through better customer intelligence, or streamlining the supply chain; these efficiency gains should contribute 149.5 billion to the economy by 2017.

And innovation should, the researchers suggest, also gain from big data, because it can improve research and development as well as the creation of new markets. Gains, the researchers say, will apply across all sectors of industry, and the public sector.

But there are concerns over whether UK businesses, and the UK IT sector in particular, has the skills it needs to help businesses exploit big data. In particular, the figure for the jobs boost from better data analytics depends heavily on UK companies increasing their IT and analytics teams' capabilities, or where work is outsourced, by that work going to UK firms.

This is by no means certain. Already, CIOs are reporting shortages of business intelligence and analytics specialists. The problem is, if anything, more acute in the lines of business themselves. There is little point in IT building sophisticated new analytics tools, if the business lacks the skills needed to interpret the results, and turn the data into decision making.

In fact, unless the skills gap is plugged, and plugged soon, it is not just the jobs benefits but the wider economic opportuntity presented by big data that could be lost. When it comes to skills, work could go to India, Eastern Europe or even the US. But companies ignoring the big data opportunity would be an even worse outcome.

This point is not lost on the Cebr: "the jobs figures do assume there is a labour market that is available, trained and skilled," said Shehan Mohamed, the report's main author, and a Cebr economist. "There is a need to close that gap over the next five years."

To an extent this is already happening, and the IT industry is playing a role, for example though SAS' Curriculum Pathways project, which aims to boost the understanding of statistics and analysis in schools.

But it is also an area where CIOs and IT directors can take a lead, and use this report, and others like it, to show that there is more to data management than good housekeeping.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT Pro

Dell's software group, and the vendor's IT management arm, Dell KACE, have teamed up to launch a new site for the IT community, ITNinja.

The site is focused on providing vendor-neutral support information on topics such as application deployment and configuration, and application management. The new site was developed from AppDeploy.com, a support community Dell acquired through its KACE subsidiary.

The new site will use a gamification strategy, based loosely on martial arts culture, to encourage participation and knowledge sharing. According to Bob Kelly, AppDeploy's founder, the aim is to build up content, to move away from the site's original niche of application deployment.

"We are now geared to a wider group of IT professionals: help desks, desktop support, and people in systems management. We are growing organically to cover related topics," said Kelly.

Visitors to the site will be rewarded with belt ranks, up to Black Belt level, which will also confer Ninja status on the member. Membership of the site is free of charge.

Research by Dell KACE found that 80 per cent of IT professionals use online support communities, and 95 per cent said that they were able to do their jobs more effectively by networking and sharing information with their peers online.

Google this week launched Get Mo a new website to help businesses make their own pages mobile friendly.

The internet giant claimed there were 23 million smartphones in the UK, or 50 per cent of the country's mobile phones, so not having a mobile ready website for your company was missing a major portion of the market.

"Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn't mean it's mobile-friendly," read a statement from Google.

"Mobile sites are designed for the small screen, with the needs of mobile users in mind. A mobile-friendly site can help your business connect with customers and drive conversions."

Just because you can see your desktop site on a mobile phone doesn't mean it's mobile-friendly.

The website howtogomo.com offers firms the opportunity to see how their websites currently appear on mobile browsers, then gives advice on how to build a mobile website, suggesting 17 partners which have won the Google seal of approval.

It also points companies towards extra mobile features they could use to boost both their own businesses and Google's profit margins. The website offers tips on mobile-only AdWord campaigns, Google + pages and Google Analytics.

A number of UK firms have signed up and are willing to be case studies for the offering, including Auto Trader, Carphone Warehouse and eBookers.com.

"In the old days, people bought an Auto Trader magazine and brought it with them to buy the car," said Nick Gee, mobile director at Autotrader.co.uk.

"We lost that a bit with desktop but now we're back in people's pockets. Mobile is growing and it's not going to slow down."

To visit the website, click here.

Fujitsu and union Unite have reached a settlement over a dispute that led to industrial action last year.

The dispute arose out of various grievances Unite members had, including pay and pension security, leading to a strikes at Fujitsu's plants in Crewe on 30 June and in Manchester on 19 September.

The quarrel between the two escalated in the second half of last year when over 1,000 staff vowed to strike in joint action with the Public and Commercial Services union.

This is finally bringing the dispute to a conclusion, which is obviously something Fujitsu and ourselves are very happy about.

Fujitsu promises of pay rises of between 1.5 per cent and 2.5 per cent did little to dissuade strikers. The IT vendor was breaking agreements in a number of areas, including benefits, pay, pensions and redundancy, according to Unite.

"The agreement reflects a significant improvement in relationships with the company since last year. It means better protection for pensions for Fujitsu employees across the UK and pay rises for most Manchester staff," said Kevin O'Gallagher, Unite national officer for IT and communications.

"There is a renewed commitment to work together through our agreements which can help avoid conflict in future.

"A significant number of new Unite representatives have recently been elected and the agreement should mean reps across the UK are, for the first time, allowed work time to deal with many issues affecting employees."

The companies came to an agreement on 3 October, where Unite suspended industrial action after it felt progress was being made. Members were due to strike again on 4 October.

On 17 November, another deal was reached, which continued the suspension.

"This is finally bringing the dispute to a conclusion, which is obviously something Fujitsu and ourselves are very happy about," Ian Allinson, senior Unite representative at Fujitsu Manchester, told IT Pro.

As part of the agreement, a pensions consultation body is to be established, alongside pay rises.

Microsoft will not be giving a keynote at 2013's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), after the software giant claimed the timing of the show did not align with its sales strategy.

The Redmond firm said it would be removing its booth from the show as well, although it will "continue to participate to connect with partners and customers."

"We won't have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don't align with the show's January timing," said Frank Shaw, corporate vice president for corporate communications at Microsoft, blog post.

"As we look at all of the new ways we tell our consumer stories from product momentum disclosures, to exciting events like our Big Windows Phone, to a range of consumer connection points like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft.com and our retail stores it feels like the right time to make this transition."

CES 2012 is due to take place from 9 to 13 January in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ebullient CEO Steve Ballmer is due to give a keynote on the first day.

"From mobile to desktop to gaming and beyond, Microsoft has a significant impact on all aspects of the consumer technology industry, and Steve Ballmer's keynote is a great way to kick off the exciting 2012 International CES," said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CES organisers CEA.

"We are excited to hear Microsoft's latest initiatives and Ballmer's vision for where consumer technology is heading."

Microsoft has previously used CES as a chance to unveil major products, including the first ever Xbox.

IBM has announced a number of new tools and features to help businesses get more value out of information and tackle the challenges posed by so-called big data, including an iPad version of Cognos.

Around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created each day, according to IBM, which also claims 90 per cent of the world's current information volume has been amassed in the last two year's alone. This data growth is being spurred along by social media, with one billion Tweets and 30 billion messages being posted on Facebook each month.

To help make more sense of this data growth and aid better business decisions, IBM has beefed up its software portfolio. In addition to extending the reach of its Cognos tool to include iPad users, Big Blue used its Information on Demand (IOD) conference in Las Vegas to unveil:

Hadoop-based cloud software to help deal with the wealth of unstructured data, which can be up and running in just half an hour.

Predictive analytics software with built-in mapping.

Software to rank the quality of data and provide a greater level of information assurance.

Cincinnati Zoo is one such company making use of Cognos on the iPad while Danish energy giant Vestas Wind Systems has implemented IBM BigInsights and supercomputing.

With more than one million visitors each year, Cincinnati Zoo needed a better way of analysing customer behaviour and turning that insight into increased revenue, according to John Lucas, the organisation's director of operations.

"Analytics has changed us to the DNA level," he said. "We turned to IBM a couple of years ago. We realised we couldn't see the story being told to us by our guests as we didn't have a lens to see it. Making guest-centric decisions was very challenging for us."

That has since changed. By implementing Cognos 8 in 2010, the zoo can now gain a better insight into customer behaviour and better target its marketing and other efforts accordingly.

As a result, Lucas believes the software helped drive $500,000 in new revenues to the zoo in the first quarter. For a business with annual revenue of $27 million, that's quite a return on investment, he claimed.

"We are able to report guest behaviour and spending and can very strategically and surgically send marking communications based on likes, dislikes." he said.

"Our members are more temperature intolerant than our non members. They stop coming after 90 degrees. We use [analytics] not only to drive a superior guest model, but new revenues too."

Cognos on the iPad will help such aims going forward and enable analytics use on the move, according to Lucas.

"We are an animal business but also a people business. On a busy day you won't see me and the executive team and managers in our offices," he said. "We go out there and interact with guests and check on pain points."

Similarly, Vestas is gaining business advantage through its partnership with IBM.

Lars Christian Christensen, vice president of plant siting and forecasting at Vestas Technology R&D, told a press conference at IOD how his company was using IBM tech to aid wind turbine placement.

"Imagine putting the Hoover Dam in the wrong location. That would not be fun If a customer turns up and says Where should I put a power plant equivalent to the Hoover Dam site?' I have to be able to write a reply fairly quickly," he said.

"We know wind direction, turbulence you name it - 178 different parameters. Big data enables us to ask in this big pool of data Where should we locate the next plant?' And we get the answer really, really fast. This helps us to create business case certainty."

Vestas expects the amount of weather and related data it has to analyse in the future to quickly reach and exceed 20 petabytes in the coming years.

With big data tools, Vestas can get answers to some queries in a matter of hours, where it would have taken approximately three weeks, Christensen concluded.

Dave Evans has two jobs at networking giant Cisco. He works as the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group, helping Cisco's customers understand the implications of networks and network technology on their businesses. His other role is Chief Futurist where he analyses where technology in general is going and predicts future technological developments.

Unsurprisingly for a Cisco executive, he sees the network as central to many potential technological developments. We caught up with Dave at the Cisco Live 2011 expo and conference in Las Vegas to get his thoughts on the tech we could expect to see within the next few decades and many are not what you'd expect from an executive of a networking company.

Dave on the future of video.

We believe that by 2015 90%+ of traffic flowing across the network will be video. I believe that's like a million minutes of video per second will traverse the network by 2015. A massive amount of video. HD video is moving from HD to super HD such as 4k displays. We're seeing 3D, holographic and so on. Video is getting fatter, richer and more substantial.

Today, it's very difficult for technology to parse and understand video and images like humans can.

So the big question on my mind is not so much the network, it's not whether the network can bear the load, and I'm confident that it can, I have no concerns there. The big challenge is how do we analyse video in meaningful ways. That's the trick. As a human being we can watch a two hour movie and I can ask you what that movie was about and you can tell me. That's really difficult for technology to do. Today, it's very difficult for technology to parse and understand video and images like humans can. It's not quite there.

In Brazil there are policeman that wear glasses that can scan 200 faces a second and do facial recognition by tying back to the cloud, so we're getting there. But I think it will be a number of years before it can parse and understand the meaning of it like human beings can and get the subtleties of it. That's our biggest challenge.

IT Pro: When do you think accurate transcription of video will happen? Do you have a timeframe for that?

I think it'll be about a decade before it's really, really good and when it's real-time. We are learning and advancing at exponential rates, so there could be some breakthroughs which will allow it to happen sooner, but conservatively it's about a ten year horizon.

IBM has a project underway called BlueBrain. It's a ten year initiative to create a working model of a human brain not to simulate, but create... down to every synapse, every neural network, every chemical interaction.

IT Pro: So you think ten years is a pragmatic, conservative time frame even though it's an incredibly complicated field? It's not just a matter of transcribing what they say, there are vocal inflections, nuances, colloquialisms, visual cues etc.

Absolutely, it's very complex. I think the paradigms for how we parse language, videos, photos, we will start learning how to do that at exponential rates. It learns in exponential ways. It's not linear because of the connectivity that we've got. Look at the work, simple work, Microsoft has done with Photosynth or Sea Dragon. Photosynth takes photos from all over the world and can recreate 3D scenes by stitching the photos together. They can look at the EXIF data of different photos and analyse the pictures. Just 15 years ago, the technology to stitch photos together was really complex and really expensive. Today, any commodity piece of technology can do it. You can buy a camera that does it in real-time as you move your camera around it will stitch your photos together. The technology is evolving at such exponential rates, that yes it's very complex but I think we'll see some breakthroughs.

I'll give you one other quick example IBM has a project underway called BlueBrain. It's a ten year initiative to create a working model of a human brain not to simulate, but create. That's a big distinction. Down to every synapse, every neural network, every chemical interaction. The project manager believes that after a decade a consciousness will evolve from this artificial brain. Whether or not it will, I don't know. But the point is that we're learning to create neural networks, we're putting a lot of money in quantum computing which is one of the tools that turns out is very, very good at neural analysis.

Over the coming years as we see more and more breakthroughs in quantum computing, quantum networks, neural nets, AI, we finally have the computing horsepower necessary and all the connectivity to enable us to start analysing rich things like human brains too.

Dave on artificial prosthetics and enhancing people with technology.

30 years ago when I was trying to figure what I want do when I grow up,

I foresaw the day when we would start integrating biology and technology. That day is beginning now.

For example, you look at the way Dean Cayman is doing with Luke, the prosthetic arm. It's a brain-controlled arm. Toyota has a wheelchair, that if you're a paraplegic, you can control it by thinking about doing it. In the last two months alone there have been advances in MRI scanning where they can scan the human brain and detect what you're about to do before you do it. They can detect what you're thinking before you audibly say it. It's crude, but it's getting there.

We will create internet-based telepathy. We will communicate with each other, by thought alone, over the network.

Over the coming years as we learn how to integrate hardware and software into wetware, we are wetware, we will start to augment humans with electronics. Now, it gets very futuristic but what I will predict will happen, and proof-of-principles have been done for this, we will create internet-based telepathy. We will communicate with each other, by thought alone, over the network. Proof-of-principles have already been done in very crude ways, such as morse code.

Because of Moore's Law and advances in nanotech, our ability to do things at the subatomic level we're becoming masters of our own destiny. We're entering a phase of self-evolution. We will start to augment ourselves more and more with technology. We will add technology to our brains to augment our own capabilities. Now this is decades out, but if we keep going down the path we're going we'll be able to download all the world's information just by thinking about doing it.

IT Pro: With man-machine integration, do you think something like that, or perhaps something else entirely, would constitute a technological singularity? Where our conceptions of ourselves as human beings change so radically that we wouldn't recognise ourselves as we are now?

It's certainly possible. That's a lot of the work that Ray Kurzweil does and talks about. It's more a philosophical question than technological. Our thinking is constrained by our own ability to think - our cranial capacity limits what we can think about philosophically or technically. If we can extend our cranial capacity, physical or virtually, it's theoretically possible that we can reach a new plateau of thinking. You're right that we may get to a point where we've increased our abilities so much that we look at ourselves in completely different ways and the singularity does occur. I'm not sure if it will or not, I don't know that it will occur in quite the time horizon that other futurists think. I think it may be a bit longer than that we have other challenges facing us right now as a species.

our cranial capacity limits what we can think about philosophically or technically. If we can extend our cranial capacity, physical or virtually, it's theoretically possible that we can reach a new plateau of thinking.

One of the things that I factor into my calculation, if you will, is ourselves. Human beings get in our own way. There's a lot we could do technically speaking in a perfect world, but there's cultural issues, political issues, social issues. Take stem cell research as an example. There are all kinds of things you could do with stem cell research, but what about the ethical issues? What about the religious issues, those kinds of things? I don't know yet that we're quite at the evolutionary stage where we can start to advance at those rates, we still have to get out of our own way. We'll get there, assuming there's no reset event that occurs. It's quite a few years out still.

IT Pro: What do you mean by a reset event?

Throughout history there have always been events that reset the clock. It could be something like a pandemic. It could be both positive and negative. It could be a massive breakthrough in renewable energy. It could be an asteroid hitting the planet (it's happened many times before). It could be a war. I'm very optimistic and try not to concentrate too much on the dire aspects of life, but the reality is that things happen throughout history and they always have. If a reset event occurs, it could put us back a bit and that could reset the timescale.

That world {travel between parallel universes} is totally realistic physicists have proven mathematically that it can be done.

Dave on the future of the internet in a nutshell.

The number of devices connected to the internet will grow exponentially. Today we have roughly 10 billion devices, give or take. In the next nine years, the number will grow to 50 billion devices - within a decade, every single device that has an on or off switch will be connected to the network.

We will create orders of magnitude more date. In 2008 we created five exobytes of data, that's about a billion DVDs worth of information. By the end of this year we will create 1.2 zettabytes of information. By 2015 almost one zettabyte of information will flow across the network. That's 44x increase since 2009.

The network is going to become much, much faster. We're going to see much richer devices connected to it and richer data sent across the network. Every device you can imagine - people, livestock, trees, shoes - will be connected to the network. Everything's going to get connected to the network.

It's going to be a very different world.

Dave on one of his favourite TV shows.

I love Fringe. That world [travel between parallel universes] is totally realistic. It could be hundreds of years before we could transition between them [parallel universes], but physicists have proven mathematically that it can be done.

City University London will be offering a new course from September this year, aimed at boosting IT professionals' mid-career development.

The university describes the MSc in IT Consultancy as "an intensive, demanding course for those who want to excel in senior positions." It will cover both risk assessment and skills for identifying strategic opportunities.

As the two-year course is targeted at established professionals, classes will be part-time and limited to 10 students.

"IT consultancy attracts professionals from a wide range of backgrounds many have a technical grounding, while others come from accountancy, business and management disciplines," said

course director Dr George Buchanan.

"Our aim with this course is to enable professionals with around five years' experience to formalise their current expertise, while gaining new professional and technical skills to step up to leading consultancy or change or project management positions."

The MSc in IT Consultancy is the newest tech-based course added to the university's postgraduate curriculum. It joins the well-established Master of Information Leadership (MIL) aimed at providing training for chief information officers (CIOs) and another new Masters course, the MSc in Information Security and Risk.

Sky has announced it plans to hire an extra 100 staff to join its technology team in Scotland.

The permanent jobs will be based at its Livingston offices and build on the existing customer business systems division responsible for giving tech support for Sky products and services.

The company confirmed it was looking for employees with varying levels of experience, including juniors and graduates, but a number of senior positions would also be available including technical test analysts, Java developers and project managers.

"Groundbreaking technology is at the very heart of our business, so we want to recruit only the very best to help us [deliver this]," said Scott Mackay, director of the customer business systems at Sky.

"We want to tempt high calibre bright sparks who are the very best in their profession to build a long-term career with us."

Benefits for employees include free Sky+HD and broadband, in addition to full training.

This is the second boost to Scotland's technology industry in a matter of days. On Friday, a new 89 million Glasgow-based technology centre was announced, which looks set to create 700 jobs and boost the country's economy by 100 million.

IT professionals need to brush up on their business skills in order to compete for jobs, according to new research.

The report, from IT recruiter Modis, claims the traditional technological skills needed to work in the sector are just not enough anymore.

"The future for the IT professional is survival of the fittest," said Jim Albert, managing director of Modis.

"Those who embrace broader business skills have access to greater and more exciting opportunities to lead organisational change than ever before, while those that don't risk being pigeon-holed as back office implementers."

The three key skills needed to take on the job market are "greater commercial acumen, strategic thinking and developed communication skills."

The research, which questioned IT leaders from across 110 UK businesses, showed 59 per cent thought IT needed to take responsibility for the challenges faced by the entire organisation. However, only 15 per cent of the departments were considered to be "strategic thinkers."

Adam Thilthorpe, director for professionalism in IT at the BCS, said: "It wasn't long ago that arguments centred on whether an organisation even needed a CIO but reliance on technology is putting the CIO role strategically at the heart of the business."

IT professionals must shed the old stereotype of hiding in the basement and become a more integral part of a business, communicating both with other divisions and with customers outside of the company, the research found.

"The message coming out of our conversations with employers is loud and clear: they want much more than technical and project management expertise," Albert added.

"In short, the future IT professional needs to be a master of many disciplines truly a business all rounder."

The NHS lacks the necessary skills for the Government's proposed 'information revolution.'

So claims a report by IT industry body Intellect, which suggested in the wake of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and its outsourcing of IT services, NHS trusts would not have sufficient IT experience on hand to make key decisions.

The report said: "Trust boards and management teams have on the whole not fully appreciated or understood the gains that can be achieved by appropriate deployment of ICT throughout their organisations."

The Government's proposals were outlined in 'Liberating the NHS: An Information Revolution,' a consultation document published to follow up the Government White Paper 'Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS'.

The overall goal of the Government proposals is to better integrate IT into the NHS by creating standardised systems and allowing patients access to, and control of, their medical records online.

"Intellect recommends CIOs (chief information officers) of appropriate seniority and experience are included within executive management teams to make informatics more prominent within NHS organisations," the report added.

"ICT functions in the NHS need to mature and do so quickly if they are to deliver the Information Revolution and ensure transition take place smoothly."

The report went on: "We need to get to a point where the CIO function is best placed to lead transformation work, because they possess the end-to-end view of how an organisation works."

IT PRO talked to Intellect spokesman Jon Lindberg and asked why the NHS was seemingly lacking in IT expertise. Lindberg explained that because NPfIT was a "top-down management approach" it took care of IT business development, risk assessment and project management centrally.

"This shift means that there is likely to be a shortage of skills and capability at a local level within the NHS to successfully procure, manage and implement ICT solutions."

When asked what sort of skills the organisation felt were absent from NHS Trusts, Lindberg said: "Skills that Trusts may need to build and develop include: commercial awareness, business awareness of wider organisational objectives and functions, staff development and training, benchmarking and evaluation of outcomes and effectiveness of ICT solutions."

"Of course there are Trusts that have made sufficient investment in their ICT functions and developed their staff to perform at a very high level, but there are many that have fallen behind," he added.

In an article on e-Health Insider it was claimed Intellect's report "contends that the current percentage spent on information solutions does not reflect the value of information to the care process."

When asked to comment on this, Lindberg said: "There are many different systems within the NHS but at the moment these are not joined-up and therefore cannot be fully utilised to take best advantage of the information the NHS holds."

"The value of the information the NHS holds would be much better utilised if there were investment to join systems up and facilitate sharing, particularly bearing in mind that the NHS currently spends around two per cent of its budget on ICT so not much more investment is needed."

He added: "Indeed the NHS should look to re-use and share services wherever possible as long as this enables better and more efficient information sharing."

IT PRO asked if Intellect thought part of the problem was there were not enough qualified IT professionals working in the NHS outside of outsourced contracting.

"Part of the problem yes, but also that as the restructuring of the NHS takes place we need to be careful not to lose highly trained staff and the tacit knowledge of those professionals, including those from Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts," concluded Lindberg.

A new competition to help transform scientific ideas into product realties has been launched in the North-East of England.

Newcastle Science City has launched the contest with a 20,000 prize to help encourage innovation and give support to either a company or individual with the drive to put plans into business action.

The key areas the organisation is looking for innovations in are ageing and health, sustainability or regenerative medicine.

Simon Green, project manager at Newcastle Science City, said: "The competition presents a phenomenal opportunity to businesses and individuals to develop their ideas and realise their potential especially in the current economic climate when investment can be difficult to secure."

"At Newcastle Science City we have the right expertise and the connections to create innovate, high-growth businesses and this competition will help accelerate that."

Once the applications have been made, six contenders will be short-listed and be in the running to win the support from the organisation, which could include market research, marketing, software development and intellectual property protection.

It is then hoped the product could come to market in as little as 12 months.

Newcastle Science City is a joint venture between Newcastle University, Newcastle City Council and One North East in an attempt to encourage the science industry in the area.

Candidates have to want to be based in the North-East and applications must be submitted Friday 11 February at 5pm.

Click here to make an application.

Anyone who's ever watched someone laboriously create a project timeline in Excel will know that there's a big gap in the market for simple, easy-to-use project management software. It's at exactly this gap that Swiftlight, which costs 237 compared to Microsoft Project's 530, is aimed.

The software is billed as being so easy to use that even someone who hasn't used project management software before will be able to quickly get to grips with it. It has seven different screens, or "views". These include the default timeline view; the Activity Group Summary which is a basic table of dates and tasks; Activity Group Detail which shows you all the information on a specific task, and Action List, which shows you all the actions in your project along with their status.

The view that's most important is the timeline. Creating a timeline is simple. Just drag and drop tasks on the page, lining up tasks with the dateline. You can easily extend a task by grabbing its right-hand edge with your mouse cursor and dragging. Once your timeline is complete, you can specify different types of activity. For instance, we tested the program by creating a project plan for a marketing brochure. Our timeline clearly shows which tasks are copywriting, which are subediting, which are design and so on.

You can add more detail by selecting a task and then clicking on Activity Group Detail (an Activity Group is the program's name for a type of task in this case copywriting, editing and so on). In this view, you can see who owns that task, any milestones that relate to it and so on. You can also break it up into sub-tasks, assigning each to a different owner. If you want to check on the progress of your project, you can run a status report or display the timeline in the review mode, which shows you where you are compared to where you had planned to be.

In many ways, Swiftlight lives up to its promise. It's easy to get to grips with, it's not that expensive for project management software and it presents a lot of information in one place. However, Swiftlight also suffers from a few oddities. Chief among these is the inability to set dependencies, to specify that a task should begin when another ends. Without dependencies, if you change the date a task begins on or its duration, you'll need to manually move all other related tasks to accommodate this.

We were also a bit bewildered by the absence of a table of dates that we could easily adjust in order to manipulate our Gantt chart. The drag and drop facility is good, but a simple table view would also have been handy. What's more, while the interface is simple it also looks strangely old-fashioned. For example, when a task is completed it shows up in the Action List Over Time as a box with a cross through it. Whether or not the software is pretty or not isn't that important. However, in much of the interface, for instance the Action List, the way information was arranged combined with the way it was formatted made it difficult to understand what you were looking at.

Verdict

Swiftlight is easy to use. You can create a project plan in just a few minutes and easily populate it with information about resources, milestones and so on. However, we sometimes found the application's layout confusing and the inability to add dependencies limits the program's usefulness, even for relatively simple projects.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 700MHz processor 256MB RAM 27MB hard disk space Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 or later

This week, industry analyst Gartner has been holding its annual project management summit in London.

Effective project management remains a difficult area for many IT professionals.

Whether it is something as complex as the NHS' National Programme for IT, or the relatively simple issue of a systems upgrade that goes failed - such as the outage that affected Twitter earlier this week IT usually hits the headlines when projects run into difficulties.

Sometimes, a technical issue will come up that even the best-prepared team could not anticipate. As Greg Balestrero, chief executive of the Project Management Institute, and one of the keynote speakers at the Gartner event, points out IT is increasingly complex, especially as more of the value in an IT system moves into software.

The pace of change in the industry also means that IT managers constantly have to work to stay on top of their technical skills. This, combined with tight budgets in many IT shops, mean that not enough attention is paid to good project management, or to project management skills.

The ideal person to run an IT project, Balestrero says, has both IT skills, and project management capabilities that are "independent of IT certifications". Of course, some people take to these skills more easily than others, but they can be learned. "As soon as you start working on something other than code - something that is a project - you should start learning about project management," he says.

As Gartner's Michael Hanford, a research director and the summit chair, points out, businesses tend to see IT project management as a distinct discipline or function.

It should not be. "The fact that you happen to be delivering project in the IT space should be no more significant than fact you are delivering a product project, a marketing or an operations project," he says.

Unfortunately, the view among project management professionals is that IT is simply not as good as it is in other area of business, at least in part because IT is seen as its own silo.

Removing the barriers between IT, and other parts of the business, is as critical to successful IT delivery as technical knowledge, Hanford suggests. But breaking down the barriers needs investment and board-level support, just as improving IT project management means investing more in IT managers' skills.

Chief information officers (CIOs) and IT directors should, Hanford says, "ask the board how happy they are with what they are getting from their IT investments".

If the answer is "no", then a relatively small sum spent on project management techniques should greatly improve the returns generated by IT overall.

But IT managers also need to prove that it is about more than the technology. It is also about taking a professional approach.

* The Gartner PPM Summit continues today at the London Lancaster hotel.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT PRO.

Comments? Questions? You can email him here.

The UK is proving somewhat careless when it comes to data management, with figures showing more than half (53 per cent) of British business managers have disengaged the encryption on their laptops.

Only business managers in the US were found to be worse, with 60 per cent placing corporate information at risk by turning off company laptops' encryption solutions.

The UK also came second only to the US in the bad stakes where a lost or stolen laptop resulted in a data breach, according to the Human Factor in Laptop Encryption study from Absolute Software Corporation and the Ponemon Institute.

Almost two-thirds (61 per cent) of UK IT managers admitted stolen devices had led to a data breach, compared to 72 per cent of Americans.

"While laptop encryption is an essential and important security tool, improper end-user actions such as turning off security features, sharing passwords, or using insecure wireless networks may substantially reduce the effectiveness of encryption in protecting laptop computers," warned Dr Larry Ponemon.

UK organisations may want to take note of the findings, especially when new powers are handed to the Information Commissioner's Office.

From 6 April 2010, the regulatory body will be able to implement penalties of up to 500,000 for serious breaches of the Data Protection Act.

Tech giants are putting their expertise to good use outside of the corporate arena by using IT to combat malaria by ensuring drugs are more readily available.

Dubbed SMS for Life, the solution - jointly developed by IBM, Novartis and Vodafone - is being used in association with the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, to boost availability of anti-malarial drugs in remote areas of Tanzania.

SMS for Life brings together mobiles, SMS and web-based tech to help track and manage the supply of Artemisinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT) drugs and Quinine injectables. Put together, these can greatly reduce the death toll linked to malaria, which totals almost one million people each year in Africa - most of which are young children and pregnant women.

After visits to clinics, hospitals and dispensaries across Tanzania, IBM, Novartis and Vodafone initiated a five-month pilot of the SMS for Life solution, covering 135 villages and over a million people in different geographic locations across Tanzania.

Healthcare staff receive automated text to remind them to check drug stocks every week. Then, using toll-free numbers, they can reply by text to a central UK-based database. Once stock levels are determined, deliveries can be arrange before they completely run out.

IBM interns - dubbed Extreme Blue - were heavily involved in the project, as was Vodafone's development partner MatsSoft.

"This is an example of a truly innovative solution helping solve a humanitarian problem. After spending time on the ground, we created a project plan, developed the application with Vodafone and Novartis and established the best way to deliver the pilot, working with the Tanzanian Ministry of Health," said Peter Ward, project manager for IBM, in a statement. "We expect other countries will also be able to benefit in the future."

During the pilot benefits were clear almost immediately. Indeed, during the first few weeks, the number of locations reporting zero stock levels went down by more than 75 per cent. As a result, the authorities are considering extending the roll-out country wide.

"The SMS for Life programme has already had a positive effect in Tanzania. I've seen district medical officers ordering urgent stock replacements for various health facilities," said Winfred Mwafongo, senior health officer for Tanzania's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, in a statement.

"During a visit to 19 rural health facilities in one district alone, I saw huge improvements in their inventory management systems. I'm very impressed with the results so far and look forward to following the rest of the pilot through to completion."

Damovo UK has become the only UK channel partner to become an Aastra Elite Enterprise Partner, the vendor’s highest level of accreditation.

Aastra, which acquired Ericsson’s Enterprise business in 2008, has a large technology base in the UK with its BusinessPhone and MX-ONE IP Telephony systems (IPT).

Damovo clients who have deployed Aastra’s technologies include Transport for London, Nutricia and The University of Birmingham. The firm recently added Aastra’s pure SIP IP-PBX, the Aastra 5000, to its portfolio.

Michael Calvert, managing director of Aastra UK states: “Damovo has shown that it is capable of taking new Aastra products, such as the Aastra 5000, to market in an efficient and timely manner and is highly praised by end clients. This is why we are pleased to acknowledge Damovo through award of our highest level of partner accreditation.”

Adds Paul Butcher, managing director of Damovo UK: “We are delighted to have been recognised with Elite Enterprise Partner status by Aastra. We invest considerable time and effort in working with leading vendors such as Aastra to ensure we can deliver the right solutions for our clients.”

Consumer- and user-focused technology is affecting the way business IT operates, according to a new report by the Butler Group.

The focus on Web 2.0 which usually contains such innovations as blogs, social media and podcasts is leading to increasingly quick, flexible and innovative technology, even in more staid environments like enterprise IT.

While much of these online innovations are consumer focused, they are leading to changes in how businesses operate. "The ideas, concepts, tools, and technologies behind consumer-oriented social networking software are being re-shaped and re-modelled for enterprise use," said Mike Thompson, director of Butler Group's business process management practice.

Indeed, the focus on user experience is leading to an increase in service oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualisation, as well as mobile working and communications, the report said.

"The social aspects of Web 2.0 are mirrored in the corporate world of Enterprise Web 2.0. Workforce mobility and changing communication patterns are two more trends that are driving change at the infrastructure layer," said Mark Blowers, director of Butler's enterprise architectures practice. "As such, unified communication and collaboration requirements are an important part of Enterprise 2.0 strategies."

And businesses had better keep this in mind when planning their IT, warned Richard Edwards, information management practice director at Butler Group and co-author of the report.

"The driving force behind every aspect of Enterprise Web 2.0 is the experience of the end user, whether that be employee, customer, partner or stakeholder," he said. This means that all organisations must reassess their IT strategies in view of this clear and distinct shift in direction."

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has commissioned a custom configured project portfolio management system to measure the strategic value of its public projects.

The new software used to create the system will track a diverse short and long-term portfolio of some 600 projects and activities, including flood management, fuel poverty and environmental initiatives that are worth 4 billion.

The system will provide an objective visual overview of each project's overall contribution to strategic goals, based upon numerical and qualitative data to help manage the prioritisation of Defra's overall project funding and support.

Chris Hix, head of finance for climate change at Defra said: "The department deals with crises such as animal disease emergencies and floods, but also has long-term commitments including the objective of climate change mitigation and adaptation."

He explained: "The department must balance multiple and diverse priorities whilst also taking into account ministerial, legislative and European Union requirements. We therefore need a tool to support strategic decision-making."

Defra is using GenSight enterprise portfolio management software in its new project portfolio system, which provides advanced web-based reporting that uses graphical, numerical and tabular displays to provide analysis and reporting on key performance metrics based on a Defra-developed scoring system.

The system has been designed to highlight projects that offer significant benefit across multiple strategic goals and assess the probability of their success. GenSight also analyses resource allocation and spending and provides a prioritisation-based approach to budget allocation.

Hix added that prioritisation and criteria based decision-making would help create consensus on the strategic level of contribution of each activity. "We are looking at the contribution of individual projects and also assessing the full portfolio of the department," he said.

The new system forms part of the 18-month-old Renew Defra programme, aimed at transforming the government department's business processes to make it effective, responsive and accountable.

One of the Renew objectives is to match the prioritisation of activities to the overall level of resource, replacing Defra's previous silo-based funding system and helping to demonstrate taxpayer value more clearly.

Defence contractor Lockheed Martin announced today it had procured the core software to be used in the project to develop new management information systems for the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The agreement is the largest ever signed by the winning asset management and supply chain software provider, IFS Applications and is worth 13.9 million to it in product revenue alone.

The software will form a key part of the Joint Asset Management Engineering Solution (JAMES) Land project to replace the existing, JAMES 1 system currently used by 9,000 users in the regular UK army to optimise asset usage with minimal fleet sizes.

The new software will provide the Army with asset information related to identification, configuration and maintenance requirements as well as current usage and owner.

The software vendor said its Applications 7 suite would also be used to extend the functionality of the JAMES 1 systems, with components handling processes involved in engineering, asset data collection and analysis as well as workshop management for the modification of assets.

The new JAMES system is anticipated to improve mobility and will also be extended to include ground-based equipment used by the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

The MoD's stated goal with JAMES Land has been to improve availability, enhance operational and training effectiveness and reduce equipment support costs. And roll out is scheduled to commence in 2010.

The largest global supplier of printing inks for graphic arts and pigments, Sun Chemical, has revealed its successful adoption of new project management software in key regions.

With a turnover of $3.5 billion (1.72bn), Sun Chemical has consolidated its management of diverse projects and portfolios on a single, centralised system, eliminating a variety of non-integrated, management systems across different sites, including some that were paper and spreadsheet-based.

Sun Chemical has implemented a customised global project and portfolio management system, based on GenSight Enterprise Portfolio Management 7.0 to capture research and development (R&D) project information and business data accessible by appropriate technical and multifunctional European and North America staff.

Robin Clarke, Sun Chemical technology process manager said getting the right project and portfolio management software was vital for the company. "This tool allows us to link the business value of projects with strategy, resources and specific project deliverables," he said.

"We have many simultaneous and complex projects and need visibility across these activities for the functional stakeholders who are located at diverse sites. Since going live, we have full visibility of our global R&D effort, which has allowed us to avoid duplicity and optimise project selection, while deploying and linking resources much more efficiently."

He added that, for the first time, the company could now view resource allocation dynamically. Strategic decisions and planning are now based on a real-time global database of projects, while permissions and security restrictions maintain higher levels of governance.

Clarke also said the system's web-based reporting means "stakeholders can now sign-off projects from any location at any time".

"This has opened up our link to other functions that play a key role in project management, such as purchasing, our environmental group, marketing and manufacturing," he said.

Dr Cynthia Arnold, Sun Chemical chief technology officer, added: "We were deeply involved in trialling the new [GenSight] version, which was configured to meet our specific needs and were impressed by its functionality, project visibility and improved management capability."

She added: "We have implemented the system for our central development projects and trained users across Europe and North America. Having global project coordination supported by an easy-to-use tool aligned to our management enables us to maintain our competitive leadership."

Entry-level IT workers' wages haven't increased in years, while higher-level tech managers still get big salary increases, research has shown.

According to statistics from the Association of Technology Staffing Companies (ATSCo) and iProfile.org, pay for first-line support staff has held firm at 18,000 over the past five years, while second line support staff have seen an increase of just 0.8 per cent a year.

Managers have seen an increase of 20.5 per cent over that time period, the research showed. Other research released today showed a four per cent increase across the board for all IT workers.

ATSCo suggested the differential between low- and higher-level pay mirrored the way those roles are outsourced - as more entry-level work moves offshore to India and other countries, those jobs become devalued here. And, as the UK specialises in higher value IT work, management jobs become worth more.

"Whilst entry-level IT positions may be moving offshore, sophisticated project management jobs remain firmly rooted on UK soil," said iProfile's chief executive, Rick Bacon.

"These managerial positions are as much business focused as they are focused on technology," he added. "We're seeing increasing competition for these positions, and it's crucial that people looking to secure or switch jobs in this area are recording and communicating their full range of skills to potential employers."

This could worsen the skills shortage, as the lack of entry-level IT jobs makes it difficult for graduates to get jobs, discouraging them from studying the subject in the first place.

Ann Swain, chief executive of ATSCo, said: "The outsourcing of entry-level IT jobs has meant fewer graduate-level jobs are available in the UK. It's like removing the bottom rung from the career ladder."

"The shortage now is of candidates with a few years experience looking for second and third jobs. But how do you get that experience if entry level jobs are being sent offshore?"

Nearly half of IT projects never make it to full implementation, because of shifting requirements and a failure to deliver, a survey sponsored by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) has found.

Out of almost 400 IT professional respondents, 43.3 per cent said their organisation had recently cancelled IT projects. The top two reasons cited were that business needs had changed (29.9 per cent) and the project did not deliver as promised (23.4 per cent).

A smaller proportion said IT projects failed before implementation because they were no longer a priority (14.4 per cent), had gone over budget (13.2 per cent) or did not support the business strategy (6.6 per cent).

"It is important to take the pulse of experts because, at a typical enterprise, 20 per cent of technology investments are not fully realised," said Lynn Lawton, ISACA international president.

Results also showed that security, at 45.7 per cent, is the most important IT-related issue respondents' organisations will address during 2008. Other IT-related issues included risk (15.3 per cent), compliance (15.1 per cent), governance (14.8 per cent) and assurance/audit (9.1 per cent).

Marios Damianides, past international president of ISACA, said many underperforming IT-related projects continue longer than they should because management do not constantly assess them to ensure they generate appropriate value and benefits.

"It is a good management practice and a sign of appropriate governance to evaluate and take action on underperforming IT projects as they progress, rather than suffer the consequences further down the road," he added.

O2 today added another string to its bow in the form of a dedicated professional services team aimed at boosting the value enterprises can derive from mobile technology.

Led by Peter Bullas who currently serves as O2's head of corporate mobilisation and technical specialists, the new arm is comprised of technical consultants, solutions architects, trainers and project managers who will focus on four key areas: Exploring key trends and recommending solutions, proving technology through trials and return on investment (ROI) analysis, deployment and then finally ongoing management.

"Our customers are telling us that we've got the credibility to do it. We have got to a level of engagement with customers where they trust us, where we can take our relationship to the next level," said Ben Dowd, O2's director of business sales.

"Uncertainty in the economy, whether good or bad, always puts pressure on cost. As we move forward in a competitive marketplace, companies are looking for efficiencies within their businesses. We had the [professional services] capability before, now we're just formalising and industrialising it so it's more of a go-to-market approach for us."

The new team will feature employees with accreditation and certification that covers key areas of mobile technology, including Cisco, government information assurance, GroupWise, Lotus, Microsoft, PRINCE 2 project management and SQL.

O2's foray into a more formalised professional services approach, mirrors its work in other areas, where it believes timing is everything, according to Dowd.

"We invest where there is customer demand. It's not about investing in technology that may happen three years from now, it's about understanding the needs of customers and building on those capabilities," he said.

"It's about backing the right horses," Dowd added, referencing O2's intentions to capitalise on the ever-increasing popularity of mobile email in the corporate space. "We've backed RIM, we've backed Microsoft and now we're backing Good Technology. This gives us a balanced portfolio to address customer needs."

Mobile phone news, reviews, themes and downloads at Know Your Mobile

Ministers are not keeping track of "mission-critical" government IT projects, a new report has warned.

The report, released today by the Public Accounts Committee, suggests large-scale government IT programmes fail because of poor project management.

The UK government spends some 12 to 14 billion a year on new and existing IT projects, but a fifth of project heads of so-called "mission critical", high-risk programmes have not met with their minister, and another 28 per cent meet less than once a quarter.

More than 70 per cent of senior officials were worried about the lack of programme and project management skills inside their departments.

Project heads - called Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) by the government - have a high turnover rate and lack previous experience bringing unnecessary risk to already complicated projects, the report said. Over half of SROs are in their first such role.

"It's certainly no good putting someone in charge of the programme who lacks the experience and skills to get the best out of external contractors and stays in post only as long as it takes to get another civil service position," said Edward Leigh MP and chairman of the committee. "The appointment of the official in charge must be on the basis that he or she is committed to staying the course and that performance and reward are linked to agreed targets and milestones."

Despite regular criticism of the NHS IT programme and others, the report praised the Payment Modernisation and Pension Credit programmes as examples of successful large-scale IT projects.

"Not all major government IT projects end up on the rocks, as the successful Payment Modernisation Programme and Pension Credit have shown," said Leigh. "If more large IT projects are to be similarly successful, then departments will have to understand what was done to make things go right."

The former lead of health care at Fujitsu - suspended after he reportedly made negative comments about the National Health Service (NHS) IT programme - has given evidence to the House of Commons about the implementation of the IT project.

The National Programme for IT (NPfIT), a multi-billion pound program to integrate healthcare software and digitise patient records in the UK, has come under heavy criticism, as has its suppliers, including Fujitsu and its Cerner platform.

One of those speaking out about the NPfIT was Andrew Rollerson, who was quoted in media reports as criticising the program at a conference in February. After the media coverage, Rollerson was suspended from his role as practice lead in charge of the tender for the programme.

Speaking to the Public Accounts Committee personally - not on behalf of Fujitsu - Rollerson said his comments were taken out of context and that he disagrees fundamentally with the media reports that the program is doomed to fail. "I believe that there are certain elements of the deployment that could be done better but, given one cannot re write history, the track we are going down can be made to succeed," Rollerson told the committee.

The programme is stumbling, he said, because of the sheer scale of the changes. He compared it to the US space programme, saying it's on a "similar scale in terms of its ambition and vision."

Due to the scale of the project, standard project management techniques haven't been enough. Rollerson said the management techniques are comparable to Boeing in the 1950s, which tried to scale up a standard aeroplane to jumbo jet size, making a craft much too heavy to take-off. They needed to go back and redesign their methods. "I believe we are in a situation where we need to be looking at the programme in that kind of light: what is it going to take in terms of project management techniques, in terms of vision and leadership, to actually make this work over the ten-year life of the programme. I do not think we are asking those questions yet," he said.

Despite Rollerson's criticsm, he does not see himself as a whistleblower and stressed the massive IT project is not doomed.

"It is, in my view, very much an IT-driven project and historically they have not succeeded. There is and there will be more resistance from the trusts if it is driven relentlessly along an IT path," he said. "I believe it is essential that the trusts are engaged so that the ultimate aim of the programme, which is the enablement of the transformation, the NHS, can be realised."

He stressed that the programme, despite its massive size, is no different from any other IT implementation. "The history of the IT projects is that typically where they are left to an IT department they fail. The reason they fail is because the people who are expected to use the application in the end have not been engaged," he said.

He compared the NHS transformation to the business world, where IT is just one aspect of a solution which will also include restructuring, retraining, and new processes. "The danger that I foresee in this situation is that we will be heading too far in the other direction, that the driver, if we are not careful, will become the technology itself."

Despite doomsayers predicting the UK is in the midst of, or at least heading for, another skills shortage or recruitment freeze, research published today paints a slightly brighter picture, suggesting that companies expect to add to their IT workforce between now and 2009.

The IT labour market was reasonably stable last year, with marginal decreases in staff turnover and shortage levels, according to the National Computing Centre's (NCC) Benchmark of IT Salaries and Employment Trends 2007.

Almost half (48 per cent) of those surveyed anticipated that IT departments will grow in the next two years, compared with just 41 per cent who felt as optimistic in 2006.

Most of the growth will manifest itself in systems development, with this area demonstrating the highest rate of expansion.

There will also be a high demand for people with browser-based skills and technologies like Microsoft .NET, Java and SharePoint.

Employers will also be battling to ramp up the number of staff they have with Oracle and SAP skills, although they have to be mindful that those possessing these traits often demand higher-than-average pay packets.

"Interestingly, soft skills have not been explicitly identified as in demand," said Stefan Foster, managing director at the NCC.

"There has been much industry talk about the rounded IT professional having both technical, soft and entrepreneurial skills, but other than project management skills, our survey reveals that technical skills requirements still come first."

Things are also looking up salary-wise for IT workers across the board, with an average increase of 3.6 per cent being reported for last year.

This means that the average IT manager can expect to bring home the bacon to tune of 46,515, while a graduate systems development trainee is looking at earning 17,888 a year.

Regionally, however, those working in the Greater London area tend to receive a healthier IT-related income than their counterparts in the north of England, Scotland or Wales, with a Scottish IT manager taking home just under 3,000 less than the average.

"Although there are fundamental changes in the way IT is delivered, the IT profession not only remains stable but is evolving to meet changing business demands," said Foster.

Estimating is the black art of project management. It is no-one's favourite task. But like it or not the success or failure of a project depends on accurate estimates. Pessimism can kill the project before it starts as the client may think it is too expensive. Overly optimistic estimates, on the other hand, can cost you or the client dearly when the project overruns.

Why Estimate?

If you propose doing anything these days, someone is bound to ask "what will it cost" or "how long will it take", which, when you are building software, is almost the same thing. For small projects, these questions are relatively easy to answer.

Trouble rears its ugly head, however, as the project size increases. With multiple programmers, dedicated testing teams and interfaces to existing systems the time required for larger projects seems to increase exponentially.

How to Estimate

With the fallibilities of the human memory and psyche, we tend to forget our failures and overestimate our abilities. Referring back to the times that specific tasks took during previous projects can help you but only if you can find similar tasks to compare.

Likewise, if you rely on one person to carry out the estimating you will get an answer but nothing to gauge it against. Different people have different ideas as to how long something will take to do. Some people think from the bottom up, estimating all the little tasks and the adding the time up. Others think from the top down, estimating the high-level tasks and dividing the time into the sub-tasks.

Bottom-up people generally come up with larger estimates than top-down people, if only due to the granularity of their estimating. A top-down guy may say a task will take eight hours but a bottom-up person might say that the ten sub-tasks will take an hour each.

The skill, knowledge and experience of the people involved must also be taken into account. An experienced, highly skilled programmer may be 10 times faster than a rookie but take him or her out of their comfort zone and their productivity can plummet. It is natural for people to estimate based on their own experience and because people are different, so are their estimates.

Wideband Delphi

Getting many people involved in estimating is one way to get closer to 'the truth' and it gives the project team a sense of ownership of the figures produced. But if you just take the mean values of the different estimates the end figures won't match anyone's first estimate so you run the risk of destroying any 'buy-in' the team might have from being part of the estimating process in the first place.

The Wideband Delphi method helps development teams reach a consensus about the estimates for a project so giving you more accurate figures and a more committed and cohesive team.

It works like this: a team of three to seven estimators from the project team make individual estimates and then, all together, with a moderator, analyze their assumptions and issues about the tasks, refining their estimates as they go. No one reveals their numbers except to the moderator and he or she draws everyone's project totals on a board, as crosses on a number line. The anonymous aspect of this method helps eliminate bias based on preconceptions of people's status or differing objectives.

Four rounds of estimation should deliver close estimates and the average (discounting outlying values) should be an accurate reflection of the team's thinking.

Function Point Analysis

Where Wideband Delphi uses people's opinions about how long a task should take, Function Point Analysis tries to be more objective.

In FPA you read the specification of the software, identify all the transactions, files, reports, forms and so on, and then break those down into their constituent elements to be classified according to how complex they are and assigned numerical values - the function points.

These are then totalled up and if you know the team's productivity (in function points per hour) you should then know how long the project should take. The theory is that different people running FPA on the same project should come up with the same answer. In reality, well-trained people can get very close but FPA is more than a little complicated to learn.

Alternative

A radical alternative to estimating is not to do it at all - though needless to say this approach won't suit every company of project. One software house, tasked with maintaining a company's internal applications, had a SLA (Service Level Agreement) which said that the only thing they had to do was to give an estimate of how long a fix or enhancement would take within two days of the request being received.

The estimating took so much time that there wasn't any time left to actually carry out the work. A long backlog of work also ensured that nothing happened fast. The whole system of work was broken and needed a radical change.

By looking back at past work they found that nearly all fixes took about five man days so they stopped estimating, scrapped the nonsensical SLA and simply charged a fixed fee for the year. Some fixes took fifteen days but many took as few as three so no-one lost out. Removing the burden of estimating freed up staff to do the work, the backlog was cleared and everybody was happy.

No pain, no gain

Estimating is a pain but it needs to be done right. The Extreme Programming method says that only the person doing the work should estimate how long it will take. Wideband Delphi uses the team approach to get 'buy-in'. FPA and Agile Programming both advocate measuring the work in more or less formal ways, based on past performance.

However you do it, though, if you get it right you have far more chance of your project coming in on-time and on-budget. And that, after all, is the ultimate objective.

Further reading

• Book: Software Engineering Economics by Barry Boehm http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0138221227/sr=8-1/qid=1145964013/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-8200390-9611916?%5Fencoding=UTF8
• Book: Applies Software Project Management by Andrew Stellman & Jennifer Greene http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596009488/qid%3D1145981862/026-6215175-2133257
• Web Site: Karl Wiegers' Process Impact http://www.processimpact.com/pubs.shtml
  (especially Stop Promising Miracles http://www.processimpact.com/articles/delphi.html)
• Web Site: Longstreet Consulting http://www.ifpug.com/default.htm
  (especially The Fundamentals of Function Point Analysis http://www.ifpug.com/fpafund.htm)
• Blog: David J Anderson's Agile Management http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/blog.html (especially From Worst to Best in 9 Months http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Papers/TOCICOBarcelona.html)