Services and disservices – 3: The echo-chamber

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Services serve the needs of someone. Disservices purport to serve the needs of someone, but don’t. And therein lie a huge range of problems for enterprise-architects and many, many others… This is the third part of what should be a six-part series…

The one business process that all architects need to know

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While I consider it vital for all infrastructure and software architects to know the 15 basic business processes, that I will cover in this blog in the coming month, there is one business process more important than the rest. This process is the Hire 2 Retirement or HR process. It is important for two reasons. … Continue reading The one business process that all architects need to know →

You choose: Internet of Everything or isolated intranets of things?

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Many companies want to make us think that the IoE is the only way forward and that this create the boost of economy that we require. The main problem I can see is that most people dreaming of the IoE have not done their home work and are into solution country long time before implementing … Continue reading You choose: Internet of Everything or isolated intranets of things? →

Services and disservices – 2: Education example

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Services serve the needs of someone. Disservices purport to serve the needs of someone, but don’t – sometimes through incompetence or failure in operation, sometimes through incompetence in service-design, and sometimes even by intent. And therein lie a huge range of problems…

Using the Capability Inventory for municipalities

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Using the Capability Inventory for municipalities I was talking to Marino the other day and he told me he would like a special capability inventory for a municipality. I said that there is no need to have a special capability inventory, the basic pattern exposed in the original capability inventory should cover any organization. In fact […]

Using the Capability Inventory for municipalities

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Using the Capability Inventory for municipalities I was talking to Marino the other day and he told me he would like a special capability inventory for a municipality. I said that there is no need to have a special capability inventory, the basic pattern exposed in the original capability inventory should cover any organization. In fact […]

Housing Technology Manifesto

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Last year I was involved in some good conversations facilitated by Hact around the current state of the technology tools that are used within Housing Associations (short blog about it here), this was partly sparked by a couple of blog posts I wrote here and here. The thing that was evident for me from the discussions, which included around 10 Heads of IT/IT Directors from various housing associations was the pent up demand to think and act differently in terms of tools we use to enable our organisations to achieve their goals.

So, what happened? not much for a number of reasons, but looking on a year or so from those conversations there is more need than ever for us to revisit the thinking behind these meetings and do something:

  • Incumbent suppliers still not delivering to the needs of the sector
  • Business ambitions curtailed or impeded through an inability to provide the right tools for the job
  • Market and government forces putting even greater pressure on the sector to think and act differently and requiring an even greater flexibility and agility from the technology that should enable the organisations.
  • Larger Housing associations are moving into largescale CRM and/or ERP implementations
  • Housing associations still buying ‘all in one’ or ‘best of breed’ solutions that simply don’t fit their businesses
  • OJEU compliant procurements that may be successful in-spite of rather than because of the process
We can and should do better. Where do we start? I think there are two simple steps:

  1. Manifesto, Principles, 10 commandments, whatever you want to call it, lets create a statement of intent, a banner under which we can congregate that set out very clearly what we expect from the technology that supports out organisations (potential e.g. mobile first, API, open standards, etc).
  2. Once we have this manifesto we can use it to drive change, change in how we behave as informed and strong customers, change in how our incumbent and future suppliers think about and develop the software tools that we use

get in touch via Twitter and we’ll get things moving.