In a speech at the Design Council last week Jony Ive talked about Apple’s key design principles: seamless, accessible, affordable, attractive. That gives a strong clue as to where Apple are coming from.  Ask a person with an iPhone what percentage of their usage is as a phone, and you will get an answer of about 5%.  I have never met a person who says the best feature of their iPhone is the phone.

For me, my iPhone is a video recorder, sat-nav, train ticket, cash machine, news feed, manages my messages, gives me stock price updates, entertains my son in restaurants and measures the distance from where I am standing to the pin on golf courses.

That is why Apple are so far ahead and will stay there until the competition starts to ‘get it’; the iPhone is not a phone.  Competitors think they need to build phones, pads, computers etc.  Their staff are experienced at building phones, pads and computers so surely, that has to be the answer.   Companies like Vodafone are hiring people who must have extensive experience of the telco industry thereby propagating the problem even further.

In a recent article in the FT, there was a forecast that by 2013 phone companies would be making more money out of apps than out of calls.  By 2020, I doubt that any of the current phone companies will exist in the shape they are in today.  In the mean time, I am sure that Apple will continue to smile every time it hears that someone is trying to create a better phone than the iPhone or a better pad than the iPad.

I have managed to get into a few great musical events on the road, the two best being Judge Jules and Joshua Panda.

I saw Judge Jules at the Roxy in New York.  Saw is probably the wrong word – heard is more accurate.  Busted some great moves there – yes sir, though didn’t have any of the diving lights that were the fashion of the day.

Last Feb I was in Burlington (Vermont USA) delightfully stranded in a snow storm that deposited 18″ of snow and brought Burlington to a halt for several hours!  As my hotel didn’t serve lunch, I ventured out into the storm armed with my trusty brolly to seek some local delights at the recommended Skinny Pancake.  The Pancakes were great, the people were polite about the brolly (‘you’re a Brit right? Thought so – it’s the brolly’) and there was a tempting advert for the gig that night – Joshua Panda.

Having decided to lose the brolly, I struggled back through the snow later that evening for an amazing night.  Most of the audience seemed to have come on skis and Joshua took us on a great run through some great cajun funky blues.  The whole place was having a great time and there were so many little things that made it a great evening; the music, local brews, many Yee Ha’s, the celebration for Veronica who had just got her leg out of plaster and so could now have a shower  and let’s not forget the pancakes.

Different experiences; neither possible if I hadn’t been travelling; both special memories.  If I had to pick one, it would be the intimate experience of the Skinny Pancake and music of Joshua’s Panda.

So if you are in Burlington and fancy some great music and a pancake try Joshua Panda at the  Skinny Pancake.  If you can’t make Burlington, buy a Joshua CD and make your own pancake party.  It will be fun.

Click here for Panda Vid

When I started I figured that the platform would be something like Webex Weboffice – A CRM with the ability to add fields, custom reports and create some custom database tables.

SalesForce can do that, but a lot more as well. The things that particularly impressed me were:

• So much can be done through the user interface, enabling a power excel user to create competent departmental apps with no developers needed.
• Very powerful workflow and alerts – the most complex workflow I have designed was around Intellectual Property. SalesForce can replicate almost all of that workflow without the need to resort to code. Features include standard things like create tasks, alerts (vie email) etc.  Also included are some more advanced features – the ability to set database table contents and derive data from other areas of your database.  Very powerful indeed.
• Deployment processes – sandboxes and staging environments are catered for with the ability to build change sets. The deployment process is a tad clunky (for example there is no ‘build all changes from this instance’ button – changes need to be manually selected – but I am sure it will be smoothed out in further releases.

There are some areas that need tidying, particularly the relationships between salesforce.com, force.com and database.com. I found what happens where to be very confusing.

Overall, if I were looking to deploy an enterprise platform for application development, that could be used particularly by the departmental power user type, then salesforce.com would be top of my list right now.

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I have worked on many IT projects in the public and private sector and in my experience, there is no real difference in levels of success between both.

The best learning I did on how to stop IT failure was at Nat West Corporate Bank many years ago. I was asked by the IT Director of the time to review the portfolio of 400 or so projects to see why there were always about 8 projects in crisis. What could be done to improve? Turns out, nothing could be done – plans were fine, methodologies were good, none of the people needed fixing. But we did fix it and here’s how.

All 400 projects had a risk register. In those projects, there were risks that were high impact but low probability. For example – project delayed because Thames floods – impact Very High, probability 1%. The problem was, when you get so many low probability risks together, then you actually end up with mathematical certainty that something will go wrong. In the case above, a number of projects were seriously impacted not because the Thames flooded, but because the servers were securely stored in the basement and when someone set off the sprinklers, 400,000 gallons of water duly turned the server room into a spark lit scene from Aliens 3.

So how did the Nat West team improve their success rate – by forming a hit squad who could go in at short notice to fix projects that were starting to or had gone wrong.

In 2011, how many public sector IT projects will get into problems because – the requirements change, key people move on, ministers change their mind, the idea proves to be not feasible in it’s original design etc? Answer – a lot, about the same number as in the private sector.

Having just finished running one of the most complex IT programmes I have ever encountered – businesslink.gov.uk – the programme’s key success was that we planned for failure. Of course we had releases that got delayed, ministerial changes, stakeholder problems etc. but when they arose, we had plans already created that detailed how we would deal with a problem of that type.  Stakeholder and PR messages were already in place and resources were available to be allocated quickly to the remedial plan.

External review proved a valuable tool. Each year on businesslink.gov.uk the programme does an OGC Gate 0 review. It is a tough process but each time it was done, the delivery team found the results helpful, even if some of the recommendations were tough.

The methodologies mentioned in the report are good methodologies. The combination interesting. But those alone will not stop an over enthusiastic cleaner from polishing the sprinklers on the top floor of your office.

Sorry for the length of this post tried to keep it short.

Having recently returned from a trip to the US, I am always impressed by how much US companies are prepared to innovate.

This time, it was car hire. Having reserved online, me and Jonathan went to pick up the car. The service was fast but the most innovative feature was the ability to just wander outside and pick my car. That’s right, no longer do I have to understand what a Group D car means in relation to Group C or E, I can just rent a car and then pick one that suits at the airport.

I am so used to being given cars that are too large / too small / could move a small army. The idea that one might pick a car to suit was just superb.

We chose a black impala with Texas plates midst a sudden desire to look like the blues brothers.  Also we figured no one would mess with Texas plates, and we might just need an extra boost to get us around Washington DC.

This experience was the complete opposite of my experience this summer, where I queued for 90 minutes only to be rented some obnoxious renault thing, though every cloud…… it was big enough to transport my son’s 8 foot inflatable crocodile.

It may be that only traveling now and again to the US gives me a rosy view of US services, but I do think that US companies innovate much more and in a much better way than UK companies.

I came up with the following. As we move to faster and faster broadband, how about creating routers that have two wireless connections. One would be for my use as usual. The second would be a bandwidth limited connection for the public to use. If the second connection were standard across all the routers, then users could roam as they travelled, much like mobile phones.

I wouldn’t mind giving up some bandwidth for the betterment of humanity. I’m not sure that a link at my home would get much use from anyone other than digitally connected sheep in the field out back. A link at my office would though – based in central london. Very few people are in our office at the time of night I am writing this so if the link could somehow grow and shrink according to time / usage, so much the better.

I guess some people would abuse the free access. There are quite a few people who use the roads in a way that annoys me – doesn’t mean I plan to stop paying for them.

Interested to get people’s views.

As the Treasury Spending Challenge web site is now offline, I have dropped a note to the data.gov.uk team to see if we can get the details published there.  Very interesting to see if the data contains other sentiments about where people feel government’s priorities should be.

My thoughts move on to what is becoming a more usual thought process – why does French food taste so nice?   The supermarkets in France are filled with tasty fresh food, that rarely comes individually wrapped and flown half way across the world.   Whilst individually wrapped peaches may look good in M&S, I prefer the French version that tastes divine.  Maybe the taste evaporates at 30,000 feet as the tasty morsels wing their way towards us. 

The lettuce in La Terace even contains some grit, which strangely adds somehow to the earthy flavour.   Given the choice of ugly food versus tasty food, I prefer ugly.  Maybe those who choose the contents of our shelves need to move back to selecting food for taste and not beauty.

I thought how you could innovate that situation and come up with something better. I got even more excited with last week’s dragons den and the 3d body scanner that was up for investement. This combined with conversations with some senior guys from HP about new printing technologies and I came up with the following:

Create a small and intimate service where women come along, get scanned and then use a computerised service to select clothes. Clothes are printed onto standard cloths including cutting designs. They are then cut and stitched (in the UK?) delivering much better fitting clothes. Shop in the morning, go for lunch and pick up in the afternoon.

If anyone is up for it, my wife would be delighted to beta test such a service.

I am interested in learning how organisations develop their approach to leadership throughout their entire organisations. 

I find many organisations put leadership and management together so that by definition, a leader must be a manager.  I have also come across some who regard leadership as something that all people do in their organisation, regardless of whether they are managers.

I like the idea that in an organisation, everyone can be a leader.  A key question though would be does everyone want to be a leader.

I look forward to getting people’s thoughts and experiences.

David