Cyber, Robots, Digital, Oktoberfest, Gosling and Demming - all in one week

This week was eventful. It started with the announcement that the UK's National Cyber Security Centre had at last opened its doors, see: http://bit.ly/2dpPZJH. This was long announced and is an essential plank in safeguarding the UK's Digital Infrastructure and Capability. My concern is the glacial pace at which progress has been made here and the comparatively small amounts of funding that the Government has assigned to fund it.

Then someone posed a picture of a man shaking hands with a robot at AT Kearney's Digital Business Forum with the caption "Next gen employee greets legacy employee". This displayed typical 1930s thinking about the value of people drawing from the legacy of the original R.U.R. play Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written by the Czech writer Karel Capek in 1920. In the play, a factory owner attempts to replace his high versatile human workers with mechanical machines, totally undervaluing the creativity and inspiration that people bring to the workplace. Digital models are largely about delivering this value not implementing mindless mechanisation. So perhaps the caption should have been about valuable human talent supplanting inappropriate technology.

Anyway, the highlight of this week was the IPexpo event in London. This had a wide array of suppliers and speakers. Notable about the event was the desire to celebrate Oktoberfest complete with free beer and people dressed in Bavarian costumes at 4:00 pm on the first day. Many of the suppliers were also offering beer at other parts of the day. It was a strange example of how modern "fun oriented" culture of digital start up companies is affecting the mainstream and making us weirdly 1960s and modern all at the same time.

James Gosling presented a captivating key note talk on liquid robots covering his current involvement with Marine UAVs used for data collation in remote seascapes and the IoT practices needed to make this work. The UAVs themselves are very cool, capturing wave energy and converting it into propulsion.  The techniques for transferring data from the middle of oceans, where there is very poor bandwidth available even from satellites, were also very interesting with the same data being transfered by differnt networks and routes to increase the reliability and speed of data transport from the UAVs to the place where it is analysed. The interesting point that he made was that Scalability is a relatively trivial issue for IoT. Security and reliable Availability are much more important.

Two other talks were really good. Mathew Skelton (skelton Thatcher Consulting) gave an illuminating talk on anti-patterns for continuous delivery (aka DevOps). He confirmed my viewpoint that typically you need roughly 1 operations person working continuously with each Product Team, to avoid the bottleneck that some traditional ITIL shops have introduced with undersized change management functions.

Derek Weeks also gave a well researched presentation on the use of Opensource software and how modern software product development practices have now become highly analagous with manufacturing and supply chain practices. He presented interesting statistics on how much open source code contains security and legacy debt bugs. His premise being that Deming's (the father of Quality Management) recommendations to reduce the number of suppliers and quality assure bought in products can raise productivity in the adoption and exploitation of Open Software.