1. technology and computing

24-30 July 2012 | computerweekly.com
Gender difference
How men and women disagree on why technology
careers are less attractive to women page 4
Destination Malaysia
companies migrate to Asia for skills,
infrastructure and workforce page 5
High performance
Estonia shows
UK how to do
government IT
head of Government Digital Service Mike Bracken explains
how the Baltic nation built public service IT from scratch
using open source infrastructure page 8
Image: www.orangesmile.com
All you need to know about
supercomputers page 13
Highlights from
the week online
most popular
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Video
premium content
> Buyer’s Guide: Migrating from
In pictures: The 25 most
influential women in UK IT
Windows XP to Windows 7
Many companies are still using
Windows XP and seem happy with
it, but Windows XP - while being
excellent for the job it was developed for – is no longer fit for
purpose. Microsoft ends support for
Windows XP in 2014, so those
businesses that haven’t already
done so need to start migration
plans this year to leave enough time
to test and roll out desktops.
The most influential women
in UK IT
Fujitsu submits incomplete
bid for Cumbria broadband
O2 claims mobile network is
fully restored
UK ISP says block on Pirate
Bay site proving ineffective
Steve Ballmer launches
Microsoft Office 2013
O2 outage puts supplier
Huawei in the frame
Reasons why IT is less
attractive to women
CW500: Agile techniques for
software development
> Supporting consumer devices in
> Getting school children excited about learning IT
The <go to> Foundation, a non-profit organisation established to promote
technology as a vital part of our society and economy, teamed up with IT trade
body Intellect to spend a day with 7- to 9-year-old children at St Matthew’s School
in Surbiton, London, to teach them programming and some of the basics of IT.
video
Photo story
Hackers reveal 453,000
Yahoo passwords
the workplace
There is a growing realisation that
desktop computing is no longer
simply about IT providing a set of
tools for employees. Consumer
technology is more advanced than
desktop IT and staff are more
tech-savvy than previous generations. This guide to the consumerisation of IT considers the proliferation of consumer technology in the
workplace and how it can empower
employees to boost resourcefulness and productivity.
> Identifying the trends, challenges
Get the latest IT news via RSS feed
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opinion
> Gus Power, CTO, Energized Work
on software development
In this CW500 Club video, Gus Power,
chief technology officer of Energized
Work, talks to Computer Weekly about
his take on the future of software
development.
> The 25 most influential women
in UK IT
Computer Weekly recognises the most
influential female role models and
discusses the vital part female IT
leaders will take in the future of the
UK’s high-tech economy.
and cost benefits of outsourcing
With economic conditions uncertain
at the moment, many organisations
are re-evaluating how and what they
outsource. In this buyer’s guide to
outsourcing, we look at these issues
in depth, as well as identifying
trends in the market and investigating the outsourcing options
available to small and mediumsized businesses.
blogs
> BYOD: Businesses must be clear
on data privacy
Businesses looking to implement a
bring-your-own-device (BYOD)
programme for employees must be
aware that the parameters of what they
can and cannot do with a mobile
device management platform are
governed by local data privacy
legislation which inconveniently varies
from market to market.
> Karl Flinders: Government finds it impossible to break systems integrator habit
> Project management: People
make projects
After a number of high-profile public
sector project failures, the government
announced it is investing £6.2m in a
civil servant project management
academy. The Major Project
Leadership Academy, launched with
Oxford University’s Said Business
School, will open in October 2012 and
aims to double project success rates.
> Bill Goodwin: How long should you store big data?
2 | 24-30 July 2012
Despite calls from inside government and the IT industry for a more equitable distribution of government IT contracts, with SME suppliers given a fair crack of the whip, nothing is changing. The
Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has stuck with the old ways of working
and will contract a single outsourcing giant for its desktop management services contract.
> Jennifer Scott: Nokia sleeps before it’s dead
The Finnish mobile manufacturer has struggled in recent years with growing competition to its
smartphones from faster and sleeker developers, as well as missing the boat of adopting Android,
while all the smaller guys grew from the partnership. With the news that it is slashing the price of its
flagship phone – the Nokia Lumia 900 – to just £32, there cannot be good news coming our way.
As businesses invest more in analytics technology to extract intelligence from business data,
managing and storing that data becomes more challenging. One difficulty is that much valuable data
is stored in spreadsheets and documents held on people’s personal computers. Managing this data
requires a proper information lifecycle strategy which ranks data by its value to the organisation.
> Philip Virgo: Is BDUK a triumph or a disaster - and for whom?
Recently I was told that BDUK – the body responsible for channeling government funds to local
authority broadband roll-out projects – was a triumph because it had enabled the leveraging of a £1bn
of additional funding (from BT, EU and local authorities) on top of government funding. Three days
later I heard that Fujitsu had withdrawn from the Cumbria bid and BT had been asked to re-tender.
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
melenas1414/Flickr
the week in IT
Cloud computing
BP rolls out first global cloud
for 83,000-strong workforce
BP is putting its global messaging
infrastructure into a private cloud to
benefit from pay-per-use functionality and the flexibility to easily scale
up and down the number of users.
More than 83,000 staff at BP will be
connected to the cloud. The company is putting Microsoft Exchange
2010 into a private cloud from T‑Systems as part of a five-year contract,
upgrading from Exchange 2003.
Operating system software
Microsoft confirms date for
launch of Windows 8 OS
Microsoft has revealed its Windows
8 operating system will launch on 26
October. The date was announced
at Microsoft’s annual sales meeting
and was published on its blog shortly
after. The launch date also revealed
when the first Microsoft Surface tablet will hit the shelves, as the ARMbased model is set to be released at
the same time as Windows 8.
e-commerce technology
Financial results
IBM experiences cloud growth,
but traditional business suffers
IBM’s revenues remained relatively
flat in the second quarter of 2012,
although the company reported
strong growth in its cloud, analytics
and smarter planet initiatives. Total
revenues for the quarter fell by 3% to
$25.8bn due to currency fluctuations.
Second-quarter net income was
$3.9bn, compared with $3.7bn in
the second quarter of 2011 – an
increase of 6%.
Business applications
Co-op uses Lloyds managed
service in branch acquisition
The Co-operative bank has agreed
to buy 632 Lloyds TSB and Cheltenham and Gloucester branches,
along with the millions of customers
attached to them. The takeover will
see the Co-operative eventually
use a separated version of Lloyds
Banking Group’s IT platform.
Microsoft Office 2013 preview out
Microsoft has released a customer preview of its latest version of Microsoft
Office, which will be cloud-based and work best on Windows 8.
CEO Steve Ballmer announced the preview, claiming Office 2013 will provide
consumers and businesses with unparalleled productivity and flexibility. “It is a
cloud service and will fully light up when paired with Windows 8,” he said.
Ballmer also announced three new Office 365 subscription services, each
of which will include the 2013 editions of Office applications.
The new subscriptions include Office 365 Home Premium with an
additional 20GB of SkyDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype world minutes
per month and Office 365 Small Business Premium with business-grade
e-mail, shared calendars, website tools and HD web conferencing.
The software is designed to work on touchscreens to cater for the growing
number of tablet computer users. More details about features and pricing will
be available in the autumn.
Cost of outsourcing agreements
Mobile hardware
Nokia smartphone sales plummet
Nokia shipped 10.2 million smartphones in the second quarter of
2012 – 39% less than the same
period last year. The company’s
second-quarter results revealed only
four million of the 10 million handsets sold were part of its flagship
Windows Phone-based Lumia range,
which meant it was still selling more
of its legacy Symbian smartphones
than the portfolio that was supposed
to “signal a new smartphone dawn”
for the Finnish firm.
Significantly more
than originally planned
16%
Less than
originally
planned
9%
More than
originally planned
26%
The Home Office has created a
private sector company to manage
police IT. The Association of Police
Authorities and the Home Office
will jointly own the company until
it is handed over to police and crime
commissioners following elections
in November. Together they will
scrutinise the new company to
ensure the taxpayer gets value
for money.
3 | 24-30 July 2012
Sales via smartphones and tablets
grew exponentially in June, leaping 356% compared with the same
month last year, according to an
IMRG Capgemini report. The total
online spend in the UK for June was
£6bn, a 13% increase on the same
month last year. British shoppers
spent £34.9bn online in the first six
months of 2012, compared with
£31bn in the same period in 2011, an
increase of 12.5%.
cloud computing
Virgin Media embraces cloudbased training for its staff
Communications supplier Virgin
Media has revolutionised the way it
trains staff through cloud-based learning supplier Cornerstone. The service,
known internally as Ignite at Virgin
Media, blends formal e-learning with
informal learning by linking staff
through social networks and communities. Courses cover the whole
business, ranging from installation
training to project management.
datacentre technology
About as much
as originally
planned
49%
Tech firm iCity wins datacentre
bid for Olympics media centre
iCity has been selected as the preferred bidder to turn the £350m
Olympics media centre into a datacentre after the London 2012 Games.
Under the deal it will host a datacentre, media studios, university facilities, a digital academy and a new
business incubator.
Source: Lieberman Software
It project management
Border Agency’s IT system runs
over budget and behind schedule
IT management
Home Office creates private
police ICT company
Mobile commerce sees
exponential growth of 356%
Microsoft financial results announcement
“We’re fast approaching
the most exciting
launch season in
Microsoft history”
Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
The Border Agency’s £385m Immigration Case Work (ICW) IT project is
running £28m over budget and one
year behind schedule, the National
Audit Office has said. The agency is
undertaking transformation of immigration and asylum casework by
2015, through streamlining processes
and implementing the ICW system.
Its major activity is caseworking,
which costs more than £1bn a year,
said the report.
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
news analysis
IT jobs & recruitment
How men and women disagree on
why IT is less attractive to women
A recent survey reveals how attitudes to gender differences in IT themselves vary by sex, writes Kayleigh Bateman
M
en and women disagree
over the reasons why females may find a career
in technology less attractive than men, according to research
from Mortimer Spinks.
Conducted with Computer Weekly,
the Women in Technology survey
represents the views of 512 experienced technology professionals
across the UK, of which 199 were female and 313 were male.
According to the survey, 86% of female technology and IT experts
would recommend the sector as a career choice to another female.
Most women feel careers in technology are less attractive to female recruits because of concerns about the
“macho” nature of technology teams
and fear of being the only woman in a
male-dominated department.
Over half (58%) of women said the
male-dominated culture of IT teams
turns off potential female recruits. In
addition, 52% said this is due to concerns about being the only female in
the department.
In contrast, men see the geeky
image associated with IT jobs as the
biggest reason why women would
find a career in technology less attractive than a man might.
Some 61% of men said this was
the main reason, whereas women
saw this as a significantly less important factor, ranking it only fourth in a
list of eight possible reasons.
Sheila Flavell, chief operating officer at the FDM Group and “Leader
of the Year” winner at the recent
Cisco everywoman in technology
awards, said: “As a woman in IT, I
understand that entering such a
male-dominated environment can be
daunting, but when I started it soon
became clear that there is a supportive network for women in the industry that other sectors don’t offer.”
Harry Gooding, head of client engagement at Mortimer Spinks, said:
“We are caught in a Catch 22 situation – women are not applying for
tech roles because there are not
enough women already in tech roles.
The issue is not with technology careers per se; the survey clearly
shows that a career in technology is
highly and equally rewarding for
4 | 24-30 July 2012
Women worry about the ‘macho’ nature of IT teams while men attribute the ‘geeky’ image of IT to its lack of attraction for women
men and woman alike.
“Much of the problem is image.
The technology industry needs to figure out how it is going to make its
technology function an attractive
place for women to work, and then
place this at the top of the agenda.”
Rewarding careers
Both males (92%) and females (90%)
working within the technology industry said they enjoy their careers
and find their jobs rewarding. However, 65% of females said they had
felt discriminated against in their
jobs because of their gender.
According to the survey, only one
in seven people are female in technology teams. Both men and women
alike want more diversity within the
industry, according to the respondents. Over two-thirds of men (68%)
and three quarters of women (79%)
believe there should be more women
in technology teams.
Nevertheless, the reasons why both
genders would like to see more females in their technology teams again
revealed a difference of opinion.
Females cited their top three bene-
fits of having more women in their
technology department as:
l Better communications;
l Better organised;
l Better liaison with customers.
Men’s top three benefits of having
more females on their technology
team looked slightly different:
l Having a more creative and innovative environment;
l A more fun environment;
l Better communications.
“The findings in the survey highlight the vital roles women are currently playing in the UK IT industry.
Their male counterparts acknowledge a more fun, creative and innovative environment with clearer communications due to having women
on their teams,” said Flavell.
“With results such as these, I find it
shocking that a mere one in seven
people in the technology sector is female; we need to do more to attract
women,” she added.
Attracting women in future
Despite these differing views, both
genders agreed that a career in technology will become more attractive
to women in the future.
Flavell said more needs to be done
to encourage this.
“The lack of women stems from
the ICT school curriculum, as it
doesn’t prepare students with relevant knowledge of commercial IT
programs. This, in turn, filters up
through the education system to university education and into the workplace,” she said.
“It is therefore imperative to offer
taster sessions and learning academies to females at an early age to
showcase the exciting and diverse
opportunities available within IT.” ■
more online
› The 25 most influential women in
the UK IT industry
› Women in IT are paid more than
men at junior level for the first time
› What is holding women back
from the top jobs in IT?
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
news analysis
Technical skills
Businesses migrate to Malaysia for
skills, infrastructure and workforce
A government initiative for economic growth is attracting large global companies to Malaysia, writes Karl Flinders
B
usinesses are increasingly
taking advantage of the
economic and political
benefits of setting up operations in Malaysia, whether to gain
access to a highly skilled but low-cost
workforce to support global operations, or as a stepping stone to highgrowth economies in the region.
BP is expanding its IT and business process work in Malaysia to take
advantage of the large skills pool and
freedom to bring key staff to the
country from other locations.
The Malaysian IT initiative, known
as the Multimedia Super Corridor
(MSC), was set up in 1996 by the Malaysian government as part of its economic transformation. Malaysia
wants to be a high-income nation by
2020 and it is hoped IT services and
business process centres will be a
major part of the economy.
BP in Kuala Lumpur
BP has been in Malaysia’s capital
Kuala Lumpur for over a decade, but
in recent years it has accelerated the
growth of its business services centre
in the city. This captive centre currently employs 150 IT professionals
and that figure is expected to grow.
Kevin James, vice-president of
global business services at BP, said
the company initially set up a finance business process centre to
cater for its south-east Asia business.
This has grown from fewer than 100
people with finance expertise to
about 550 with finance, procurement and IT skills.
“Initially, we put a finance centre
of expertise in Malaysia, but in mid2009 we started to build up a business services sector in Kuala
Lumpur,” said James.
He expects continued expansion at
the Kuala Lumpur centre: “We see
the centre growing to between 800
and 900 people in the near term.”
BP has large offshore captive centres in Budapest and Chicago as well
as Kuala Lumpur, which support
global operations, with smaller captives in Melbourne and Cape Town.
The Malaysia business centre’s IT
component supports global enterprise systems. This involves support
and application development for
5 | 24-30 July 2012
“The salary levels
are attractive”
Gary Jeffery,
Frost and Sullivan
SAP systems. The centre supports
SAP deployments in Europe, the
Middle East and Australia.
James said BP is growing the Kuala
Lumpur centre as part of a strategy to
centralise and automate its business
services: “We decided one of the
ways to do this was to bring it all together in larger centres.”
He added that the IT skills base in
Malaysia is high and changes introduced by the government to relax
tight immigration rules for businesses
in Malaysia, as part of the MSC initia-
tive, have helped. The MSC programme means companies involved
can bring all the staff they need from
outside Malaysia.
Frost and Sullivan expand
Another company exploiting Malaysia’s infrastructure is business consultancy Frost and Sullivan.
Gary Jeffery, director of operations
at Frost and Sullivan, said the company had been operating in Kuala
Lumpur for 12 years, but has so far
maintained a small staff of 150.
“Our reason for investing in Malaysia is
a growth strategy, rather than
offshoring or a low-cost alternative”
But he said the company is opening a second centre in another part of
Malaysia, Iskandar, and the company’s workforce is expected to grow to
about 800 over the next seven years.
He said the firm set up in Malaysia
because it wanted to do business
there and in the Asia-Pacific region:
“Our reason for investing in Malaysia
is a growth strategy, rather than offshoring or a low-cost alternative.”
But Jeffery said the company is investing in a regional hub in Iskander
which will support other Asia-Pacific
countries. He said Malaysia is an easier place to set up operations than
neighbouring Japan or China.
Tax breaks, the ability to bring staff
in from overseas and the good communications and IT infrastructure are
key reasons for setting up in Malaysia, he said.
Jeffery added that the access to a
multilingual graduate workforce, that
is less expensive than a Western
equivalent, is a big draw: “Payroll is
our biggest expense, so the salary levels are attractive to us.” He said they
are not as low as other regions, such
as India and China, but the combination of other benefits make Malaysia
a good place to do business.
Malaysia is a place of big business.
Two of the biggest IPOs this year
were both Malaysian firms – palm oil
firm Felda and Asian hospital operator Integrated Healthcare Holdings.
Other large western corporates
using Malaysia to deliver IT include:
HSBC, DHL, Prudential, Dell, AIG,
IBM, Ericsson, Shell, Exxon, Nokia
and Standard Chartered. IT service
providers such as Wipro, HCL, IBM,
HP and Atos Origin have IT delivery
centres in the country. ■
more online
› BT extends IT services reach in
Asia Pacific with £64m acquisition
› Microsoft brings cloud
computing to Malaysia
› HP boosts Asia Pacific intellectual
property licensing operations
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
Gartner Outsourcing & Strategic
Partnerships Summit 2012
8 – 9 October I London I gartner.com/eu/outsourcing
Business Success Through Sourcing Excellence,
Emerging Technologies and Stronger Relationships
Guest Keynote Speakers:
Beyond the Limits
Sir Ranulph Fiennes
The World’s Greatest
Living Explorer
The Attack of The Unexpected: Trendspotting
and Future Thinking in Turbulent Times
Magnus Lindqvist
Futurist and Trendspotter
Leading IS Transformation
at AstraZeneca
Jon Kirby
CIO, AstraZeneca
HOT TOPICS
• Business-aligned outsourcing
• Strategic relationships with service providers
• New vendor management frameworks
• Emerging technologies and changing market forces
• New contract and pricing structures
Early-bird savings
register by 10 August
and save €300
WAYS TO REGISTER
Web: gartner.com/eu/outsourcing
Phone: +44 20 8879 2430
Email: emea.registration@gartner.com
case study
enterprise software
Software delivers for Asda Direct
a
sda is deploying software
from Manhattan Associates to support the future
growth of its general
merchandise e-commerce operation
Asda Direct.
Asda will deploy the software in
several distribution centres across
the UK where Asda Direct orders are
fulfilled. Initially, the software will
be used to manage orders from the
retailer’s website.
Asda Direct is focused on general
merchandising. It sells a range of
goods from electrical appliances and
clothing to home furniture, toys,
home entertainment products, garden and outdoor equipment and
baby items.
When the business started five
years ago, the company worked with
Clipper Logistics to fulfil Asda Direct
orders from an e-fulfillment centre in
Ollerton, Nottinghamshire. However,
since the Ollerton facility is run by
Clipper, Asda Direct has limited
scope for expansion.
Paul Anastasiou, head of distribution for new business at Asda Direct,
said: “We wanted a systems platform
that would allow us to enhance
the overall efficiency of our distribution processes and offer complete
visibility of inventory throughout
our operation.”
He said Asda Direct needed a supply chain technology platform that
could integrate with the company’s
core systems and support its business
growth and expansion goals.
The Manhattan technology will
support a range of ordering and delivery options, which will extend as
the deployment project progresses.
a product is available,” said Rob
Wilks, distribution systems manager
at Asda Direct.
The system then tells the website
what products are in stock. “There
will be integration between the
content management system and our
replenishment system,” he said. The
project also involves integration to
update the finance system and
Metapack, the system used to route
packages to carriers for delivery.
The business process
Asda Direct fulfillment centres are
treated like large stores. “We put
forecast and demand planning
information into the Manhattan
Associates system. Once stock
is on the warehouse system it is
ready to order from our website.
Manhattan gets a notification that
Complex integration
“The project involves installing the
Manhattan Associates warehouse
module at the Ollerton site. It will
require integration into our systems, such as SAP, which we use
for finance,” said Wilks. “The IT integration is greater than I have ever
done before.”
Asda is deploying Manhattan Associates software to increase
efficiency across its Asda Direct distribution centres
Once stock is on the warehouse
system it is ready to order from the
Asda Direct website
7 | 24-30 July 2012
courtesy kenjonbro/flickr
Asda is revamping its distribution centre IT to support the growth of its e-commerce operation. Cliff Saran reports
Asda Direct is just completing the
design phase. A team from Manhattan Associates has worked with Asda’s on-site team on the project. “We
have been looking at how we are
structured and the building set-up,”
said Wilks.
Manhattan Associates initially developed a prototype. The configuration phase of the project began earlier
this month, and Wilks hopes to pilot
product lines by Christmas. He has
no plans to roll out until after the
Christmas period is over, but will test
the end-to-end process during that
busy time.
Future development
Wilks said Asda will centralise the
server environment in its distribution
centres over time. It currently runs
28 depots, each with its own server
room. This will involve running isolated 10Gbps point-to-point networks
links between locations backed up
by ADSL.
“While we will initially focus
on deploying Manhattan’s warehouse management solution, the
potential to implement additional,
complementary solutions from the
Manhattan product suite, and what
that gives us in terms of future flexibility and adaptability, was a big
appeal to us,” Wilks said.
Following the deployment in
Ollerton, the next site planned is the
Lymedale clothing site in Stoke-OnTrent. By installing Manhattan at the
Lymedale distribution centre, Wilks
said Asda Direct would be able to
avoid transporting clothing the 80
miles to Ollerton, which would
reduce costs. ■
more online
› Asda challenges rivals with
aggressive laptop pricing
› Forrester on optimising and
managing company datacentres
› Retailers without multichannel
risk losing business
› Enterprises increase software
application spending to $120bn
in 2012
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
news analysis
Government & public sector
Estonia a role model for digital and
open source in public sector IT
The head of the Government Digital Service tells Kathleen Hall how the Baltic nation built public service IT from scratch
E
stonia has one of the most
advanced online public service portfolios in the world
and is held up by some as a
model for the UK’s digital remit.
Earlier this year Mike Bracken,
head of the Government Digital Service (GDS), visited the country with
Cabinet Office minister Francis
Maude and deputy CIO Liam Maxwell, to see what the UK could learn.
One of the biggest differences with
Estonia’s open-source culture is that
licensed software is almost alien,
says Bracken. Just 1% of its GDP goes
on technology and services, with
0.1% going on software licences.
“They are advocates of open
source, having built the country’s infrastructure using it, and we should
learn from that,” Bracken says.
Estonia has just three instances of
proprietary software: Microsoft; an
SAP platform from which it is migrating; and a reduced Oracle platform.
Open source is used in core databases, a move which would be seen
as too risky for mission-critical systems in the UK, he says.
“Having spent 15 years doing this
they have strong confidence in their
ability to mould open source. And it
doesn’t appear to be misplaced.”
But Bracken says he is not seeking
an absolutist approach to using open
source in the UK.
“The point is, we should live in a
heterogeneous environment, using
the best of licence and the best of
open source to select which is appropriate for the job.”
But the current environment is unbalanced: “The Public Accounts
Committee said we are operating an
oligopoly – and it’s clear we have
gone too far in one way,” he says.
“The absence of open source is restricting change and innovation. It restricts market innovation and the
speed of innovation. A wider selection of technology gives you more
tools in the bag to get things done.”
8 | 24-30 July 2012
“It’s a huge advantage,
starting from scratch”
Mike Bracken,
Government Digital Service
Engineer-led culture
That Estonian IT engineers have the
freedom to innovate means they were
able to quickly recast public services.
“One of the things that struck me
clearly was, if they are left to their
own devices, they can design excellent public services,” Bracken says.
After Soviet administration for so
long, following independence Estonia found itself in the position of having to build infrastructure from
scratch, quickly and at low cost.
“The country had an emerging
open source and tech community,
with the brief to go and create public
services, which it did from 1996 to
2010. It was really interesting that noone ever wrote a requirement document to define the development.
“It’s a huge advantage, starting
from scratch. But there was also a
huge cultural advantage, as requirements weren’t imposed. They were
cheap and quick.”
The self-sufficient culture increases the chances of developers wanting
to work in Estonia’s public sphere,
Bracken says.
“If we can create government digital services as an environment where
leaders flourish, it should lead to a
vibrant, engineer-led culture.
“Self-sufficiency happened there
over a generation. But if we stick at
trying to create that culture over a
number of years, why shouldn’t that
happen in the UK, too?”
However, the approach to digital in
Estonia does not translate easily to
the UK model. Bracken says Estonia
has a low population density of 1.3
million and is an homogenous set of
people, which makes the delivery of
public services more straightforward.
“The country is the size of Birmingham and there is a lack of diversity. Few people get anything other
than vanilla services,” Bracken says.
ID card issues
Another issue which would struggle in the UK is that of ID cards, a
system used in Estonia for citizens to
validate themselves when accessing
online public services. There are no
intermediaries or other companies
validating the service: “It’s just you
and the state,” says Bracken.
The lack of finance in the development meant there was no time or energy to discuss issues around privacy.
“It is more complicated in the UK
with the legacy of ID cards, our privacy lobby and EU legislation,” he says.
“There is a strong culture of a mistrust of the state – there are many different cultural views on the nature of
ID here. We tend to question these
things in England and quite rightly.
But in Estonia it was seen as a civic
task after the USSR occupation.
“While rebuilding the mechanics
of state, there was a huge amount of
good will, which we lack.”
The UK system integrator culture
has fostered a certain aggressive attitude in government, says Bracken.
“When you travel around the UK
government, you often see unnecessary macho attitude from the system
integrator culture,” he says.
“But the people in Estonia didn’t
bang the drum, they were happy to
have a ‘show and tell’ culture.
“When you look at the UK vendor
approach and the machismo there,
you can see that attitude is absent in
Estonia. The people didn’t see themselves as tech leaders. Generally there
is a good degree of humility.
“The Estonian head of the government digital organisation asked me
what a system integrator was – when
I told him, he looked at me blankly.
The concept of having a large company in to run services seemed alien.”
But the culture is starting to change
in the UK government.
“The days of spending £100m on
outsourcing a contract to a system integrator are coming to an end. Game
over. We can’t afford to play that anymore,” says Bracken. ■
This is an edited excerpt. Click here to read
the full interview online
more online
› What is the future of open source
in government?
› Why the public sector is turning to
multi-sourcing
› Could government move to
open-source storage software?
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
community
Bryan Glick leader
Give IT the
strategic merit
it deserves
T
he latest in a series of outages, fiascos and scandals has put outsourcing under fresh scrutiny.
First, the RBS/NatWest IT problems led some critics to point the finger at
offshore outsourcing. The O2 network outage raised questions over the mobile operator’s managed service. And now the G4S
Olympics security scandal (with its shameless attempts to blame the IT) has national
newspaper commentators debating the
worth of outsourcing government services.
Labour leader Ed Miliband has joined in
too, questioning the role of G4S and others
in outsourcing (or “privatising” as he prefers
to call it) aspects of the police. According to
the BBC: “He was not opposed to privatesector involvement, but said it should be
restricted to back-office functions, such as
providing computer systems.”
And here’s the rub. In every case above,
outsourcing of IT has been implicated, even
if the problems had nothing to do with the
fact IT is outsourced. The telling phrase in
Miliband’s comment is not the “private sector involvement” but the line “back-office
functions, such as computer systems”.
The problem here is not the outsourcing of
IT. It’s the attitude that IT is a back-office
function and unworthy of strategic consideration. As police officers increasingly rely on
IT and smartphones as essential tools on the
beat, how can that be seen as “back-office”?
All those RBS press releases over the past
few years, announcing job losses in “backoffice functions” that included IT, were
phrased as if to say, “Don’t worry, it’s not job
losses in anything we do that matters.”
Company executives need to stop looking
at IT as a back-office function. The successful businesses of the future – and indeed the
efficient public services – will be those that
put technology front and centre in their strategic planning and customer/citizen engagement. Tomorrow’s leaders will see technology as a competitive weapon, not an
administrative necessity. You don’t put your
competitive edge in the back office.
Every organisation should debate the value of outsourcing – but not that of IT. ■
Editor’s blog
computerweekly.com/editor
9 | 24-30 July 2012
Glen Wilson opinion
European court legalises
second-hand software
I
n a landmark decision, the European Union Court of Justice
ruled in favour of UsedSoft, a
used software licence distributor, that the reselling of used software
licences is legal. According to the
Court of Justice, once a software
company sells a copy of its computer
program, it loses its exclusive rights
to distribution. This ruling is based
on an interpretation of Directive
2009/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, dated 23
April 2009. This directive describes
the legal protections for computer
programs within the EU.
With this ruling, companies such
as Germany-based UsedSoft have
been validated in their resale of licences, legitimising the niche market
for resellers. Although the EU Directive does not refer to the laws of individual countries, the concept of licence resale is not new in the EU. For
instance, a loophole in the UK’s insolvency laws, combined with specific language in a Microsoft licence,
created a boom in the existing resale
market in 2005.
The court’s decision states the ruling applies to physical and electronic
download. Oracle attempted to separate the download of a copy of the
software as free, but only used legally
with a licence agreement that is nontransferable. The court disagreed
“The resale of software in the EU
is likely to grow as cost-saving
measures for organisations”
with this separation and defined
what constitutes a first sale.
“It makes no difference whether
the copy of the computer program
was made available by means of a
download from the rightholder’s
website or by means of a material medium such as a CD-ROM or DVD,”
the court ruled.
“Even if the rightholder formally
separates the customer’s right to use
the copy of the program supplied
from the operation of transferring the
copy of the program to the customer
on a material medium, the operation
of downloading from that medium a
copy of the computer program and
that of concluding a licence agreement remain inseparable from the
point of view of the acquirer.”
In addition to the purchase of the
licence and product, existing contractual obligations transfer from seller to buyer. This includes maintenance and upgrade contracts that
recognise and uphold the licence.
This implies that resale has no negative consequences for the buyer. This
judgment brings a new perspective
when discussing acquisitions, mergers and buyouts.
Publishers did receive some consideration in the ruling. Before a copy
can be sold by a reseller, the original
downloads and/or installations must
be removed. Licence agreements cannot be separated. The Directive cites
the example of an Oracle licence
package that is sold in groups of 25
users. If a buyer has 27 users, they
must buy two bundles and may not
resell the unused users in the agreement. This still provides Oracle with
some leverage and a way to monitor
the used licence reseller market
through CD key registration.
The effect in the US is much less
than in the EU. In the precedent-setting case Vernor vs. Autodesk, it was
established that US buyers purchase
the ability to use a licence, not own
the software. Without that ownership
transfer, redistribution is not legally
possible. This does not stop US purchasers from sourcing products, software and licences from outside the
US, although the legality remains
murky. Organisations risk paying for
software and not being able to use it
due to no-transfer licence language or
the requirement for a matching maintenance agreement.
The Court of Justice’s decision is
important in that it strips away the
line that divides sale of a licence
from sale of a product. The implications on international trade, intellectual property enforcement and IT
asset management are enormous, but
that impact is subject to further discussions and agreements. In the short
term, the resale of software in the European Union is likely to grow as a
cost-savings measure for European
organisations. ■
Glenn Wilson is executive vice-president
& general counsel of the International
Association of IT Asset Managers (IAITAM)
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
buyer’s guide
Taking the tablets
to boost efficiency
Cliff Saran looks at how consumerisation trends are
improving healthcare provision in the NHS
CW Buyer’s guide
iT in healThCare
part 3 of 3
M
obility is one of the big
drivers in the NHS.
Rather than type up
paper notes, mobile
devices allow clinicians to access patient administration systems directly.
Cornelia Wels-Maug, senior analyst in healthcare technology at
Ovum, says: “Consumers drive the
need for ease of use and instant availability. This translates into healthcare, which follows the consumerisation trend. There is a time-lag in
healthcare, however, as data needs to
be digitised, which is driven by
adopting electronic health records.”
A few years ago, state-of-art in the
NHS was the so-called Computer on
11 | 24-30 July 2012
Wheels or CoW, basically a laptop on
a trolley which clinicians could
wheel around wards. CoW was positioned as the system that provided
clinicians with bedside access to the
clinical IT system.
The Royal Free Trust in London
used three CoWs per ward. However,
they were not being used because the
trolleys were too large, according to
Will Smart, IT director of NHS Royal
Free Trust.
“It was almost impossible for clinicians to get the trolley to the bedside,” he says.
The trust is rolling out a ruggedised Windows tablet called the Motion C5v as an alternative to the CoW,
to connect to Cerner, the clinical system the trust deployed in 2008.
The tablets run standard Windows
XP using a security model based on
smartcards. They connect to the hospital-wide secure wireless network.
The device is ruggedised and has
been checked by the trust’s infection
team to ensure it meets the level of
hygiene required in clinical areas.
According to Motion, the tablet can
survive a 1.5m drop.
Smart has yet to test this: “We have
not had any tablet failures yet.”
Along with greater accessibility,
the tablet device made IT part of the
clinician’s day-to-day work.
“We spend a lot of money on IT. By
changing the device, the applications
becomes more accessible. This drives
up usage,” says Smart.
In fact the Motion tablet removes a
lot of paperwork.
“Nurses used to capture data on
pieces of paper, then went to a workstation to input the information into
Cerner. Now they can use tablets directly,” says Smart.
But the system is not only being
used as part of patient care.
“We had anticipated the tablets
would be used in clinical systems.
But ward managers are using them to
log calls with facilities for minor repairs,” says Smart. “They would previously have taken notes on paper.
“We’ve found the impact goes way
beyond efficiency – it has improved
the quality of care delivered and
opened up options for how we work.
“And this is just the start, we have
plans for dynamic, responsive operation scheduling, based on anaesthetists being equipped with the tablets
and deploying the technology in preoperative assessments.”
Each ward has five to six devices
and a rack called the pizza box,
which automatically charges the tablets when they are not being used.
Due to the design, it is also possible
to hot-swap batteries and Smart’s IT
helpdesk will keep batteries on
charge just in case one of the tablets
runs out of power.
Since it runs the same application,
training clinicians to use the device »
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
buyer’s guide
was straightforward, according to
Smart. He says: “The main issue was
change management, how the technology fits into the work process.”
The trust has done some work to
make Cerner as friendly as possible
to use on the tablet. “People use a soft
keyboard. We also created new forms
in Cerner, that use button input,
which works quite well with tablets.”
But not everything in Cerner can
be achieved using a push-button interface, which means tablets may not
be suitable for all areas in the trust.
Smart says: “We won’t replace all
desktops with tablets. We want to ensure clinicians have the right device
at the right place to do their job.”
This means the trust will need to
look at smartphone connectivity and
how to use iPhones as part of its technology roadmap.
Smart says the trust is planning to
roll out 150 tablets this year across its
30 wards. It will also pilot their use
in A&E and look at other key areas
such as anaesthetics.
Beyond this the trust will review
whether the PCs on the ward are no
longer needed.
BlackBerry deployment
It is no surprise Research in Motion’s
BlackBerry is deployed in healthcare,
since the BlackBerry platform is established in enterprise, thanks to its
strong levels of security.
University Hospitals Birmingham
NHS Foundation Trust has developed a series of applications for the
BlackBerry platform that enable it to
deliver mobile access to core patient
services for clinicians.
Stephen Chilton, director of IT services at the trust, says: “What we’ve
really tried to do with the BlackBerry
environment is create the ability for
us to deliver applications, to supplement traditional phones, scheduling
and e-mail capability.”
One such applications, Norse (neurological referral system), enables
specialist neurological team to better
respond to requests for advice and
guidance from other hospitals.
“We may get a request in from another hospital following a road traffic
accident. Wherever they are, our specialists can now use their BlackBerry
to look up a patient’s records, provide
informed guidance and then append
their recommendations directly to
the patient’s record,” David Rosser,
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children: Using iPads and iMacs for instant access to 3D images of a patient’s heart
medical director at University Hospitals Birmingham explains.
“It has dramatically improved the
inter-hospital interactions that were
often the problem points in a patient’s care.”
Consumerisation of health IT
Beyond the BlackBerry and specialist
mobile platforms, there is an almost
grassroots movement to bring IT consumerisation to the NHS.
The cardiology department at
Great Ormond Street Hospital for
Children is using iPads and iMacs for
instant access to 3D images of a patient’s heart while planning for surgery, or even in theatre.
Mark Large, IT director at Great Ormond Street, believes mobility is
vital. Clinicians need to be able to access data and update records in real
time, at the bedside, to ensure each
patient can get the best care.
For many nurses and allied health
professionals (AHPs), an iPod Touch
is ideal because they can simply slip
it in a pocket when it’s not in use.
For others, such as doctors using
complex clinical software, the larger
screen of the iPad works better.
“Mobility is part of a wider journey, one that involves the move from
paper to electronic medical records,
“Ultimately, electronic access to the
latest patient information will free up
clinical time and improve patient care”
12 | 24-30 July 2012
so mobility has to be ready and working for that transition” says Large.
Great Ormond Street recently upgraded its cardiology MRI Pacs (picture archiving and communications
system) system. The tool, which was
deployed by Kanteron Systems, enables clinicians to access 3D images of
children’s hearts, using Osirix 3D
medical imaging software.
When the surgeon goes into theatre
they can call up the images directly
from central storage onto an iMac
workstation in theatre.
South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust (SWFT) is another organisation deploying the Apple tablet.
Here, the trust is digitising its paperbased library of medical records. It is
providing staff with mobile devices
to access the information from the
bedside in hospitals or while in the
community visiting patients at home.
Duncan Robinson, associate director of ICT at SWFT, says the plan will
change the way staff work.
“Whether in an acute or community setting, there is significant duplication of information. Paper can’t be in
two places at once. Ultimately, flexible, simultaneous electronic access to
the latest patient information will
free up clinical time and improve patient care,” he says.
Computer Weekly’s sister title,
SearchDataManagement.co.uk, recently covered how three NHS Trusts
connected iPhones to Oasis’s patient
administration system (PAS). Thirty
hospitals in the UK use Oasis PAS.
“The mobile system provides the
right information to the right people
at the right time so that they can
make decisions,” says Robert Campbell, managing director of Ecommnet,
a mobile application specialist that
implemented the business intelligence application.
He adds: “The consultants can
identify those patients whose results
are out of kilter so that appropriate
action can be taken.”
Going Mobile
Putting mobile technology in the
hands of clinicans is the way forward
for healthcare IT in the UK.
The starting point for a mobile
strategy is ensuring patient records
are digitised. Clearly hospitals also
require robust wireless networking,
since poor networking limits will
impede the way clinicians access
medical data.
Virtual desktop software, such as
Citrix or the BlackBerry Enterprise
Server, can widen access to clinical
systems from a secure mobile environment, but devices will need to be
managed, which is what Great Ormond Street Hospital does with the
iPads it issues to clinicians. ■
more online
› Hospitals cure test data delivery
with mobile business intelligence
› The benefits and costs of putting
telemedicine into the NHS
› NHS invites software developers
to create healthcare apps
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
»
supercomputers
What you need to know about HPC
At the forefront of technological advancements, high-performance computing and its far-reaching potential
is hindered only by the shortcomings of the humans employed to utilise it. Kevin Cahill reports
courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory
T
he supercomputer sector is
the fastest growing niche
in the technology world,
with annualised installation
growth of over 10% to date.
The overall supercomputer market
in 2012 is worth $25.6bn, 22% up on
last year. Annual growth to 2015 is
forecast at 7% per annum, according
to figures from the High Performance
Computing (HPC) Advisory Council.
The average cost of an installed
machine is between $10m and
$20m, but for some of the bigger
sites it is upwards of $100m, and
can even exceed $200m.
By definition, a supercomputer is
the largest, most powerful (fastest)
computer available at any given
moment in time. In practice supercomputers are scientific and numerical processors, rather than data
processing machines.
They are built on a different basis
to data processing machines, and
are many times faster. The power of
a supercomputer is measured
several ways, but flops (floatingpoint operations per second) is the
current measure.
Top performers
The Top 500 rankings of the most
powerful computers are based on
a commonly accepted test, called a
Linpack. This measures the speed at
which a machine executes a dense
system of linear equations. The runrate is commonly reported in flops.
The current top machines are in the
teraflop zone, at 1012 flops. The race
is on to get to an exaflop machine,
delivering 1018 flops, by 2018.
Design teams in the US, Japan,
Germany and China are attempting
to win the race. The breakthrough
machine will be called “the exaflop
machine”, a device that can do
tens of trillions of calculations per
second, and one that could close
The IBM Blue-Gene/P
supercomputer
down a small city when it is
switched on due to the 20MW
of power needed. It will be the
largest, most complex computer
ever constructed by mankind.
Supercomputer community
There are approximately 500,000
people working within the supercomputer sector. The majority work
with installed machines, applying
After nuclear weapons, the most
important strategic devices on Earth
are supercomputers. They will
determine the success or failure of
countries, continents even, in the future
13 | 24-30 July 2012
them to specific, real-world problems. But there is a significant group
working in the construction of the
machines, and on the research and
development associated with them.
There is a vast skills shortage in the
sector. It is at its most acute in the development of operating systems. This
is the software that controls the machine and connects it to the application software that does real-world
work, such as modelling the planetary weather system.
The electronics have moved so far
ahead of the software that the situation has been likened to having a Ferrari engine with a model T Ford
three-speed manual gearbox to get
the power to the wheels, which have
yet to move on from the equivalent of
solid rubber to pneumatic tyres.
The rule of thumb that applied to
all earlier computers – that what you
get out is only as good as what you
put in – applies in spades to supercomputers. If you use bad data you
get bad data back, only faster and
worse.
User skill shortage famously resulted in the failure of the Japanese Earth
Simulator supercomputer to forecast
or predict the 2011 tsunami – and the
failure of the many machines in the
banking structure to forecast the subprime crash. Rather, banking staff appear to have used their supercomputing power to accelerate the pace of
the crisis and make it worse.
There is a further issue, not much
discussed in the industry. Supercomputers are not data processing machines, and use models, mathematical formula and other intellectual
creations to work on problems. Those
programs are equally subject to the
earlier observation – bad programs
deliver bad results, only much faster.
The machines expose flaws in
»
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
supercomputers
»
Strategic importance
After nuclear weapons, the most
important strategic devices on
planet Earth are supercomputers.
They will determine the success or
failure of countries, continents even,
for the whole of the future. Without
them, mankind itself may not be
able to survive.
The competition for pole position
in the race to develop the largest, fastest and most powerful supercomputer lies between a handful of countries, and the competition is intense.
The US currently holds first and
third place, Japan is second, Germany is in fourth place, and China fifth.
Unusually, the key teams are accessible, at least to conference visitors.
Members of all three teams attended
the International Supercomputer
Conference (ISC 2011) in Hamburg
last year, and there were open ses-
Darwin: a supercomputer based on commodity chips
Paul Calleja oversees one of the world’s most powerful
computers, the Darwin supercomputer cluster, ranked at
number 93 in the Top 500 list, writes Bill Goodwin.
With 9,600 Intel Sandy Bridge processor cores, the
machine is capable of running calculations at 200
teraflops, equivalent to 200 trillion calculations per second.
It is not the fastest supercomputer in the UK, says
Calleja – there are faster machines at Edinburgh,
Daresbury and the Met Office – but it is certainly the
fastest scalable machine built from commodity Intel chips.
Calleja joined the Cambridge high-performance
computing (HPC) service from the HPC centre at Imperial
College six years ago. He took the decision to replace
sions with the designers, very akin to
academic conferences.
The level of secrecy that might have
been expected did not occur. This is
partly explained by the fact that the
kinds of problems that these three
teams are trying to solve, in creating
the ultimate machine, are beyond individuals or countries to resolve.
Table 1: Supercomputer applications
Application area
No. of machines
%
No of personnel
Research (University)
71
14.2
14,200
Finance
24
4.8
4,800
Service
21
4.2
4,200
Logistics
21
4.2
4,200
Defence
16
3.2
3,200
World Wide Weather
15
3
3,000
Geophysics
13
2.6
2,600
Information services
10
2
2,000
Energy
10
2
2,000
Climate research
10
2
2,000
Aerospace
8
1.6
1,600
Benchmarking
7
1.4
1,400
Telecomms
6
1.2
1,200
Internet provider
5
1
1,000
Transportation
5
1
1,000
Info Processing Svc
5
1
1,000
Automotive
2
0.4
400
Medicine
2
0.4
400
Software
2
0.4
400
Weather forecasting
2
0.4
400
Electronics
2
0.4
400
Digital media
1
0.2
200
Life science
1
0.2
200
Environment
1
0.2
200
Semiconductor
1
0.2
200
Biology
1
0.2
200
238
47.6
47,600
Other
Source: Top 500 list
14 | 24-30 July 2012
Cambridge’s propriety supercomputer hardware with
supercomputers based on commodity Intel chips.
Calleja also changed the computing centre’s business
model – transforming it from a free service funded
centrally by Cambridge university, to a commercial
service open to both academics and businesses.
The shift to a commercial service has meant investing
heavily in improving the support and service levels the
department offers to businesses and academics.
The Cambridge HPC service has worked with the Lotus
Formula 1 team to model the aerodynamics of racing cars,
and with a small graphics arts company to render the
special effects in the latest Planet of the Apes movie.
HPC in the field
There are only 11 companies that can
be said to be serious producers of installable supercomputers – IBM, HP,
Cray, SGI, Bull, Appro, Dell, Hitachi,
NEC, Fujitsu and Dawning – out of
a world total of 37 producers. These
companies are concentrated in the
US, Japan and China.
The sector remains under-marketed because, despite IBM’s best efforts,
it is not a mass market. At upwards of
$10m-20m per machine, and ignoring the colossal cost of running a site,
all decisions about purchase or commission are made at board or government cabinet level.
The application sectors (Table 1)
are mainly selling sub-capital additions to machines. Marketing
expenditure and activity is likely to
increase significantly here.
The top site in the UK – that at
Edinburgh University – presents an
indicator of where governments
and suppliers will focus their
attempts to expand the market.
Governments will be looking to
improve job opportunities for their
graduate populations and get greater
efficiencies in their economies.
Suppliers will be looking to install
a mid-range machine in 10% of
the world’s approximate 8,000
universities.
The number of key decisionmakers is very small – the boards of
the Fortune 500 companies in the US
and the boards of the FTSE 100 companies in the UK. In most of the 27
top 500 countries, up to half of the
decisions are made by government.
The suppliers will be looking to expand the market by getting machines
into more countries. ■
This is an extract from a Computer Weekly
guide to supercomputers. Click here to
download the full article. Kevin Cahill is
a professional Fellow of the British
Computer Society.
more online
› Supercomputers: Q&A guide
› UK’s biggest GPU-based
supercomputer goes live
› Supercomputers will reach
‘exascale’ speeds within decade
Kim Traynor/wikipedia
human thinking, and do so at great
speed. The internal ethos in the industry is a unique blend of pure science and applied engineering.
Edinburgh University is the top supercomputer site in the UK
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Michael thought this
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diagnose a sprained ankle
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IT for travel & transport
Mobile software
How mobile apps let fliers arrange
their travel details from 35,000 feet
America Airlines' director of mobile apps tells Linda Tucci how back-end data is improving customers' flying experience
User interface quality
To rev up its enterprise mobile apps
development, IT first had to concede
it no longer owned IT, Easter says.
Having ruled the technology playground at the enterprise, IT was
schooled by Apple into realising the
game had changed, especially on the
front end.
“User interface [UI] is the new song
for mobile apps. Everything about the
mobile app has to have great UI,”
says Easter, whose team develops
apps for the consumer space and
consults with internal IT on developing the airline’s mobile apps.
To really make use of those great
UIs, the back end at American Airlines had to change.
“We have over 50 years of legacy
data securely captured in our enterprise. We don’t let it out. And now
come these mobile devices needing
access,” Easter says.
In the past, anything that was mobilised at American Airlines was
usually a one-off, built specifically
for an application.
As mobile devices matured and
could receive data in a more stand16 | 24-30 July 2012
“If I know why you are
there, that is key”
Phillip Easter, American Airlines
Flickr/ Simon_sees
P
hillip Easter, director of
mobile applications at
American Airlines, says
the airline has been in the
mobility business for 80 years. This
is because its assets are mobile. Employees are mobile. The airline’s 86
million passengers certainly count
on being mobile after boarding one
of its 900 aircraft.
As for enterprise mobile apps?
Roving airline agents were carrying
handheld devices and WiFi-enabled
printers on their belts back in 2000.
“We’ve been doing mobile for over
12 years in the enterprise,” he says.
Today, however, doing mobile has
new meaning for the financially challenged airline, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November.
Over the past 18 months, American Airlines has worked at making
mobility a core business process,
most visibly in its offerings for travellers. A suite of mobile apps that work
on an array of devices, for example,
has become a big selling point for the
Fort Worth-based airline.
ardised fashion, IT needed to build
a middle layer and new application programming interfaces (APIs)
for its back-end systems, to expose
data in consumable chunks for mobile devices.
“This is not an old system that allows a mobile device to get megabytes of data and then leaves it to the
device to figure out how to manage it
and sort it,” Easter says.
Instead, they use what he calls
representational state transfer, an architectural style developed for distributed systems, such as the World
Wide Web and JavaScript Object Notation. It is basically a lightweight data-interchange format.
Developers can call an API to get
data and quickly create enterprise
mobile apps. “They should not have
to worry about how to open up a
channel, the security, nor how they
should find this type of data. They
should be able to call the data in an
object-based API,” Easter says.
For organisations eager to jump on
the enterprise mobile app bandwag-
on, the goal is to create a middle-layer API that is documented through a
wiki or in some other place where
any developer in the enterprise can
get that data.
“Once you have that exposed to
developers, the apps just flow in,”
Easter says.
“It will take time to create this middle layer that is open and robust to
your system, but once you spend
time there, it really becomes agile.”
Easter says he and others were surprised by how rapidly American’s
full- and part-time developers started
pumping out apps – and how quickly
employees started using them.
The 12- to 18-month development
approach – from proof of concept to
testing, analysing and committee reviews to then tweaking the product
year after year -- doesn’t exist anymore in the realm of enterprise
mobile app development.
“When we say proof of concept,
that really means production, because the internal user could be using
it in matter of weeks,” he says.
Focus on user intent
Easter has another tip for organisations eager to jump on the enterprise
mobile app bandwagon: Think intent, not location.
“Knowing that you are at a certain
latitude/longitude is great, but if I
know why you are there, that is key,”
he says. With enterprise mobile apps,
the temptation is to cram in a lot of
features, but Easter advises his people to try to do three things well.
“If you know who the customer is
and what is their intent, then you
know what to bubble up in the app.
You can have 30 different things, but
only show three things at any given
time,” he says.
Easter’s team continues to open up
internal systems to provide innovative mobile services to the airline’s
travellers. Working with its partner
on IP telephony systems, Easter’s
teams became intent on pushing
voice over internet protocol (VoIP)
into the mobile space.
The result is a soon-to-debut service that will let passengers chat with
American agents on the ground over
a Wi-Fi connection – while airborne
– to adjust travel arrangements.
Because American Airlines’ systems know who you are and where
you’re going, the preliminaries are
dispensed with and the business at
hand is dispatched in minutes by an
agent 35,000 feet below.
“IT’s an example of bringing together tested technology – WiFi, mobile apps and Internet-enabled
phones – to bring about a new conversation with the customer.” ■
This article first appeared on Computer
Weekly’s sister title SearchCIO.com
more online
› Virgin Atlantic to offer in-flight
mobile access
› IT headaches for Continental
and United Airlines
› Delta Airlines brings Wi-Fi to
international flights
Daily news for IT professionals at ComputerWeekly.com
downtime
IT-inspired verse
This technology-related limerick
business is really catching on.
Here we share more finely crafted
contributions from our creative
readers.
The delights of a career in IT
by Steve Pauline
At twenty one years - just a pup,
A job in IT I took up,
Now I’ve reached fifty nine,
It’s time to design,
A career path for when I grow up!
Ode to business gatherings
by Stan Gain
Because I find meetings boring
I find myself doodling and
drawing.
To keep me awake
Strong coffee I take
It’s the only thing stops me from
snoring.
Reflections on two-finger typing
by Stan Gain
My problem with using PCs
Is my slowness in working the keys
As PCs get faster
They are harder to master
Can anyone help me here? Please!
The rhyme of first line support
by Steve Pauline
“Have you checked that it’s
switched on?”, I said
“Have you checked that with
power it’s fed?”
Cos without any juice
It’s about as much use
As a Python-esque parrot – it’s
dead.
Lines on impressing the boss
by Steve Pauline
There once was a programmer
called Brad
Who felt undervalued, not glad
So with Neuro Linguistics
And clever statistics
He proved he was clever – how sad
Medioimages/Photodisc/thinkstock
Have you got an IT-related
limerick. Click here to e-mail
your contribution to the
Downtime team.
17 | 24-30 July 2012
Heard something amusing or exasperating on the industry grapevine? E-mail cw-downtime@computerweekly.com
Geeks and gamers are at it too
Those who prefer to wander the
realms of Azeroth than hang out in
the bars of Soho might have become
accustomed to the odd pang of loneliness that the virtual world cannot
cure. But a new website has been
created to help both male and female
gamers get that little extra something
on the nights they can bear to turn off
the PC.
ShagAGamer.com does what it
says on the tin. It’s no dating site –
that would involve nights out or
weekends away from Halo – merely a
place to meet fellow gamers who
wish to play a quick level and head
home afterwards to their Call of Duty.
Still not getting our drift? Well, the
claims on the home page of the website will make it clear: “We play host
to thousands of single gamers who
want no more than a quick shag.”
In Downtime’s experience, plenty
of geeks and gamers are happily married or shacked up with a partner and
don’t need another fantasy game in
their lives, but for the rest, it is always good to have something in common, even if just for one more round.
Just leave the PS Vita at home.
On your marks, get set, pee
With just days to go until the start of
the London 2012 Olympic Games,
PRs everywhere are trying to find a
desperate Olympics angle to shoehorn a story into publication by a
Games-obsessed media.
There will be highs and lows, but
they will have to go some way to beat
what is perhaps already the benchmark nadir for Olympics-related tech
PR puffery.
Captive Media, a company that
specialises in – wait for it – “interactive washroom media”, has launched
the 100ml Dash, described as “a
sprint race like no other”.
Downtime cannot hope to improve
on the wording of the press release
that announced this earth-shattering
(or should that be “ceramic-shattering”) development, so we’ll leave it
to the firm’s own description: “The
100ml Dash is a unique game that
male ‘evening athletes’ at participating bars will be able to play while answering the call of nature – with the
digital action displayed before them
on a mounted video screen.
“Set to be rolled out in selected
bars in the UK and Europe in the runup to London 2012, the 100ml Dash
is a sprint race like no other. Participants control the game by directing
their pee stream at targets in the urinal. The truer their aim, the faster
their character sprints.”
Other products from the same
company include “washroom diversions” such as a downhill skiing simulator and a trivia quiz game called
Clever Dick.
“The game makes every man a
competitor – not merely a spectator –
in the true Olympic spirit,” said Captive Media co-founder Mark Melford.
Clearly, Olympics organisers have
missed a trick. Stick a portaloo at the
end of the 100m track, deprive sprinters of the opportunity to relieve
themselves for 24 hours prior to the
race, and watch them break the world
record as they race to be the first to
empty their bladders – and presumably to beat the top score in the latest
in interactive washroom games.
Mobile phones destroying good
manners and fashion
Scientists are developing T-shirts
that will be able to recharge batteries on mobile phones. Yes, scientists
at the University of South Carolina
have found a way of storing electrical
power in clothing.
What is interesting is that the same
day the article appeared, there was a
report on the Guardian website about
how mobile phones are taking over
our lives.
So not only do people now hold
conference calls while sitting on the
toilet and check texts and e-mails
during sex, they even have clothes
designed just so they can charge
their phones. ■
Read more on the Downtime blog
computerweekly.com/downtime
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