Organisation

Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Cloud gives tech firms a skills shortage

It’s almost twenty years since AWS publicly launched its first infrastructure service. Those early days of Cloud were chock full of promise: no more hardware ownership to worry about; scale infrastructure up and scale down, paying only for what you use. In many ways that headline promise has been realised. Much of the last two…
Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Three ways Cloud may be holding back your Business Plan

Cloud has become embedded in many firms as the weapon of choice for accessing computing power and storage without needing to own hardware. However, while Cloud has many advantages, there are some important disadvantages that business decision makers must navigate. Sometimes, the underlying disadvantages of Cloud can be overlooked and only become apparent when real…
Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Operational people dominate the new Cloud era

Cloud technology has captured the headlines for years, and development teams have delighted in all the new services and capabilities that have been added. Rightly so. The race has been on to build new applications and get them running in the Cloud. Yet the emphasis has been shifting steadily, largely overlooked, and this shift has…
Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why using a new Cloud provider is getting even harder

Public Cloud services are widely available, and more and more firms are using these as a platform for their own technology services and systems. Tech teams, though, tend to have a favourite brand of Cloud, often out of familiarity or practicality. This can be a problem because there are several good, business reasons why firms…
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….
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…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why business leaders must forget about normal and thrive in the unknown

I’ve been in business a long time, and big events have come and gone: the oil crisis and inflation of 1972; the crash of ’87; a couple of recessions and a few wars and 9/11, you get the picture. Sudden technology changes have done their bit as well. I’m not really sure when it was,…
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…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

How stretched tech teams can raise their game in the Cloud

The pool of talent in ambitious tech firms always seems too thinly spread. We used to think it was like a small duvet: you can have your shoulders warm or your feet, but not both. Almost all ambitious tech businesses have too few tech specialists that have the depth of skills and a real understanding…
Organisation

Ask the CFO about the right Cloud architecture

My BMW is ok, but it’s not new. It’s now of an age that gets me thinking about replacing it, but for the last too many months my marvel of German engineering has hardly moved. I’ve realised that for three months it’s only been used to go and get a takeaway of a Friday evening….
Organisation

Covid-19: The UK lags far behind

The majority of significant changes are a worsening of the rates of fatality, and this can be seen here, in this chart of movement over the last seven days. Daily fatalities in the UK lag far behind those of the leaders in this grim race. In fact fatalities per million in the UK are almost…