What does it mean to be good at technology?

This article first appeared on the Public Digital blog. Every organisation needs to be good at technology. That’s why we always tell our clients they need an internet-era CTO. But what does that really mean? What does it look like? An internet-era CTO is able to understand what should be hard and what should be easy, and stay up to date with how that’s changing. Doing experimental data analysis (even on lots of data) is pretty easy, fixing how you manage data responsibly is hard. Taking credit card payments is now easy, scaling to handle a serious Black Friday surge is hard. ...

March 11, 2019

The internet-era CTO: What is the role, why do you need one, and how to hire for it.

This article first appeared on the Public Digital blog. A lot of our work at Public Digital is about helping our clients understand what an internet-era CTO is, what skills and experience they should have, and how to hire one. Why hire an internet-era CTO Internet-era organisations need to be in control of their own technology destinies. Everyone in a leadership position needs to have a sense of what should be easy and what should be hard. No-one should automatically switch off when technology becomes part of the conversation. But you also need strong technology leaders who can make sure the whole organisation is good at technology. ...

October 19, 2018

Reading list for Internet-era CTOs

This article first appeared on the Public Digital blog. While guest editing last week’s issue of our newsletter, I posted a summer reading list for Internet-era CTOs. It seemed to go down well with newsletter readers, so we thought it might be nice to re-post it on the blog today. Things were a little quieter in the PD office this week, now that the school summer holidays have started. On the assumption that you’ll have some time to sit somewhere comfortable and read a book this summer, here’s the reading list. ...

July 27, 2018

Getting past off-shoring

One of the factors many organisations (including governments) agonise over when deciding whether to use public cloud services is whether or not services and data can be stored “off shore”. It’s not a topic we tend to discuss very well. “Off shore” usually means stored in data centres in other countries but can sometimes mean in facilities within the originating country but operated by foreign-owned companies. For UK organisations looking at infrastructure as a service that conversation is dissipating now that the three biggest players all have UK data centres, but switching to UK data centres is really just dodging the issue rather than looking at how and why decisions are made.It was great to hear Ian McCormack from NCSC addressing offshoring in his spot in the keynote at the AWS Public Sector Summit in DC recently. ...

July 20, 2017

Transition beyond GDPR compliance

360 days from now the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force. Anyone handling personal data from an EU citizen or subject (and the Information Commissioner has been clear we should assume that includes Brits regardless of what happens around EU exit) will be held to new standards in how they obtain, store, process and dispose of that data. I was asked to speak about compliance at Salford Centre for Professional Development’s event on GDPR, and used it as an opportunity to try to encourage everyone to think beyond compliance. ...

May 30, 2017

What's next?

It’s been nearly two months since I left GDS. It’s high time I talked a bit more about what’s next for me. I was really pleased with everything we got done in my last few weeks at GDS. Alongside the inevitable handover tasks, we made a big announcement about the future of government networking), began to share a draft policy about APIs and expanded the guidance around the “Cloud First” policy. I remain very grateful to the many brilliant colleagues who helped get all that done. ...

March 25, 2017

Enterprise-ready SaaS Features

In my last post on Cloud-native organisations I said: “we should be clear about the principles that apply and help our people understand what we need to watch out for when choosing technology.” As the responsible people in an organisation we need to be thinking about things like: We need to be confident that when people leave our organisation we retain access to information on the work they’ve been doing We need to be sure that the sensitive information we handle in our organisation can only be accessed by authorised people Where we have time-sensitive business commitments, we need to be confident that third-party software will be available for us to use when we need it The specifics like how important that is, what types of information, etc. will be context sensitive. ...

March 24, 2017

Cloud-native organisations

I spoke recently at the OpenGov Leadership Forum in Manila and at Cloud Expo Europe. At both I started to explore a theme from my final GDS blog post: cloud-native organisations. //speakerdeck.com/assets/embed.js “Cloud” is a nebulous term. At the start of both talks I explained that, while there are formal definitions that I’ve found useful, for me it’s just a useful term for starting a conversation about what’s currently happening at the collision point of “the internet” and “computing tools”. Most of the time for technology, I don’t draw a distinction between the impact of cloud, agile, devops and a number of other inter-related movements. ...

March 20, 2017

Clarifying our Cloud First commitment

This was my final post on the Government technology blog The government technology landscape has shifted significantly since we made our commitment to Cloud First nearly 4 years ago. Departments have become more mature in their uptake of cloud services and with this maturity comes a need for further guidance. To support this need, we’ve added further clarification to our cloud guidance and policy and we’ll continue to expand this content in the coming months. ...

February 6, 2017

Trust and privacy: sharing lessons

This was originally posted on Government Technology Back in November Emma Pearce blogged about using big data following the first in a series of data seminars we’re running. We’ve now held our second session, hosted by Facebook, which focussed on trust and privacy. Stephen Deadman, Deputy Global Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, welcomed us for a talk and Q&A. Facebook is often held up as an example, both positive and negative, due to their profile and size. ...

January 27, 2017