Craigs Blog

From the BCS

Quote: Anna Duckworth BCS Head of Corporate Marketing said: “Year on year the standard of entries increases and this year is no exception with innovative projects which showcase excellence in IT. The next stage of judging will be very difficult as our expert panel endeavours to select the outright winners for each award.”

The BCS IT Industry awards are the leading hallmark of success amongst practitioners in the IT industry today. As standards of sophistication, business acumen and skill in the IT world are continually developing, the role of IT and its effective management is critical across the whole spectrum of business. These cross-industry awards recognise, promote and acclaim excellence, professionalism, innovation and the outstanding achievements to which individuals and groups contribute.

Following on from here ,directlinebusiness.com gets another product – keep an eye on it.

Screen shots courtesy of http://www.webshotspro.com/

Editted from here

Additions: Added community applications

Today I was talking to one of my colleagues about communities and virtual places and stuff – I’ll leave it to him to comment on his observations. I described my view of things and thought it worth noting them here:

In my view there are three four types of online community ‘places’ at this time:

1. Community support tools
2. Community Applications
3. Worlds
4. Games

Community support tools are things like facebook , linkedin , bulletin boards. These sort of places offer existing communities a place to communicate. The frame of reference for the community is outside the tool, i.e. you remember when we were at school together?

Community applications are things like zopa . This site allows a community of lenders to lend to a community of borrowers. I distinguish applications from the others in terms of the role of the application – the support tool allows a community to communicate and are often used by the other virtual places, but an application actually serves some specific purpose that could not be fulfilled except by a community.

Worlds are things like second life . They have a world in which players interact. Existing communities can use this as a tool but the world also provides an internal frame of reference i.e. have you seen the bank over here in second life?

Finally games provide a world in which one has objectives defined by the game, and rules governing it’s play. World of Warcraft being an example. Whilst existing communities can come to a game frequently ad hoc communities are formed to solve objectives in the game, i.e. I need to kill hogger, can you come help me?

Just a few thoughts…

Today I was talking to one of my colleagues about communities and virtual places and stuff – I’ll leave it to him to comment on his observations. I described my view of things and thought it worth noting them here:

In my view there are three types of online community ‘places’ at this time:

1. Community support tools
2. Worlds
3. Games

Community support tools are things like facebook , linkedin , bulletin boards. These sort of places offer existing communities a place to communicate. The frame of reference for the community is outside the tool, i.e. you remember when we were at school together?

Worlds are things like second life . They have a world in which players interact. Existing communities can use this as a tool but the world also provides an internal frame of reference i.e. have you seen the bank over here in second life?

Finally games provide a world in which one has objectives defined by the game, and rules governing it’s play. World of Warcraft being an example. Whilst existing communities can come to a game frequently ad hoc communities are formed to solve objectives in the game, i.e. I need to kill hogger, can you come help me?

Just a few thoughts…

DirectLine for business went live today.

As noted here I’m one of the finalists for the Systems Architect of the Year award in the Individual Excellence Awards 2007. It’s most exciting to be recognised by my peers in this way and to go through this process. Also cool to see my name in lights (well, on the Internet at least).

I attended the finalists reception today. I spoke to a number of my colleagues there as well as other members of the IT industry.

A good day.

Seems I’ve not done the same job more than a year at a time in my current work place so time for a change. Expect to see some more links to and notes about line management, architecture and particularly technical architecture and enterprise architecture.

All jolly good.

A friend of mine pointed out that part of our role appeared to be saying the same thing to different groups of people until the message sticks. I note that before this observation I would get quite stressed apparently wasting my time repeating myself. I’ve now arrived at an acceptance that my role is to communicate messages (techy stuff) at varying degrees of depth, accuracy and from different view-points to different groups of people – or the same people when their thinking has moved on. This has reduced my stress levels and probably helped me communicate better.

I must admit given this I don’t know how long it takes to put a message across – i.e. how much effort is required to create and sustain a shift in thinking. I wonder if there are models of this around – I guess I’m thinking a model of key stakeholders, interested parties and influencers against shift in thinking and acceptance over time.

I note it here for posterity and so that, in 10 years when I’m still delivering messages repeatedly I remember a time when I didn’t do that.

I actually found the course to be very relevant. I was a little dubious but essentially it provides a number of complementary processes and frameworks to put together simple powerful documents swiftly and effectively. I genuinely think this year I’ll save the man-days I spent on the course if I use the techniques from the course.

Word of note – it is a business writing course. It’s designed to allow you to get content out swiftly and in a readily accessible format. It’s not a creative writing or technical writing course. It is however absolutely relevant to me and I’d recommend it.

Continued on from here

The training courses mentioned in the post above are now booked for May. Will post back here when I’ve been on them. In other news going on a ‘leadership’ training course in loverly Bournemouth next week. Should prove interesting.

As posted back here I’m intending to get the business analysis diploma from the ISEB, so I’ve just requested the second bit – business analysis essentials. Should be in the next few months so I’ll post here what I thought of it. Turned out I got 80% in the last one so pretty good really :D

Also I’ve been looking at courses with illumine . I rate them highly actually, found their courses to be of use and the Tony Buzan series of books are very interesting. I’ll post how I get on.

hi,

As part of my self appraisal activities I felt that I was weak in my business analysis skills, or at least there was an opportunity to leverage those kind of skills in my current role. As such I’m currently doing the ISEB Organisational Context course with a view to getting the Business analysis diploma . A good measure of if I’m learning something is if I could have passed the exam without doing the course – I get the feeling this wasn’t the case so the course will do me good. A measure of if the course was useful will be how much I use it’s content but I guess that will come later. Still, for now I need to do some reading up and I got 1.5 days of course and exam on Wednesday.

all good fun.

My ISEB tagged links on del.icio.us

On the face of it a win for REST but there isn’t a REST API. Commentry on the subject available here (from ongoing), here (o’reilly article linked from ongoing) and here (ex google dev linked from the o’reilly article).

As you can likely tell I’m catching up on my reading just now. Another insightful blogger posted this tome on SOA, REST and ROA which has put ROA on my list of things to look into. An interesting discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. I too share the view that systems that dynamically bind themselves together from random data strewn around the internet and in UDDI repositories are pure fantasy at this time – and if they could do that they’d be AI and wouldn’t want the data represented in WSDL, XSD etc.

I’m guessing development environments are a subject of interest to any IT area. I’m a regular reader of Grady Booch’s blog and this post on CDE’s (as he calls them) caught my eye. Not actually looked very deeply at the linked alphaworks page or read his paper but it’s on my to do list and I thought it was worth noting here.