Executing

Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy

Why tech firms must now be agile in business, too

The future isn’t going to be like the past. In fact it isn’t even going to be like the present, but that’s not new for tech firms. What is new is that there are so many moving parts and large, disparate and sudden uncertainties out there that make forecasting deeply suspect. The range of significant…
Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why the Cloud carve-up makes life hard for SMEs

Revealing figures published recently in the FT show Cloud supply is highly concentrated in AWS and Azure, and they now command more than half the worldwide revenues in the sector. The rest of the vendors are fragmented and too dispersed for them to be able to exert any significant influence. They pick up what’s left….
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management

Three ways to solve the growing problems of Cloud scale-up

Once online technology services have been built and tested, attention shifts to delivering to customer, and Operations becomes the name of the game. Lots of new workloads must kick in to ensure that performance is up to scratch, services are resilient and robust, and all service problems and issues are identified and fixed quickly to…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Cloud vendors are taking us back to the 1960s

Trousers were flared, and flowers and funny smelling smoke were everywhere when Gene Amdahl worked as a computer architect at IBM in the 1960s. Back then, designing and building hardware was a big deal and very expensive. Only a few companies produced such equipment, and each was different from the rest. Software was big, complex,…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

What Tim did after Steve

There were a lot of naysayers about the future of Apple when Steve Jobs died in October 2011. Few were confident about the Company he’d created and its future under Tim Cook, who’d just been promoted up from Chief Operating Officer to CEO. Even fewer had any idea about the rocket ship that the business…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy

How to fix the business issues created by Public Cloud

Public Cloud – on-line computing resources from the big brands – was seen as the obvious choice for many and technologists love them, but several key problems have emerged for business users: Costs can become prohibitive when usage gets underway Lock-in strips away business flexibility and choice Privacy and security issues concern many Support is…
Covid-19, Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation

How to stop Cloud costs strangling business

Once the tech is running, it’s the business that matters in the Cloud Once the devs have worked their magic and the tech is running and doing what it should, the challenges move to business: getting the service to customes and users reliably, at scale, and profitably. This is where the business challenges begin as…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

How Cloud creates business problems that can be solved

Business challenges begin once the technology is running Dev and test are all about getting new functionality to run to spec. Once it’s running and doing what it should, it must move to Production and get delivered to the intended customers and users. This is where the business challenges begin as the costs issues and…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation

Face to face meetings are a whole new thing

I’ve just agreed my first face to face business meeting for almost fourteen months. I’m looking forward to the familiar, productive push and shove that you get when you get into open debate and press the search for the right idea or solution. None of that stuttering audio as Zoom or Teams tries to make…
Covid-19, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation

Managing occupational health issues in the new normal

Few businesses would doubt that the pandemic has had a challenging impact on the way businesses and sectors have needed to revise how work is undertaken, not only in the UK but across the world. Probably one of the most far reaching changes in this regard is the increasing use of technology platforms in the…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy

Why Cloud now matters for the CFO

Back in the day, Cloud was just a technology for technologists. It had some business benefits, maybe, but they came anyway, regardless of the Cloud solution. The design choice was a technical one. This picture is changing as the use of Cloud has extended through deeper and wider penetration across the organisation, and as the…
Covid-19, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

The angry mob of Covid issues coming in 2021

We will look back on 2020 with some nostalgia as a year when life was challenging but simple. The strategy was Hope and Cope, and this would all be over soon.  That myth will evaporate in 2021. At one level, the twelve months ahead looks like a straightforward journey with obvious steps to take in…