Software

I was at the Agile Business Conference a couple of weeks ago and amoungst lots of very interesting presentations was a comment by Scott Ambler about research into the costs of Big Requirements Up Front (BRUF). By BRUF he means trying to pin down exactly what an IT system (and I would extend this to any system e.g. business, government dept. etc) will do before developing it.

Click here for Scott’s article on the study. In summary BRUF typically leads to significant wastage of resource.

While we didn’t have access to this sort of detailed research at the time, Solution 7 and I knew that to deliver the National Packaging Waste Database in the very tight timescales required, an aglie approach had to be taken. We have met the deadlines and are on course to meet the final go-live date of 1st February 2007, so the approach has been effective. It is nice to know that it was the most efficient approach as well!

Kubernetes is delighted to announce that it has joined the UK Information Technology Association (UKITA).

A bit of background is worth noting. UKITA has come about as a direct result of the government’s “clustering” initiatives that started in 2002. At that time, the regional development agencies (RDA) were given funds to get SMEs to collaborate with academia, government and each other to build their businesses. The original vision was to try and engineer something akin to Silicon Valley in California which has a potent mix of capital, ideas and enterprise in several technology sectors.

This funding levels varied depending on the economic circumstances of the region and it was used in different ways by each RDA. In the South East the money was spread thinly and tactically; in the West Midlands it was used more strategically with the West Midlands IT Association being set up and given 3 years funding to cover the whole region. This was successfully built to over 300 paying members.

In the South East, OxIT Cluster, with Jeremy as a part-time facilitator, was one of the few organisations to be successful in developing collaboration, however the funding levels were much lower and for only 18 months. It also became clear that to solve many of the issues faced by IT SMEs a national voice was needed. While there was, and is, a national voice for IT in Intellect, it is dominated by the multinationals, most of which are not British. From the solid base that was WMITA, UKITA has been launched with one of its aims to provide that national voice for the ICT SME community.

OxIT decided to join at the AGM at the end of September and will become one of the first full branches outside the Midlands.

Please see also the white paper Developing the UK ICT Industry

I heard the following definition of digital content last week. “Digital content is everything delivered over a high speed telecommunications network”. It came from someone with a media background, so it is understandable that the application to display/play the content, whether Realplayer for Music/Video or a Patient Records application for an MRI image set, gets demoted.

Going back to the conversation with the DTI folk (below), if you ignore the detail of protocol stacks and focus on “application and content”, Digital Communications as a term to describe the combination of content, software and telecommunications makes some sense.

Of course what all this discussion masks is that human (business) need we are talking about here is people communicating knowledge. In most cases remotely both in the physical sense and in the sense that they often don’t know each other.

A good example of this is accountancy software like Sage or Quickbooks. I have no personal relationship with the people that develop an acountancy package, but their in depth knowledge of book-keeping allows me to maintain my own accounts and reduce the costs of running a business.

So I’m starting to think that Digital Content is in fact part of Digital Communications which is actually about Communicating Knowledge. The digital bit is just another revolution in a similar vein to the printing press, photography and television.

How to define “Digital Content”?

At one level it could be seen simply as the electronic media; on-line print, television and radio which extends to include mobile ringtones, video clips and games.

Gaming is a very interesting example as it blends two distinct disciplines; software development and video production. In the gaming industry the two are intimately linked, so, in this case, is software part of digital content?

The answer is “it depends”. In the gaming example then the answer is probably yes but, taking it to the other extreme, the firmware that operates a digital watch is probably not.

Some insight came from the DTI’s Technology Strategy event last week where their ICT stream presentations referred to “Digital Communications”, yet the documents that the DTI have produced on this seem to refer to Telecommunications. It immediately seemed to me a bit bizzare investing taxpayers money in research in Telecommunications as the industry is maturing and is dominated by US, Chinese and Japanese mulitnationals.

In conversation, it became clear that they were really looking to co-ordinate and maximise the value of research into what they called “the upper layers of the protocol stack” i.e. applications and content. At the time it made sense to refer to this as “digital communcations”, but then I checked the wikipedia entry on protocol stacks and the application layer is of course things like HTTP!

Confused?….. You will be

However, using “Digital Communications” as a broad term to to describe the combination of software and content that “new media” has become, works for me. In the 21st century knowledge is communicated between people in digital form through content and delivered using software over the telecoms infrastructure.

My only reservation is perhaps the term still too broad and ill-defined?