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8-14 July 2014 | ComputerWeekly.com

The most influential women in IT

meet 25 iNspiratioNal womeN wHo are maKiNG tHeir marK oN tHe future of a

traditioNally male-domiNated iNdustry

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the week in it

Cloud computingUK cloud adoption up 61% in four yearsSome 78% of UK organisations have for-mally adopted at least one cloud-based ser-vice, giving cloud a mainstream deployment status, according to research. UK cloud adoption has grown by 61.5% since 2010 when the annual study by cloud industry body CIF began. The lastest research, con-ducted in June 2014, found cloud adoption had grown by 15% since September 2013. CIF estimates the annual growth rate will be 20% by the end of September 2014.

Broadband infrastructureBT apologises after broadband customers hit by mystery outageThousands of BT customers across the UK were left without internet access on the morning of 28 June after a mystery “net-work incident” brought down its service in many parts of the country. It was unclear how many of BT’s seven million broad-band subscribers were affected.

Financial ITBanking disrupter teams up with Fiserv to boost new challengersThe man behind Metro Bank and Atom Bank is working with banking software maker Fiserv to create a retail banking IT platform for entrants in the sector. The Agiliti software as a service IT platform is an attempt to reduce the costs and risks associated with the heavily regulated retail banking sector.

Mobile softwareJust Eat opens Bristol centre to boost native app developmentJust Eat is setting up a development centre in Bristol to build native mobile apps and support its back-end e-com-merce systems. The online takeaway service is expanding its technology development operations with the open-ing of a new specialist hub in Bristol. Just Eat already has a development centre in London, where it develops its e-commerce and back-end systems.

AppointmentsBBC promotes R&D controller Matthew Postgate to CTO roleThe BBC has appointed Matthew Postgate as its chief technology officer (CTO). He will be responsible for delivering the BBC’s technology strategy, including the delivery and management of broadcast and enter-prise technology infrastructure, as well as the broadcaster’s IT requirements.

Mobile networksData roaming charges across EU tumbleData roaming charges in the EU have fallen by over 50% as caps came into force to limit roaming charges for calls, texts and mobile data in Europe. The capping rules were set earlier this year by the European Parliament, which voted to end roaming tariff fees across the EU as part of its goal to create a single telecoms market.

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Formula 1 big data contest enters First lap

Formula 1 racing communications provider Tata Communications has unveiled the first in a series of challenges in its F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize, with a focus on big data and analytics. Ahead of the 2014 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, Tata invited entrants to capture and demonstrate “new and insightful” information from Formula One Management’s live data feeds. The brief was to create a visual package for this information with “suspense and excitement” for audiences.

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the week in it

access the latest it news via rss feed

Network securityISPs take legal action against GCHQ over mass network surveillanceSix internet service providers (ISPs) from around the world – including the UK’s greennet – have filed a legal complaint with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, calling for an end to what they term gCHQ’s “attack-ing and exploitation” of network infrastruc-ture for mass surveillance. It is the first time a group action has been taken against the British intelligence agency.

Data managementPhysical location of data will become irrelevant by 2020, says GartnerThe physical location of corporate data will cease to be important by 2020, being replaced by a combination of other crite-ria, according to a gartner report. gartner said the location of where companies store data will become “increasingly irrelevant” in the post-Prism era, and will be determined by a combination of legal, political and logical considerations.

Public sector ITCare.data will remain opt-out model, says NHS director Tim KelseyThe Care.data programme will continue as an opt-out scheme, despite calls from vari-ous health organisations for it to be opt-in. Tim Kelsey, national director for patients and information, nHS England, said Care.data needed to be an opt-out scheme because people who most need the health service are also those least likely to opt in.

IT projectsMoJ writes off £56m from duplicate shared services programmeThe Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has been forced to write off £56.3m from its shared services programme, which aimed to cre-ate an enterprise resource planning (ErP) system. Development of the ErP system suffered cost constraints, lateness and poor governance. The MoJ was forced to abandon the project when it realised it had been duplicated by the Cabinet Office.

Social mediaICO probes Facebook over psychology experiment data protection fearsThe Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is to investigate if Facebook broke data protection laws by conducting a psy-chological experiment on users without their consent. Two US universities were involved in the experiment, conducted one week in 2012, in which Facebook filtered 689,000 users’ news feeds to study the effects on users’ emotions.

Data privacyGoogle loses US appeal over Street View data collectionThe US Supreme Court has rejected google’s appeal that it has no privacy case to answer over its Street View data collec-tion programme. The internet giant will now face legal action. In 2010, google publicly apologised for accidentally collecting per-sonal data through open Wi-Fi networks while running its Street View programme. n

majority in Favour oF biometrics to aid travel

To make borders more secure To make travel more convenient To speed processing through customs and border contol

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Source: AccentureGlobal Australia France Germany Japan UK US

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awards

Computer Weekly’s search for the most influential women in UK IT in 2014 is over. Those who made the grade are profiled here. Kayleigh Bateman reports

The 25 most influential women in IT

The aim of compiling an annual list of the top 25 most influential women in UK IT is to recognise the role models

of women in the industry and discuss the vital part female IT leaders will play in mak-ing a difference to the future of the UK’s high-tech economy.

The winners – selected by a judging panel of employers and IT leaders from across the industry and by Computer Weekly’s readers – were announced at a special event in London last week.

The 25 inspirational women listed here on the 2014 list are role models for diversity and success among the technology community.

1 Dame Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University

of Southampton, and founder of the Web Science Research Initiative

Dame Wendy Hall is founding director – along with Tim Berners-Lee, nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J Weitzner – of the Web Science research Initiative, a

long-term research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT.

She is a fellow of the BCS, the royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the royal Society. She was awarded a DBE in 2009.

2Dame Stephanie Shirley, philanthropist and founder of

software company FI GroupDame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley is a British businesswoman and philanthropist who founded software company FI group in 1962 (later Xansa, later bought

by Steria). She created work opportunities for women with dependants, and predominantly employed women – only three out of FI’s 300-odd programmers were male – until the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made that illegal.

She adopted the name “Steve” to help her in the male-dominated business world.

In 1993, she officially retired at the age of 60 and has taken up philanthropy since then. She was awarded an OBE in 1980 and made a Dame (DBE) in 2000.

She set up the UK-based Shirley Foundation in 1986. It aims to support pioneering projects with strategic impact in the field of autism spectrum disorders, with particular emphasis on medical research.

3Joanna Shields, non-executive director at the London Stock

Exchange Group and chair of Tech CityJoanna Shields is an American-British non-executive director at the London Stock Exchange group. Before that she was CEO and chair of Tech City

Investment Organisation and the UK government’s business ambassador for digital industries. She remains Tech City UK’s chairman.

Before that she was vice-president and general manager of Facebook in Europe. She has also been president of people networks at AOL after it bought Bebo. At Bebo, she served as CEO, and before that was manag-ing director for google Europe, russia, Middle East and Africa.

In February 2013, she was rated one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK by Woman’s Hour on BBC radio 4.

4Chi Onwurah, shadow Cabinet Office minister for digital

governmentChi Onwurah is shadow Cabinet Office minister for digital government, including cyber security. She is also leading the Labour party’s pre-election

review of digital government policy. She was elected at the 2010 general elec-

tion as MP for newcastle upon Tyne Central.

Women in tech think

differently to men in tech,

say industry experts

Women in IT: Take charge of your career

path to success

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doctorate from De Montfort University for her contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of the nation and for stimulating interest in science and technology.

She reports on science and technology for the BBC’s Bang Goes The Theory, provides analysis for BBC Webwise, and is a regular reporter on BBC 1’s Inside Out programme.

6Catherine Doran, CIO, Royal Mail Group

royal Mail’s third CIO in 18 months, Catherine Doran inherited a controversial IT transformation programme, as well as the government’s partial

sell-off of the Post Office. She is responsible for devising and deliver-

ing the IT strategy to transform the technol-ogy estate. She joined royal Mail from network rail where she led a company-wide transformation programme.

A chartered engineer and former head of telecoms technology at UK regulator Ofcom, she became shadow minister for business, innovation and skills (innovation, science and digital infrastructure) in 2010. She is co-chair of the Parliamentary ICT forum (Pictfor) and board member of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

5Maggie Philbin, CEO, TeenTech

Maggie Philbin has worked in radio and television for over 30 years on a wide range of science, medical and technology programmes. She is

co-founder and CEO of TeenTech CIC, an award-winning organisation that helps young people, their parents and teachers understand more about the real opportunities in science and technology.

In 2012, she was awarded an honorary

interview: proFessor dame wendy Hall – tHe most inFluential woman in uK it 2014Solving the gender imbalance in the IT sector is not just an issue for women to sort out, but men too, according to Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, who has been named Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Woman in UK IT 2014.

Long list of achievementsHall topped the list due to her many achievements. She started out studying undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She returned to the university in 1984 to join a newly created computer science group. There her team invented the Microcosm hypermedia system.n In 1994, she was appointed as the university’s first female professor of engineering. She then

served as head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007. n In 2000, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, in addition to becom-

ing a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).n Along with Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel Weitzner, she founded the Web

Science Research Initiative, which was launched in 2006.n She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2009

New Year’s Honours.n This year, she was invited to join the Global Commission on Internet Governance, an interna-

tional effort to determine how to keep the internet free and open to all. n She also launched the Institute of Web Science, a major research initiative to understand the

effect the web has on society, culture and the economy. n Hall sits on numerous committees and advises various government bodies.

This is an edited excerpt. Click here to read the full article online

awards

Tech City names

Facebook executive

Joanna Shields as CEO

Tech City startups

struggling to acquire capital

for further growth

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awards

Black was acclaimed for her role in cam-paigning to save Bletchley Park, the home of the UK’s codebreakers in World War 2. She founded BCSWomen in 2001, which now has more than 1,200 members.

10Claire Vyvyan, general manager and executive director, large

institutions, Dell UKClaire Vyvyan is general manager and executive director, large institutions, at Dell UK, and recently acted as general manager for Dell’s public sector

business. She was previously director and general manager of Dell’s commercial business group in the UK and netherlands between 2002 and 2009.

Before rejoining Dell in April 2011, she was responsible for Microsoft’s global business relationship with BT in market partnerships to consumers around TV, music and gaming.

She has held sales management roles in the public sector and commercial businesses for Compaq, as well as sales and marketing positions at Mars group, including running Mars Electronics’ northern European distri-bution business.

11Lyn Grobler, VP and CIO, Corporate Functions, BP

Lyn grobler is BP’s vice-president and CIO of IT strategy and corporate functions and alternative energy and shipping

businesses. With an extensive career in IT, she has been responsible for projects in banking, trading and energy environments for companies including ICL, ralph M Parsons, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Koch Supply and Trading.

She is a member of Women in Technology and leads the Women in IT&S group in BP.

12Rebecca George, partner, Deloitte

rebecca george leads Deloitte’s UK public sector health practice, where she is responsible for Deloitte’s work with the Department of Health,

regulators and the nHS.

7Susan Cooklin, CIO, Network Rail

Susan Cooklin is CIO at network rail. Her career spans over 20 years in financial services, leading business, technology and operational

teams across global organisations. Last year, she took responsibility for finance

and Hr shared services at the rail operator, with her team expanding from 600 to 1,000.

Cooklin ran a business change programme in the corporate banking division of Barclays, where she worked for seven years before joining network rail in 2006.

8Denise McDonagh, CTO, Home Office

Denise McDonagh took up the role of Home Office CTO in 2013, having been programme director for the government’s g-Cloud cloud computing

scheme. The cross-government g-Cloud programme aims to transform the direction and procurement of IT across the UK public sector, and reduce Home Office IT expenditure by 30%.

McDonagh was previously director of Home Office IT, and represents a new breed of leader, enabling innovation and focusing on building high-performing teams of civil servant IT professionals.

She has more than 25 years’ experience in central government, including Defra and the Home Office, delivering high-profile IT programmes with budgets worth hundreds of millions of pounds. She is also the govern-ment representative on many senior supplier forums. She was awarded a CBE for services to IT in 2013.

9Sue Black, founder and CEO, Savvify

Sue Black is CEO of Savvify and a senior research associate in computer science at University College London.

She originally set up Savvify as the goto Foundation, a non-profit organisa-tion which aimed to make computer science more meaningful to the public through projects such as #techmums.

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awards

director level. She was a member of Sainsbury’s board, responsible for transform-ing IT to support the firm’s recovery plans.

She started her career in a software house and spent seven years in consultancy before joining Asda, where she held a number of director roles, including establishing its home delivery grocery business, serving as CIO during the transition of systems from Asda to Wal-Mart, and latterly as European strategy director for Wal-Mart.

15Hannah Dee, lecturer in computer science at

Aberystwyth UniversityHannah Dee has a degree in cognitive science, a masters in philosophy and a doctorate in computing, all from the University of Leeds. Her research areas are

computer vision for the analysis of human behaviour, the detection of shadows and reasoning about shadows, and student attitudes to the study of computer science.

She has held post-doctoral positions in grenoble, Leeds and Kingston upon Thames.

She is a Women in Computing activist and deputy chair of BCSWomen, the chartered institute for IT’s group for women. She set up the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, the UK’s main conference for female undergrad-uates, which she has run for seven years.

She leads Deloitte’s relationships with the Department of Health and Monitor, and with third-party partners in public sector health and IT-enabled propositions. She has wide experience in operational and general busi-ness management, IT, business process re-engineering and Hr.

george has been involved in a variety of activities to increase the participation of women in IT since the mid-1990s. She chaired the BCS Strategic Women’s Forum and Intellect’s Women in IT Forum, and is currently chair of the policy and public affairs board for the BCS, where she is a fellow.

She chaired Intellect’s shared services working group, and the skills group for the Egan review of sustainable community skills. She is a member of the advisory board for Warwick University Science Faculty.

13Christina Scott, CIO, FT Group

Christina Scott was appointed CIO for the Financial Times in 2012. She is responsible for technology across the FT group, working closely with

editorial and commercial areas. She has a 400+ global team responsible for building and operating the infrastructure, business applications, data and consumer products across multiple platforms.

Scott has over 20 years’ experience across the media, IT and engineering industries, designing and delivering commercial and editorial services and innovations. Before joining the FT, she worked in technology across a number of media companies, including the BBC, BT Vision, news International and ITV Digital, and spent several years as a consultant at Accenture.

14Angela Morrison, CIO, Direct Line Group

Angela Morrison has been CIO of Direct Line group for four years, managing business technology services, which shapes, builds, runs and

governs IT for the company. Insurance was a new sector for Morrison.

She had previously spent over 18 years in food retail and IT, including a decade at

judging panel

The list of the 25 most influential women in UK IT was selected by a judging panel of employers and IT leaders from across the industry, including: n Maggie Berry, founder, Women

in Technology; n Sheila Flavell, COO, FDM Group; n Eileen Brown, chair of Intellect’s women in

technology committee; CEO, Amastra; n Kayleigh Bateman, special projects

editor of Computer Weekly; and editor of CW Europe;

n Bryan Glick, editor in chief, Computer Weekly;

n …and by a reader vote on computerweekly.com

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awards

She was included in the 166th annual edition of Who’s Who, has been voted onto the Wired 100 list, the Tech City 100 and the BIMA Hot 100. The Guardian named her as one of its top 10 women in technology and she features in the top 10 Tech Heroes for good by innovation charity nesta.

Mulqueeny writes regularly for the UK press and on her own blog, speaks on radio and television, is best known for her “Year 8 is Too Late” campaign to encourage girls to take technology subjects.

19Kathryn Parsons, founder, Decoded

Kathryn Parsons is co-founder of Decoded, which teaches people to code in a day. Having launched the self-funded business in 2011, she is now

overseeing its international expansion and launching products. Some 40% of Decoded staff are female.

20Nicola Mendelsohn, managing director, Facebook Europe

nicola Mendelsohn has been vice-president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa operations at Facebook since 2013. She is responsible for

growing Facebook’s advertising revenues and improving relationships with brands.

She has served as the president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and Women in Advertising and Communications London. She was executive chairman of Karmarama advertising agency for five years.

Her career in advertising began in 1992. She also serves as director of the Fragrance Foundation and is a board member of Cosmetic Executive Women. She is chair of the corporate board of Women’s Aid.

16Jacqueline de Rojas, non-executive director of Home

Retail Group and TechUK board memberJacqueline de rojas is non-executive director for Home retail group and a board member of TechUK.

Previously, she was vice-presi-dent and general manager, UK and Ireland, at CA Technologies, responsible for sales, marketing and service.

She joined CA Technologies in 2012 from McAfee, where she helped the business move away from relying on renewal revenues towards a greater focus on new business. Her success here helped her win McAfee’s Vice-president of the Year award.

Prior to this, she was managing director, UK and Ireland, at novell UK. She has also held leadership roles at Cartesis, Business Objects, Legent and Informix.

17Ursula Morgenstern, CEO, Atos UK and Ireland

Ursula Morgenstern has been CEO at Atos UK and Ireland since January 2012. In 2013 she was appointed global CEO of Canopy, the Atos cloud and

enterprise software service line.She joined Atos Origin in 2004 as head of

enterprise solutions, having previously been a partner at KPMg for four years and general manager at K&V Information Systems.

18Emma Mulqueeny, founder, Rewired State

Emma Mulqueeny founded rewired State and Young rewired State. She is also a commissioner for the Speaker’s Commission on Digital

Democracy and a google fellow.

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21Bindi Karia, vice president, Accelerator, Silicon Valley Bank

Bindi Karia leads Silicon Valley Bank’s early-stage efforts as vice-president for its origination and entrepreneur commercial banking arm Accelerator.

She has spent much of her career in and around the startup ecosystem, most recently as the venture capital/emerging business lead at Microsoft UK.

For five years she led BizSpark in the UK (now known as Microsoft Ventures), concen-trating on early-stage technology businesses, as well as being responsible for working alongside venture capitalists and angels on behalf of Microsoft.

She sits on many industry advisory boards and has been recognised in many industry league tables over the years. She has recently been appointed a trustee for Startup Weekend Europe and is an active mentor and supporter of many of London’s top incuba-tors, including Seedcamp, TechStars, Startupbootcamp, Wayra, Entrepreneur First and Level39.

22Gillian Arnold, chair of BCSWomen, founder of Tectre

gillian Arnold has 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, including 22 with IBM, and has undertaken customer-facing technical, sales, business

development, strategic marketing and consultancy roles. She has managed and established teams for new products, and built teams with cross-industry and cross-platform experience across Europe and the UK.

She has now retired from IBM. She has significant interest in encouraging more women into the science and technology

sectors and has chaired a forum for IT trade body Intellect. She sits on the

board of directors for the UK resource Centre for Women in SET, and is currently chair of BCSWomen, which is part of BCS, the chartered institute for IT.

23Edel McGrath, UK CIO, KPMG

Edel Mcgrath is the CIO for KPMg UK. She sits on the firm’s global IT steering group and has a key role in the EMA region CIO network.

She has been with the firm for 20 years, originally joining in an administrative capac-ity. Today she is a role model in a KPMg programme designed to support female managers in their career progression.

She has worked hard to understand the business issues to support the development of KPMg’s IT strategy and deliver technology to make colleagues’ lives easier and to enhance productivity.

24Debbie Forster, UK managing director, Apps for Good

Debbie Forster is UK managing director at Apps for good, an education and technology charity, overseeing business and daily operations. Apps for

good teaches young people to create apps that can change their world.

She also serves as CDI Europe’s lead expert on education, public sector and policy. Forster has 20 years of educational experi-ence, 13 of them in leadership roles, including serving as the headteacher of a mixed com-prehensive school.

At e-skills UK, she led on education policy and strategic engagement, working with employers, educators and policy makers in the technology sector.

25Christine Ashton, SVP technology, Thomson Reuters

Christine Ashton is senior vice-president of technology at Thomson reuters, which she joined in 2013 as global vice-president for MIS centres of

delivery. Before that, she was the regional CIO for Bg group, responsible for IT strategies across the global energy company. Prior to joining Bg, she was group strategy and technology director at Transport for London. From 2001 to 2008, she held senior IT positions at BP. She is a fellow of the BCS. n

awards

› Photo gallery: Most influential women in IT› Video: Gillian Arnold, BCS Women

› Women in cyber security: The time is now

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interview

Hotels.com CTO discusses the future of omnichannel and security concerns

With 25 million downloads of its mobile app,

11 million user-generated reviews and 85 global

websites scouring 290,000 hotels across the world for available bookings, Hotels.com packs a real digital punch. But, as part of the Expedia brand, and without the tie of physical travel agents, the company is still striving for the perfect Omnichannel experience that traditional retailers are so desperate to achieve.

Chief technology officer (CTO) Thierry Bedos says that, although his web, mobile and tablet channels are connected, he wants to achieve a more integrated experience.

“Omnichannel is the experience on one device that continues when you move on to another,” he says. “But how do we make that a seamless journey?”

Bedos says Hotels.com realised this was necessary at an early stage and enabled customers’ searches to be saved on their online profile, so if they log in using another device, their recent searches will appear. The company also has a loyalty programme to encourage customers to return, but Bedos says they expect a seamless experience each time they visit the site.

Because the company’s customers can create lists of preferences, Hotels.com can begin experimenting with big data.

“The whole idea is to try to understand what customers like – not tracking what they do,” says Bedos. “Then we can tailor choice to their needs.”

For example, from the thousands of hotels that appear when a user searches for “Paris”, Hotels.com wants to show those most relevant to the customer, says Bedos. “We can understand what they’ve bought in the past, and infer their preferences to give

a choice closely aligned to what they are interested in.”

Bedos, who has been with Hotels.com since 2010, and CTO since April this year, says the company is doing a lot of work around big data and testing social proofing. This phenomenon reaffirms customers’ choices when they search for hotels by providing information about how many customers are looking at the same hotel. This shows that the hotel may be better because other people are looking at it.

Mobile offeringHotels.com has been around for 25 years. It started as a call-centre business, then evolved a web presence. It merged with Expedia at the turn of the century, growing significantly and investing in mobile over recent years. The company works closely with the rest of the Expedia team to handle similar functions, including websites, applications and mobile apps.

Bedos says mobile is key, with Hotels.com apps available for tablets and smartphones, including iOS, Android, Windows and Kindle Fire. It has also launched device-specific apps for the Samsung galaxy note series to use its dedicated S-pen.

Thierry Bedos is discovering ways to transform the omnichannel experience into a seamless journey for customers. Caroline Baldwin reports on his latest ambitions

CIO interview:

Carlos Morgado, CTO,

Just Eat

John Lewis sees omni-

channel growth in

yearly results

CW500 interview

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In fact, mobile accounts for a quarter of Hotels.com’s transactions, with the apps running up more than 25 million downloads since launching for iPhone and Android.in 2011. Bedos says the future of the business will depend on the convergence of three trends: mobile, big data and machine learning. He also says Hadoop and Cassandra will be core open-source technologies used by Hotels.com.

“We need to adapt the experience of the user across multiple devices, understand what they are trying to do and help them recognise products,” he says.

Security worryBut it is security that worries Bedos the most, and he points to the issues surrounding eBay and Heartbleed.

“These security breaches are concerning,” he says, adding that Hotels.com has a

dedicated group looking at potential security breaches, as more and

more hackers go after big brands to try to steal customer information.

“It’s worrying to hear eBay was hacked and a large number of user credentials were stolen – eBay is not a small startup, it’s a large business,” he says.

Bedos: “The whole idea is to try to understand what customers like – not tracking what they do. Then we can tailor choice to their needs”

Developing technologyHotels.com uses outsourcing and in-house staff, and recruits internal developers, because Bedos believes in multiple options.

“Using 100% outsource leaves us vulnerable, and 100% insource is not saving on costs,” he says. “It needs to be a balance across costs, control and ownerships.”

Bedos says Hotels.com is a technology company, so it has a lot of in-house skills and management. In July 2012, the firm brought part of its offshore development team in-house to cut software product cycles from 26 weeks to two weeks.

But the company still outsources some projects. Bedos says it tends to stick to startups and suppliers with a niche.

“We’re not looking at large IT outsourcing organisations,” he says. “They would want to take the whole of IT away from you.

“What we need is an organisation to help develop on the side with a particular skillset.”

To pinpoint such organisations, Bedos says he attends events and conferences, while Hotels.com’s in-house developers go to tech meet-ups to find “hidden gems”.

“But these guys will usually find you,” he says. “It’s just choosing the right one with an interesting proposition.”

Hotels.com also contributes to the open-source community by providing code for projects, as long as the intellectual property is kept within the organisation. n

› Spanning Cloud Apps boosts partner channel› Omni-channel goes beyond retail

› BBC starts search for new CTO

interview

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editor’s comment

CIOs and CTOs have a duty to address the lack of women in IT

Congratulations to the 25 most influential women in UK IT. Our annual list was announced last week, and contains some amazing, high-

achieving individuals (who happen to be women).But with just 16% of the IT profession being female – a

statistic that continues to shame the industry – there is a growing realisation that no amount of women in IT networking events or female role models, or encouraging girls at school to consider a career in IT, will change the status quo. The only way to make a change is if the men in IT make it happen.

At our event to announce the top 25 list, we heard from three male IT leaders: James Evans, director of IT strategy and enterprise architecture at BP; James robbins, CIO at northumbrian Water, and Kevin gallagher, CIO of Channel 4. Each has positively targeted a more diverse workforce in their IT teams.

But, sadly, they are rare exceptions. It is all too common to hear male IT leaders say, “Of course I understand why there should be more women in IT, but I have a great team, does it matter that they are nearly all men?”

It’s an easy statement to make, and one that reflects the unconscious bias present to varying degrees in us all. But it does matter. We have a large and growing skills shortage that is the biggest single threat to the future success of the UK’s digital economy. We will not fill that gap with men alone – and nor should we want to.

The digital revolution is not gender specific – digital technology is changing the way all of us live and work. But digital cannot deliver its full potential if it is specified, designed, built, managed and supported by a professional group that reflects the characteristics of only half the population.

The reason it matters to every CIO or IT leader who has responsibility for recruitment, talent management, skills, or staff promotions, is because you have to set the example. It will be hard work, but it has to start from somewhere. Male IT leaders – it is time you took the lead. no more excuses. n

Bryan GlickEditor in chief

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Emerging trendThis trend is already emerging. Porge research’s data relating to actual invoice expenditure shows Agilisys claiming the sixth biggest slice of the local government ICT pie in the 2012/2013 financial year, with only the major players sitting above it.

The breaking up of the Treasury’s single supplier framework, which was signed with Fujitsu in 2009 for “core IT services”, further underlines this point.

According to the Office Journal of the European Union (OJEU), a key objective of the exercise was to increase SMEs’ ability to respond. But it is nTT Data UK, part of the Japanese nTT global Communications group, that won Lot One and estimated in the OJEU to be worth £250m, which is 98% of the framework’s value. not really in the spirit of small contracts being awarded to SMEs, is it?

There is an opportunity here for prime contractors to engage genuine SMEs to deploy sub-systems. This doesn’t give small businesses the direct relationship with government that they crave, but it is preferable. Why? Because it protects the government from the risks and potential inefficiencies of dealing with lots of suppliers – something the Department for Work and Pensions recognises as being at loggerheads with its overarching objectives, in its 2014 SME action plan. n

opinion

The government wrote big specifications for big systems, which were won by big companies, and rightly so, says Porge Research director Alice Watson

Bashing big business will not lead to a competitive and diverse supply chain

According to recent headlines, the ICT market has gone wrong, with a few major players dominating public

sector contracts and pushing out small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Cue a major Office of Fair Trading investigation, and general flogging of big business. But is this the real problem?

The government wrote big specifications for big systems that were won by big companies, and rightly so. With major contracts comes major risk – and do we want that to sit with SMEs? Indeed, do SMEs themselves want it?

I’m in favour of the government’s drive to support SMEs – after all, I run one. And I’m not knocking the aspiration for a more competitive and diverse supply chain that encourages innovation and drives value for money, but bashing big business is not the way to achieve it. And I would question whether the IT Transformation Programme in its current form will help.

When I attended a Cabinet Office briefing last year, the room was full of SMEs, with niche software products and innovations. There was a sense of optimism about the potential for a direct relationship with the government, but I fear they will be disappointed by the outcome of the programme.

The aspiration for the IT Transformation Programme is to break up big ICT contracts into smaller service towers, triggering a higher penetration of SME providers. But contracts won’t be awarded to small businesses, or at least not those the government defines as small – organisations with a turnover of less than £50m and fewer than 250 employees. Instead, it will be medium-sized businesses, such as Agilisys, Liberata and Civica, which sit just under the Capita tier, that will benefit.

G-Cloud key to

government SME spending

target

Late payments still

causing SME headaches

Alice Watson is the founder of Porge Research, a specialist in public sector spend data.

This an edited excerpt. Click here to read the full interview online.

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buyer’s Guide

April 2014 marked the fourth anniversary of the release of Apple’s iPad, the device that created the modern tablet market. Tablets are transforming computing as IT departments, business units and workers buy the devices for work and personal computing. While it might sound odd to refer to a four-year-old form factor as

“traditional”, the pillars of the tablet market stand beneath the 9.7in Apple iPad and its mostly sub-11in competitors, such as the Samsung galaxy Tab 3 (10.1in version) or the Micro-soft Surface (10.6in Windows rT version).

Many information workers today use tablets which typically contain an ArM-based micro-processor or, in some newer models, an Intel Atom processor. generally weighing less than 2lb, these devices feature always-on operation and long battery life. They offer easy-to-use, hyper-portable productivity in a wide variety of environments.

Why Apple?Certainly iPad users show a great deal of devotion to the platform. Among global informa-tion workers, a sub-segment use both a work-provided iPad and a personal iPad in a typical week. There are a number of reasons for Apple’s continued success in the tablet market.

First, innovation often comes first to iOS. Developers target the platform for many of the most innovative applications. Partly, this is pecuniary: Developers reap higher revenue, in general, from iOS than from Android. Even though Android is also a key platform for tablets (as opposed to smartphones), the iPad is the first release choice for the most innovative apps. An example is the MindMeld application, which “listens” to multi-user conversations, takes notes, raises key themes of the meeting and brings in web content to form a radically new content-generating collaboration experience. While the system is now on Android, the earliest versions were all developed for the iPad.

Managing the iPad in

the Enterprise

How to strategise enterprise

device management

The pros and cons of iPads in the enterprise

Apple’s tablet inspires devotion among users and it is often the first platform for which

developers produce apps – but it is substantially more expensive

than its competitors. J P Gownder

reports

Buyer’s guideApple in the enterprise part 2 of 3

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buyer’s Guide

Second, service providers make iOS devices enterprise-friendly. An underrated part of the iOS ecosystem is the service provider categories. Mobile device management (MDM) suppliers such as AirWatch, good Technology and MobileIron help IT professionals manage numerous endpoint devices, but all three of those suppliers say iPads are the most common tablets they manage.

Apple-owned FileMaker provides a platform for developing applications, and an ecosystem of hosting service providers has sprung up to project FileMaker applications from the cloud.

In addition, vertical industries are adapting iPads to their own uses. Each enterprise vertical tailors the iPad to its own needs. For example, in healthcare, providers have developed ser-vices for discharging patients and moving them to outpatient care on the iPad platform. As enterprises devote developer talent to proprietary iOS applications, vertical adaption will become even more widespread.

A related trend is that enterprise apps take advantage of tablet features. These proprietary applications will take advantage of the tablet-specific features of the iPad, including sensors, gyroscopes, gPS and LTE wireless services. For example, field-service applications can location- and time-tag activities to track worker productivity. not that iOS holds a monopoly here – it doesn’t – but many of these apps prove themselves on the iPad first.

Finally, the iPad can be used as a hybrid device with external keyboards from Apple, Logitech and Zagg. Indeed, it’s not hard to find an author who has written an entire novel on an iPad. The flexibility of the ecosystem around the iPad extends even to peripherals that workers can employ as needed.

The alternativesBut, Apple’s iPad doesn’t win all the enterprise app battles. Logitech developed a propri-etary app for its salespeople in China, who visit retail outlets to evaluate current inventory, sales trends, and inventory planning. They offered the app on iPad and Android tablets, but their Chinese salespeople overwhelmingly chose the latter.

Further, Apple’s iPad doesn’t monopolise developers’ attention. Among mobile developers, iOS and Android run neck and neck in terms of tablet prioritisation. Among all mobile devices (including smartphones and tablets), 48% of mobile developers list the iPad as one of their top three priorities, while 45% list Android tablets.

Then there is the question of cost. Compared with an entry-level iPad Mini in the US ($329), an HP Slate 7 Android tablet ($169) offers a significant discount. The open-source, multi-supplier nature of Android leads to a wide array of device form factors and price points.

Samsung, in addition to other hardware heavyweights such as Lenovo and HP, joins google in its advocacy of the platform. Samsung touts its S-Pen as a differentiator in the functionality and performance of its Android tablets, even as the Korean manufacturing giant leads the smartphone market as well. However, IT professionals should beware the complexity of Android. The fragmentation of the operating system continues to present a significant chal-

lenge, with so many devices on the smartphone-tablet spec-trum employing disparate versions of Android, from 1.6 to 4.2. MDM suppliers report that managing Android complexity represents a substantial challenge for most of their enterprise customers who want to accommodate Android in their bring your own device (BYOD) programmes.

We’re enjoying a period of great experimentation in the device market, offering workers and consumers unparalleled form factor diversity and choice. Some of these devices will succeed quickly, as Apple’s iPad did. Others will take time to develop, as witnessed by the first suc-cessful Android tablets. Still others will peak and fall quickly, like netbooks. Particularly in the diverse Windows 8 and Android device ecosystems, there will be mass die-offs in the com-petition for survival in the tablet market. n

This article is based on Forrester’s report: Orchestrating An Enterprise Tablet Strategy That Drives Business Value, by J P Gownder.

› Virtual solution to consumerisation› Bring your own IT department?

› Buyer’s Guide to consumerisation

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datacentre capacity planninG

Many enterprises are no longer building in-house datacentres, opting instead for third-party datacentres, and scalable and agile cloud infrastructure, so they can keep depreciating IT hardware assets off the balance sheet.

But does this mean the in-house datacentre is dying?“If I start a new business today, will I build my own datacentre? Maybe not. But that doesn’t

mean in-house datacentres are dead,” says Daniel Beazer, consultant at Broadgroup, the datacentre consultancy firm that hosted the Datacentres Europe 2014 conference.

“I know of a bank that just bought a mainframe, and late last year Debenhams invested in a mainframe. This proves that these businesses are not about to exit the datacentre business.

“There may be many such companies heavily invested in datacentres.”Capgemini is one such organisation. In 2010 it built a state-of-art, modular datacentre in

Swindon. The Merlin datacentre is the company’s newest and best datacentre. Its energy efficiency, responsiveness and resilience are so high that Capgemini is using it as a model for other datacentre facilities.

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Next generation

datacentres: The cloud

Cloud and datacentre

warnings for CIOs

Does extinction beckon for the in-house datacentre?Cloud is reaching tipping point as users realise the benefits of scalable IT but in-house IT is not on the endangered list just yet, writes Archana Venkatraman

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datacentre capacity planninG

“We have 39 datacentres across the globe with Merlin at the top of the list. Some datacen-tres are legacy,” says Paul Hammond, vice-president of infrastructure services at Capgemini.

“We know the IT landscape is changing and we question internally how many datacentres today would be right. Five years ago, the answer would have been very different from today. But we do know that 39 datacentres is a bad answer.”

Migrating to cloudPublisher news UK is consolidating its datacentres and moving as many workloads to the public cloud as it can. At its peak in 2010, the company had 65 data-centres spread globally. Today, after embracing virtu-alisation and cloud, that figure is down to 46. But it wants to exit the datacentre business completely. “Today, building a datacentre cannot be taken lightly; it is a huge investment,” says Hammond.

He says internal servers and in-house datacentres are incapable of handling certain IT functions, such as social media data analytics or speedy customer service. “IT needs to know what to broker out to the cloud, because it will be silly to pump in millions to build a datacentre that can emulate AWS or Microsoft or google.”

As the desire to move to a more flexible, agile, cloud delivery model becomes strong among enterprises, IT will invest less in in-house datacentres.

It is predicted that the global market for cloud services will touch $79.1bn by 2018. The “big four” third-party datacentre and colocation providers – Equinix, Telecity, Interxion and Digital realty – are reporting record growth in customer numbers.

“As cloud becomes a significant enabler, enterprises are getting out of the datacentre business in droves,” says Tim Crawford, CIO strategic advisor at enterprise IT consultancy Avoa. “But datacentres are not dying. Cloud is just enabling more enterprises to use third-party IT services.”

Experts agree that in-house datacentres are not becoming extinct. “There will always be mission-critical apps that firms want to host internally. Then there are emotional or regula-tory reasons dictating that data should remain in the company,” says Hammond.

But there are other factors conspiring to keep in-house datacentres alive: Legacy applica-tions that are business-critical but not cloud-ready; or when customers demand dedicated IT. Then there are those who want to milk as much from their existing datacentre invest-ment as they can.

“There are those running systems that cannot work on an infrastructure as a service plat-form, and do not want the expense and business impact of moving existing kit and software to a colocation environment,” says Clive Longbottom, datacentre analyst at Quocirca.

There will always be some kind of in-house IT, and hybrid IT will be the way forward for most enterprises, estimates Simone Brunozzi, chief technologist for vCloud Hybrid Service at VMware. Longbottom agrees: “The future is hybrid,” he says. “The role of IT becomes decid-ing where new workloads should be placed – in-house, colocation or public cloud.”

Experts say enterprises wanting in-house IT should have just one datacentre in every region or, at the most, a couple for high availability and redundancy.

Zero in-house ITBut some companies want zero in-house IT. Take OpenWork, the network for financial advisers and mortgage professionals in the UK, which has outsourced all its IT. “We did not want to own hardware assets or worry about power and cooling,” says Chris Yeow, techni-cal architect at OpenWork.

“There are regulaTory reasons dicTaTing ThaT daTa should remain in The company”Tim crawford,

aVoa

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datacentre capacity planninG

The company uses rackspace’s hosting and managed services. “For the size of our organisation, we knew we would not benefit by owning a datacentre,” Yeow says. OpenWork has about 2,000 financial services professionals and 500 employees in the UK.

“We want highly scalable, agile IT and not to worry about operating a datacentre. But we spend a lot of time on developing the service level agreements, so we get what we want from the service provider,” Yeow says.

The best answer for a highly scal-able IT is the cloud but, as OpenWork handles sensitive financial services data, it wanted a private cloud-like infrastructure at a competent third-party provider. “When the industry is ready, our underlying IT infrastructure is also ready to help us overspill to the cloud,” Yeow says. “This wouldn’t have been possible if we had an in-house datacentre.”

An operational expenditure model of IT gives the team an assurance that, as the company grows, they can easily scale up their IT while continuing to focus on other strategic issues, such as applications development.

Currently, the IT team is busy investing in and rebuilding some of its applications to make them cloud-aware, so it can migrate apps to the cloud if the need arises. But Yeow appreci-ates how some industry segments – such as banking and the finance sector – will have reasons to own a datacentre. “These firms have the budget to build a highly resilient and efficient infrastructure that can function as a cloud service,” he says. “But as technology moves on, even they could be left with a large asset base.”

Capgemini’s Merlin datacentre is a highly resilient, multitenanted infrastructure replicating a private cloud. The company has invested a lot of money in it. “Maybe four to five years later, when they look at a technology refresh, they may think differently,” Yeow says.

Adapting in-house facilities for niche tasksSome industry commentators say in-house datacentres will begin to die away in the same way the mainframe has. “There will remain those who see an owned datacentre as the only

secure datacentre – even though they are patently wrong in the vast majority of cases,” says Longbottom. “There are those for whom an owned datacentre will provide them with the mil-lisecond or so less data latency that makes all the difference.

“Will the in-house datacentre ever die out? not before I’m long dead and buried. However, like the mainframe, it will have to adapt and figure out where it fits as the world changes around it.”

Datacentres may not completely die away but smart CIOs are changing them – shrinking it, tweaking it, repurposing it to do only certain tasks, and do them efficiently.

“Five years ago, convincing business stakeholders to invest in cloud was a mammoth task. Today the same can be said about convincing them to invest in a shiny new in-house data-centre,” concludes Capgemini’s Hammond. n

› AI improves datacentre energy efficiency› Human factors in the datacentre

› Troubleshoot datacentre management issues

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Many companies do not want to worry about depreciating datacentre assets on their balance sheet

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computerweekly.com 8-14 July 2014 19

human resources software

Enterprise human resources (Hr) technology supplier Workday has triumphed sim-plicity from its inception, building a consumerised front end on proprietary cloud infrastructure. In under a decade, the company has gained a place alongside the established industry heavyweights. Its short history and fresh image belie a tiger

fighting to corner the enterprise market. But there are risks to its plans. As the company diversifies, its competitors multiply – and it hasn’t turned a profit since it was founded.

The company was started in 2005 by Dave Duffield, co-founder of human capital manage-ment (HCM) provider PeopleSoft, and Aneel Bhusri, chief strategist at PeopleSoft, following the hostile takeover of PeopleSoft by Oracle.

Duffield has a good reputation. When Oracle laid off half of PeopleSoft’s workforce, Duffield launched a fund to help the newly redundant. Duffield is regularly seen at the bigger Workday events, but Bhusri tends to lead the company in the cut-throat world of Silicon Valley, and is first in line on earnings calls.

Workday came into the world as a multitenant software as a service (SaaS) system pro-vider, which gave the company its first-mover advantage. While its main competitors – Oracle and SAP – have been forced to buy their way into the market, Workday built all its infrastructure in the cloud from the very start.

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Workday Financials works for

TripAdvisor

Are HR and finance

systems better together?

Workday’s challenge to the HR giants built in the cloudThe pretender to Oracle and SAP’s HR throne might have humble roots, but its ambitions – and those of its investors – are substantial, writes Jamie Lawrence

In May 2008, Workday took US electronics company Flextronics from HR software giant SAP

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human resources software

Rapid growthConsidering Workday’s short history, it is in a strong position. Veteran Hr technology advi-sor Steve goldberg, who has worked in Hr technology since the 1980s, says the secret to Workday’s success is that it started securing large customer organisations right after it started, and growth naturally accelerated with its subsequent initial public offering (IPO).

“The increasing threat the supplier poses to SAP and Oracle – notwithstanding being a fraction of their size or the fact that the two Hr enterprise resource planning market leaders now have cloud-based, comprehensive talent management suites – is due to two main reasons,” he says.

“First, it had the first core Hr management systems (HrMS) delivered in the cloud, allow-ing organisations to much better predict and manage Hr technology costs. Second, it was the first core HrMS designed for maximum interoperability with other systems, through an object-oriented, service-oriented architecture.”

Entering heavyweight territoryOracle and SAP are the established Hr technology titans. Workday is the new kid. In terms of clients, Workday has just over 600, while Oracle and SAP have over 10,000.

Some of the biggest companies in the world have left the established Hr heavyweights to take a punt on Workday. In May 2008, Workday took Flextronics – the US electronics design, fabrication, assembly and test company, with 160,000 employees – from SAP.

And 2012 was the year, according to independent Hr technology analyst naomi Bloom, that Oracle and SAP became more concerned with Workday than with each other. Interestingly, it was also the year Oracle bought Taleo, a key recruitment partner for Workday. Bloom says you had only to “listen to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s performance on earnings calls” to understand how much of a threat the company saw in Workday.

now Workday is established, it is innovating and pursuing acquisitions to grow. It bought Identified in February 2014, a predictive analytics firm also known for its social recruitment functionality, allowing Workday to bolster two crucial offerings from one acquisition.

Technology profileOne of Workday’s biggest differentiators is its use of metadata to define data relation-ships. It doesn’t use relational databases with hundreds of tables. In fact, its main database holds just three tables – instances, attributes and references. If you looked at this database manually, it would be meaningless.

When the Workday system is activated, the heart of the system – the object management server (OMS) – picks up the data and definitions stored in the three tables and pulls them into the relevant dashboards, based on the relationships defined as metadata. If Workday wants to change its product, it redefines the relationship between objects via metadata and restarts the application.

Some say Workday’s approach is a brand new way of doing ErP that will rip traditional suppliers apart. For others, it is the implementation of a long-held vision. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has called Workday’s non-use of relational databases a severe blunder, and something it will pay for in future when it needs to build or buy in the functionality.

Accessing any part of the Workday system goes through a single layer of security in the application server. Stored data is coded with a customer’s unique ID, and all requests for data use the ID to access the right data. This prevents customer data from blending, which is a possible problem for many multitenant SaaS systems.

Workday initially developed using the fast waterfall method, with one month of design, two months of programming and one month of testing. It switched to agile development, but has since gone one step further, and now works around continuous development and distribution.

Instead of having an old code line and a new one, Workday replaces the existing one. Workday 21, the incumbent iteration, was the first built on this framework. The company puts out three new updates a year.

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computerweekly.com 8-14 July 2014 21

human resources software

Financial performanceWorkday’s executive team has said the company will not be profitable for some time. This doesn’t seem to have worried investors; as of February 2014, shares in the company were trading at 34 times the sales price. During the first day of the company’s IPO, share prices surged 74%, ending the day at $48.69. As of 26 March 2014, they were trading at $94.42.

The company’s total revenues for its fiscal year 2014 came in at $468.9m, an increase of 71% on fiscal year 2013. This produced an operating loss of $153.3m, compared with $117.9m the previous year. In summer 2013, the company issued bonds worth $440m to last until 2018. going by Workday’s last raft of earnings statements, the company is burning cash at around $40m per quarter so, assuming the burn rate stays consistent, it has 10 quarters to start seeing a return from its clients.

Workday’s subscription model does not offer short-term returns, but slowly and surely the company is cornering new enterprise clients. It is confident of an eventual pay-off and, clearly, investors do not disagree.

Too thinly spread?Workday’s financial situation worries some people, but not others. If it doesn’t go bust, where else could it run into problems? According to Mark Martin, who has led Hr technology implementations for 25 years and now runs consultancy Mark Martin Ltd, its success could cause it to lose focus.

“Workday’s financial product is doing very well,” he says. “If the financial services industry starts putting its eggs in the Workday camp, it could be hard for the company not to refocus in that area, and the Hr product will suffer.”

Hr consultant Steve goldberg agrees. “Arguably the only speed bump in the Workday Express is perhaps the company’s desire to achieve what SAP and Oracle achieved in terms of multiple product line depth and breadth, but in decades less time,” he says.

“not every product line can be a top research and development priority at the same time, and Workday will need to maintain enough of an ongoing commitment to the Hr market or it risks losing some of its avid support in Hr technology circles.”

The implementation perspectiveWhen it comes to the influence of Workday on Hr directors, Martin shares the words of one Hr director, saying that – for those “in the know” – Workday has secured its position as the leader of new technology systems.

“What makes Workday superior is its ‘usability’ – very customer-driven, global, a strict multitenant SaaS system with high configurability, object-ori-entated and mobile. I still think Workday has more work to sell this unique selling point,” he says.

In his previous role as group Hr director of Direct Line group, Martin implemented Workday. “Compared to implementing a legacy system it is very different,” he says. “You cannot under-

estimate the ‘newness’ of multitenant SaaS systems, such as three releases a year that you don’t decide on and cannot stop, and contracts that represent renting a system rather than buying it. IT, risk, legal and finance don’t have the ‘control’ they are used to.

“Fortunately, Workday is genuinely customer-focused and gives considerable support through the process. As for the overall experience, I don’t believe any other system on the market would have delivered the ambitious project aims we had in 2011/2012.” n

“workday will need To mainTain enough of an ongoing commiTmenT To The hr markeT”sTeVe goldberg,

hr Tech consulTanT

› Workday expands suite with recruitment tech› Workday enters the big data game

› Workday mixes HR and finance big data

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are expected to follow suit. But are the cinema owners making a load of fuss over something that isn’t really a big deal? A google spokesperson said the device’s screen lights up like a Christmas tree

when activated, making it a lousy device for clandestine recording.

Also, google glass can’t record for longer than 45 minutes. So, with current blockbusters such as Captain America: the Winter Soldier clocking in at 136 minutes, we estimate the google glass-wearing pirate would need to fork out £3,000

on equipment before he or she even got into the auditorium, and that’s before they’ve spent the same amount of money on popcorn and a drink. n

UK cinema group bans Google GlassLast month, google glass launched in the UK. The price, for members of the public who want to look like a prat before anyone else, will be £1,000. Alongside the device, the panic over privacy has travelled across the Atlantic, with news that the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) has banned google glass from cinemas because the gadget could be used to make pirate films.

CEA chief executive Phil Clapp told The Independent that customers would be requested not to wear glass in cinemas, whether the film is playing or not. The Vue cinema chain added that it would instruct patrons to remove glass as soon as the lights dim. Others

police sKills v artiFical intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) provokes great fear in most people. That fear is perhaps due to the science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which HAL 9000, a monotone, sociopathic sentient computer, attempts to murder an entire spaceship crew, until someone pulls his plug. HAL’s dispassionate demeanour and acts of cold-blooded violence are frankly terrifying, but nothing compared to the pants-wettingly scary human incompetence of Dallas police, whose failure to operate a records management system last month resulted in the release of 22 criminal suspects. It’s perhaps unfair to place the blame fully on the cops in this instance – the system may have been poorly designed and they might have received inadequate training – but we’re going to do that anyway just so we can embrace the dumb-cop stereotype and show this cartoon of a moronic-looking trooper about to munch on a doughnut. So, maybe we should embrace AI after all – HAL may have been a mass-murdering mofo, but you couldn’t fail him for efficiency.

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