Sure, you can invest in faster computers and printers. You can train staff to be better at shuffling paper around. You can even work longer hours to plough through the heavy workload. But none of that is ever going to address the underlying issue for many workplaces: UK business is ossified.

Companies that have been around for decades will have formed working processes and procedures over the years, most of which may well have been cutting edge at the time they were conceived. However, time marches on, and companies have a tendency to become locked into A Certain Way Of Doing Things.

Legacy systems, procedures and thought processes build up within any business. Long established and large organisations – such as those we see in banking and insurance – tend to disproportionately be victims of the gradual drag on productivity that comes from relying upon the same old process decade after decade.Changing the direction of one of these behemoths is akin to turning the Titanic.

But just because a thing is difficult, that does not mean it should not be done. A good example of this might be the financial services sector.

Financial services in the UK have grown over the past 50 years, however, the back-end IT systems have been slow to change and adapt. There are indications that investment in back-end IT has not been sufficient across the sector. Some banks may still be relying on systems that still contain elements dating back to the 1960s.

Banks have been investing, just not enough. And not in the right areas. One of the best – and most difficult – investments any business can make is to take a view on how best to work, and then to build systems and train staff to deliver that best practice. But it’s difficult to start projects that creatively re-imagine business processes in large organisations where stability is valued.

With a new breed of ‘challenger’ banks snapping at the heels of the incumbents, now is actually the time for the old school financial institutions to take a good look at how they work. Between 2010 and 2013 the challenger banks grew from 4% of the market, to 7%. A phenomenal growth when placed in the context of the traditional reluctance to change banks.

Instead of trying to keep decades old systems going, the challenger banks can start with a blank sheet of paper to deliver the best ways to do business. Offering better service based upon modern purpose-built systems is partly what is enabling their growth,

The brute force approach to delivering productivity (working longer hours with systems that are not fit for purpose) is not a sustainable strategy. It’s time for big business in the UK to drive productivity by embracing change, using modern tools and techniques, and pro-actively searching out improvements rather than waiting for disaster to act as a cue that change is overdue.

This post was first published by me on LinkedIn.

Premier Foods – Share Price Tumble

Premier Foods owns some of the best known food brands in the UK, and is one of Britain’s largest branded food producers. In 2013 Premier food’s sales were £849 million, with a trading profit of £138.9 million. Seemingly a Great British success story. So why are they asking suppliers for investment payments from their suppliers?

To a lay person, the ‘investment payment’ appears almost like a bribe to Premier to allow suppliers to carry on working with them. Premier implied that not paying an investment payment could lead to a supplier being ‘de-listed’, which means no more working for Premier Foods.

According to a Newsnight report on the 4th of December, Premier Foods’ demands for investment payments came via a letter signed by Premier Foods CEO, Gavin Darby, saying:

… we are aiming to work with a smaller number of strategic suppliers in the future that can better support, and invest in, our growth ideas … we will now require you to make an investment payment to support our growth…

It’s understandable to trim suppliers down to a more manageable number, Premier have over 1,000 suppliers. Asking suppliers to negotiate new deals based on the fact that they would receive increased business from Premier would also seem a much fairer strategy than asking for up-front investment from suppliers.

It’s shareholders that actually invest in Premier though, and those shareholders are voting with their feet. Since the Newsnight report ran, Premier has lost approximately 12% of it’s market value. Not only is the loss of market confidence in Premier a damning verdict on it’s treatment of suppliers and there for the strategy of the management team, it’s also a potential opportunity for any organisation with a taste for acquisition looking to snap up a food conglomerate to run the proverbial slide rule over Premier.

Although the debt could be a bitter pill to swallow. Premier Foods is carrying huge debt at the moment, both in a pension scheme and bank loans. Could requesting investment payments from suppliers be part of keeping the company going long enough to pay off it’s debts?

On top of all this, Business Secretary, Vince Cable, has said that Premier Foods could be said to be “demanding money with menace” and he has asked the Competition and Markets Authority to look into the case. The CMA is a newly minted government department formed by merging the functions of the old Competition Commission and Office of Fair Trading. If ever there was a department in need of an example to set, the CMA is such a one.

There is a certain irony that it was also Vince Cable who, in 2003, schooled Gordon Brown on the danger of debt in the UK economy:

…is not the brutal truth that with investment, exports and manufacturing output stagnating or falling, the growth of the British economy is sustained by consumer spending pinned against record levels of personal debt…

It took a few years, but that simple truth was finally borne out, and Premier Foods knows all too well the crippling effect of debt.

I wonder if, in hindsight, the leadership of Premier Foods still think the strategy of seeking ‘investment’ from suppliers was a valid one? They claim that the investment payments were “widely misunderstood and misinterpreted” and that they will now move to a programme of a “more conventional type of discount negotiation potentially based on price, value or volume based rebates, or lump sums”. This statement would indicate that it’s those outside of the Premier Foods management structure who did not understand the nature of the investment payments, and that they still think the strategy itself was fair and legal.

There are those who constantly opine that ‘red tape’ costs UK business too much. The CMA is exactly the kind of red tape that is needed to protect small business owners from being taken advantage of by an organisation with a potential monopoly.

If there are those in industry who think “pay and stay” policies are acceptable, they should be willing to test their strategy not just against public and shareholder opinion, but against the relevant regulatory authorities. Investing normally gives you a equity in a company, so if Premier Foods wanted to avoid misunderstanding, perhaps it should not have used the term ‘investment’ if it was not selling shares? And anyway, how attractive are a few shares in a company that has not paid dividends since July 2008?

Not all suppliers are disgruntled though. Responding to the negative publicity, on 5 December Premier released a number of supplier comments praising the ‘Invest for Growth’ programme. On the face of it, these were endorsements from companies that had paid money to invest in Premier Foods, and in return had received increased business from Premier which in turn enabled them to grow and take on more employees. Great news for the economy you would think, but which really begs the question, what happened to employees in those suppliers that provided a good service, but which could not afford to contribute to the investment programme, or who refused to do so for their own reasons?

At the core of this issue is a simple question. Is it healthy – or even acceptable – for any food producer to be building a supply chain the principle advantage of which being that it can offer ongoing investment payments, rather than offering consistent long-term value for money and a quality service rooted in ethical behaviour?

Gotta get down on Black Friday?

Christmas-time capitalism keeps many retailers going for another year, but squeezing deals into such a narrow time frame can have social consequences. There is no doubt that the people literally fighting to take advantage of Black Friday deals are increasingly likely to be amongst the most disadvantaged within our community.

But it doesn’t have to be a mad scramble for the best deals. The major retailers have records of our individual spending habits going back years. Through loyalty card schemes and personal website accounts they already know when we splash out and what we look for deals on. They know our eating, drinking, reading and watching habits. In short, between them, there is nothing the retailers don’t know about us.

The big trade off we make when giving up this priceless personal data is what we are meant to get in return. In some cases we get points to spend on products, in other cases we get vouchers off our next shop. Occasionally, just occasionally, we might get sent an offer that’s so clearly tailored to our historical purchasing habits that it’s scary.

Contrast this with the scatter-gun approach of Black Friday.  Retailers stock up physical shops with special offers, and place a limit on the deals to be had – either a time limit or ‘whilst stocks last’. The offers are available on a first-come-first-served basis so Black Friday fails to reward regular customers in favour of a smash-and-grab system that is biased towards those who don’t have to go to work on that particular day.

With all our personal shopping data at their disposal, surely the retailers can find a better way to run their Black Friday deals? Couldn’t they nurture loyalty by offering their regular customers tailored offers? Imagine Black Friday being the day when a book of vouchers lands on your doormat that are tailored to you. With a few killer deals, and a few nice-to haves. And maybe the voucher codes can be used both online or in store?

Perhaps an example would help put this in context.

I bought a games console at Game a few years ago. They must know this because at the same time I signed up to their loyalty card. So Game know I have a PS3. They know I bought an extra controller pad for it, and they know I bought the remote control for watching DVDs and Blu Rays with it. So it’s quite a serious gaming habit I have, but considering I bought the remote control, it’s a safe bet that I watch a lot of films on the PS3.

I’ve had thePS3 for just over 3 years –  about the time people spend with a console before looking for a new one.

If I were Game, I would have used the data they already have on me to have tempted me to upgrade to the PS4. Perhaps they could have thrown together a few console bundles  based on the buying habits of my demographic? Maybe a new PS4, plus a few games and an extra controller for a rock-bottom price? Throw in some decent Blu-Ray films? Maybe a trade-in deal for my old console? Something tells me that there are any number of thirty-something gamers out there who would love such an offer.

But no. All I got from Game this year was the usual scatter-gun e-mails (stop telling me about XBox deals when I’ve never shown a preference for Xbox merchandise!), and a website that seemed to be down more often than it was up. Which explains why I bought my new console elsewhere. I did still have some remnants of loyalty though. I did go in to Game to purchase some PS4 games, and having spent a not-inconsiderable amount I thought I’d rack up the rewards, but again I was disappointed with the single, painful pitiful point that my loyalty earned me.

On top of that I was told I’d missed out on a Black Friday controller deal, but if I wanted to I could now pay full price for a PS4 controller. The number of bloopers from Game this Black Friday just seemed to mount up. A creaking website? Stingy points levels? No actual rewards from using the reward card? If that’s how my loyalty is repaid, I’ll give it a miss thanks!

This example could apply to the clothing retailers that my wife frequents. Her account on the website of a well known high-street department store must be a rich mine of information. They know her dress size, and probably the age of our daughter. Why wouldn’t they put together some targeted offers for the sizable demographic that my wife is a part of (a mother who also shops for a young child)?

For all the talk about big data, retailers still have a long way to go to join up the dots. This isn’t a failure of technology. It’s a failure of imagination. I hope to see personalised Black Friday deals that are more sophisticated than the usual random marketing, that reward consumers for loyalty and that aren’t limited to a 3-day period. Until then retailers should see Black Friday as a double edged sword. Sure, it’ll boost short-term sales, but if the customer experience isn’t what it should be, people will take their business elsewhere, not just for Black Friday, but for the rest of the year.

It was intriguing to follow Phil Couchman, the Chief Executive of DHL in the UK. It’s likely the show was deftly edited, and it’s difficult to tell how long Phil actually spent at the coalface with his employees, but it was clear that he saw at first hand problems that he may never have considered critical, or perhaps even knew about before.

The most strikingly obvious problem Phil faced was the lack of Sat Nav in delivery trucks that were being timed for each delivery, which he experienced costing him vital delivery time. I’m sure a lot of viewers found it to be a bizarre situation. My first thought upon seeing this problem was that if I were a DHL delivery driver I would have taken my own Sat Nav to work. But instead of pointing and laughing at DHL, we should consider that perhaps the majority of companies are afflicted with problems that to outsiders appear obvious, but which internally have been worked around or ignored because of some specific reason such as cost or time constraints, or lack of applicable skills to solve the problem.

Another issue was an unflinching reliance upon process by call centre staff. It would not be fair to characterise this as an issue with the staff themselves. They had been trained to do a certain thing in a certain way and so cannot be blamed when it is the procedure itself that is wrong. The opposite situation can also be a problematic – of process not clearly defined enough.

Whilst Undercover Boss can seem a little contrived, and in no small part a marketing excerise, it still highlights typical business issues. Over time inconsistencies and inefficiencies will insidiously creep, almost imperceptibly, into every organisation. The key is to recognise and rectify these inefficiencies and systemic inconsistencies.

Not every CEO will take part in Undercover Boss. Those that do can’t hope to personally see and deal with all the issues within the organisations under their stewardship. Most CEOs probably do not want to appear on a TV programme to discover their problems – it is almost like that other Channel 4 staple, Embarrassing Bodies, in which people reveal medical problems in glorious colour. But organisations do need people to, in effect, fulfill the role of an Undercover Boss.

Gathering up problems, as with DHL, is often a cathartic process, occasionally challenging, but always worthwhile. Finding the gaps between the way a company works, and how it could work best will at the very least highlight to C-Suite executives ways to enhance company performance. It’s then up to those executives to decide which gaps need to be filled in and which are acceptable trade-offs in the overall strategic direction of the company.

Being on Undercover Boss, I would imagine, is difficult. It’s likely that you just don’t know what is going to happen, or how it will turn out on TV. But, like the Embarrassing Bodies programme, the only thing worse than displaying all your problems on TV is systematically ignoring those problems in the hope they will go away. A head-in-the-sand attitude allows problems to grow and fester. Doctors and Business Analysts alike advise against this course of action.

The article is a distillation of Somers’ experience in the web development industry. From the UK perspective he makes the development job market in the US seem very appealing; signing bonus? Perks? Freedom? Respect? Somers’ remarkable – and wonderfully written – article does highlight issues around the perceived value of a development team.

There seems to me to be a difference between what something – or someone – costs, as opposed to the value that is derived from it. I may own a car that could achieve 45 MPG, but it will only ever achieve that value if I drive it in such a way. And if I’ve paid the cost of a car that can achieve 45 MPG, but through my own driving techniques I only get, say, 38 MPG, then I’ve failed to maximise the value that car could have brought.

Relating developers to cars might be a funny analogy to make, but the value to be had from developers is not entirely unrelated to how those developers are put to work. If developers are set to work on a project that would never have delivered value, that is not a general indication that those developers are worthless.

In that light, Somers’ makes claims deserve to be explored outside the confines of a purely investment-led looking-for-a-quick-ROI-with-exit-strategy.

“Most of what we’re doing is putting boxes on a page”

On the face of it, developers do spend a lot of time putting stuff in boxes. I can see where Somers is coming from and the point he is making.

As a developer Somers is paid to cram his head with the minutiae of magical coding constructs that enables him to shift text and images across the world, from a database in the cloud all the way into a box in a web browser being blasted into the retina of a teenager gawking at Rhianna’s latest escapades.

Whilst this is true for web sites oriented towards public use, I’m sure that if Somers had experience of developing web-based business applications, such as an insurance aggregation site, risk management systems, systems designed to manage billions of pounds worth of intellectual property, or a KPI dashboard for a group of hospitals, he’d probably concede that there is a huge amount of work around getting the workflow and process right to support – or even change – how a business does business.

Web based business applications still dredge databases to put text and images into boxes on a web page, but the business rules and workflows applied to that data are often complex and deeply fascinating.

A decent business system can mean a huge difference to how individuals, and ultimately organisations, perform. The speed and quality of web-based business systems can mean the difference not just between profit and loss, but literally between life and death. And when you think in those terms, it becomes less easy to trivialise the work of web development teams.

“Cheap, fun, and about as world changing as creating a new variation on beer pong”

Developers can and will spot business model flaws from 100 paces. They don’t always know this from experience, but because they know some other company tried this or that thing and it didn’t work.

But sometimes a management team commissions a project for something beyond financial reasons. A business project does not have to change the world to be successful. Making an incremental change to an existing system and gaining more experience and knowledge through a particular project may well be a stepping stone to something bigger later on.

As a developer I once worked as part of a start-up business that had some great backing, a great team, a great business plan, but which ultimately failed to stand on it’s own two feet.

Years later it was a pleasant surprise to discover that, a disproportionately large number of the people who worked with me in that business had gone on to found their own web-related companies.

This, I thought, was no coincidence.

We hadn’t changed the world, but we’d gone through a shared set of experiences that changed our own perceptions of the world. Working through the Dot-com bubblewe saw at first hand that it was possible to raise huge sums of money, bring a talented team together, produce good work, and still fail as a business.

Business, like life, and the stock market, is not always a continuous upward curve. There are ups and downs, Once you have lived and learned through that up/down experience, changing the world becomes just as much about changing yourself and the way you work, along with the way your organisation works.

“If you’re not technical, you’re not valuable”

Somers is self-admittedly coming from a narrow technical perspective here. When we look at a business overall, it’s not technical skills that are particularly scarce.

I think we only need look at one example to disprove the theory that pure, unadulterated and laser-focused technical talent is king. And that example is Steve Jobs.

Famous for dropping out of formal education, taking drugs, and being as concerned about the creative process as the technical possibilities, Jobs helped to build not just one, but  at least 2, and arguably 3 successful companies each based around different technologies and creative processes.

Jobs was a master at placing people around him who could sustain his vision. It’s no secret that Steve Wosniak was the technical genius behind Apple’s early success. AtNeXT Jobs was supported Avi Tevanian.

Knowing the value of creativity, Jobs also had a successful partnership at Pixar withJohn Lasseter, and most famously at Apple with Jonathan Ive. Imagine that. A major hardware and software company drawing  inspiration from a creative, rather than a technical expert?

It’s possible not to be overly technically focused and yet to produce world changing products. The value of Steve Jobs – and I’ll concede that his is a rare case – was far beyond his knowledge of circuit boards and hard drives. It was the vision and leadership that Steve Jobs had, and the vision he inspired in others, that was the key to his success, and the success of the companies he ran.

“I could put the whole of my energy and talent into an article, everything I think and am, and still it could be worth zero dollars”

I can really empathise with Somers on this one. When I put my heart and soul into some documentation, or a white paper, or whatever, and the response is more of a ‘Meh’ than a ‘Whoa, you really thought about this!’ then it can be dispiriting.

But actually, what I’m doing at work is distilling,  compiling, analysing and helping to adjudicate over the ideas that are already out there in a business. I provide roadmaps for business change and the technical implementation of that change.

There is room for creativity in that I could – and often do – suggest new, more efficient ways of working, and that’s the value that I can add as a Business Analyst. A developer does get those opportunities, but by the time discussion reaches the developer, some core principles have likely already been laid down.

I take a lot of inspiration from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a great book that’s commercially successful to boot, but the story behind it’s publication is an illustration of how different people assign different values to the same thing.

Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers. It was only at the 122nd time of asking did it’s author get the support and recognition he was looking for. Somers would prefer to be paid for writing articles than code. But just because he isn’t succeeding in his dream job right now, that doesn’t mean he won’t succeed in the future.

The final (business) analysis

So given all of this, what are coders worth? Even though I have a few issues with his reasoning, it’s hard for me not to agree with Somers; he knows he’s giving people what they want because he’s getting paid handsomely to do it.

A newly minted venture – which seems to be the type of companies that Somers is discussing in his article – has different priorities from a mature business. It may need to offer better than average salaries and perks to attract the right talent to an unproven venture. In some cases it needs to get to market fast and iterate quickly. The coders in these businesses are laying the organisational equivalent of a new nervous system using tools of their own choosing, for Somers this is Ruby on Rails.

A mature business, though, has already proven it’s stability. It may attract talent by pure brand draw, and can demonstrate a track record of products or services. It already has a nervous system in place, one that could be sprawling and sophisticated, and which uses a range of tools and frameworks that collectively are beyond the ken of a single coding guru.

Maybe coders are worth whatever organisations are willing to pay them. But the value derived from coders is as much based upon the organisation itself as the amount of awesome the coder is capable of delivering.

Gartner recently revealed that SAP had lost its leadership position in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system market. SAP is rightly proud of its long software heritage, but perhaps it is a testament to a new digital economy that an enterprise with 40 years of history, deep funding pockets, and a team of capable and dedicated professionals can fall behind a company literally forged in the blazing furnace of the original dot com bubble.

SAP may have the people and budget to develop amazing tools, but seems to be finding it hard to muster the corporate vision, values and strategy required to meet the threat posed by an upstart entrant to the market.

To their credit, the team at SAP have recognised the threat and seem to be taking steps to combat it. One of the steps being taken is to focus upon specifically hiring workers with autism.

A stereotypical vision of any specialist ‘geek’ team has to include social misfits with communication difficulties. These and other stereotypes have formed the basis for hit comedies such as The IT Crowd and The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon Cooper, a character in The Big Bang Theory has caused controversy in that some believe his idiosyncrasies to be an unfair characterisation of a high-functioning autistic adult.

I don’t know much about autism, and most of that was garnered from watching Rain Man, but it’s generally accepted that autistic individuals have a particular set of skills – such as an obsessive attention to details and the ability to analyse complex sets of data.

The flip side of being somewhere on the autism spectrum is that autism can cause communication difficulties, repetitive behaviours, and even cognitive delays.

In explaining the decision to seek out and train autistic individuals, SAP says that:

Only by employing people who think differently and spark innovation will SAP be prepared to handle the challenges of the 21^stCentury.

If that was the strategy that SAP was employing, it would be laudable, but it doesn’t look that way to me.

SAP have actually positioned the vanguard of these intelligent, innovative, detail obsessed individuals as software testers.

Now don’t get me wrong.

I’m not knocking either software testers or software testing as a career. Anybody who has spent any time developing will know that testing is a key link in the development chain. However, testing normally takes place after the requirements have been gathered, agreed, and signed off.

Conversely, innovation needs to be capitalised upon up front in the project process.

Managing the creative and technical process at the start of a software development cycle requires ‘soft’ communication skills. Working as an individual, but also contributing to the team effort, whilst also understanding the driving needs of the people and enterprises you are aiming to serve.

In short, all those things that we are told autistics struggle with are at least as essential to the creative process as pure intellect or analytical ability.

If SAP is really aiming for product innovation, they should be placing their creative thinkers – autistic or not – front and centre right at the very start of product conception and development.

If you knew HTML, PHP, ASP, Java, SQL Server, MySQL, IIS, Apache, Oracle, Dreamweaver, Javascript, Flash, Photoshop, SEO, and other assorted technologies and techniques, then you could claim to be a fully-fledged Webmaster. You were part of a brave new world in which the geek shall inherit the earth, and your place was very definitely chained (metaphorically speaking, of course) to a cubicle somewhere deep in the bowels of the IT Department.

You don’t see many adverts for Webmasters anymore. But as a species, they are still out there. And they’ve changed job title. And departments. Now, those generalist Webmasters who used to be working in IT, are likely now working in Marketing.

As the Internet matured, so did the tools for creating and managing a corporate digital marketing footprint. It’s become much easier for marketing teams to draw together for themselves a set of tools with minimal help from a dedicated IT team.

Marketing executives are – rightly, in my opinion – increasingly gaining the confidence to initiate and lead projects that in the past would have fallen to IT. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects, content managed web sites, social and mobile campaigns, mass emailing platforms, are all examples that come to mind here.

Indications are that advertising spend will pick up in 2013 and that a large part of increased marketing budgets will be invested into digital marketing technology. Recent Gartner analysis has predicted that by2017 the CMO will be spending more on IT than the CIO.

Whilst corporate IT teams, in general, aspire to be creative in the solutions to the problems that their business throws up, it’s actually those cool cats over in Marketing that are expected to generate and deliver the initial spark of creativity. It has always been the role of IT to support business needs, to enable all other business functions to, well, function.

Corporate IT focus may have shifted recently towards managing cloud-based services, Big Data, and figuring out how to replace all those legacy BlackBerries. But sales and marketing teams don’t want to sit around waiting for the website to be updated by the IT team. They want to do it themselves. And they know that the tools exist to specifically deliver what they need.

This is not to say that marketing teams are going rampant with software design and development, or that they are seeking to undercut or undermine the IT team. There should always be consultation and collaboration between Marketing and IT teams, not to mention the wider business, although the driving force behind that collaboration has changed in some organisations, and will change in many more over the coming few years.

IT professionals need to come to terms with the fact that technology has matured to the point where a marketing team could, in theory at least, commission and maintain a great deal of IT-related services and products , sidestepping the traditional enterprise IT role altogether. Never mind Bring Your Own (BYO) laptops, what about BYO CRM? BYO mobile apps? BYO CMS?

The flip side of the coin is that the budget for all these projects will have to be justified by the marketing department. In a downturn, the IT budget is traditionally one of the first to feel the pinch. If marketing professionals are recognising the value of investing in technology solutions and are allocating budget towards them, this can only be a Good Thing.

Webmasters are still around. They’ve evolved a broad set of skills that aren’t so focused anymore on underlying technologies, but on making the most out of the right software tools and techniques that enable sales and marketing operations. And now, it seems they live in the Marketing Department. Some of them don’t even know they are Webmasters. But they are. And they are part of a brave new world.

This post was originally published on icreon.co.uk

On the consumer side of 4G the potential for streaming video is obvious, but that’s not the limit of 4G possibilities. Mobile gaming will offer huge opportunities for creativity once data transmission speed and maintaining reliable network connections become less of an issue. Augmented reality (AR) applications should also enjoy growth as real-time data becomes faster to acquire and display.

But it’s not all just about consumers. Enterprises stand to benefit from 4G if they can meet customers’ needs and – almost literally – do business at the speed of thought.

Faster data transmission – supported by agile business processes – could mean the difference between closing a sale and losing the lead. That’s why organisations like SugarCRM are really concentrating upon making their software available across mobile platforms. If you want to discreetly update contact information and make notes on a VIP just after you spoke to them at an event, mobile is the only way to do that at speed in real time.

Beyond CRM use, dedicated applications and faster connections are combining to enable innovative and sophisticated solutions. From complicated financial transactions, to delivering custom course materials to students, to paperless electronic systems, there has never been a greater for greater speed, or greater thought about how to use that speed.

Speed, security and connection stability are not the concerns they used to be for mobile applications. At Icreon UK our clients – and their customers – are beginning to expect a new generation of mobile optimised applications that deliver a fast and fluid experience not so unlike what they get when tethered to a desktop PC .

4G is a confident step forward, and there is no doubt that it will enhance our mobile experiences. For business to capitalise on this infrastructure upgrade they must avoid being caught up in the hype and concentrate on building or using applications that deliver real benefits beyond being able to download Word documents and PowerPoint presentations faster.

This article was first published on the Internet World blog

London itself has always been at the forefront of the application of new technologies in many areas, and it’s easy to highlight transport as an area where London has always benefitted from ingenious solutions – the Tube (150 years old and just had wifi retrofitted), Oyster Card, Congestion Charge, and Boris Bikes to name a few.

The term ‘smart city’ means different things to different people, but there is no doubt that drawing together some of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, academics and business leaders into a single and focused group will have benefits for London, and will present great opportunities for both public and private enterprises.

The convergence of multiple technological paradigm shifts – such as the huge growth in mobile devices and applications, big data and cloud computing – coupled with the recent economic downturn and the resultant need for enterprises of all shapes and sizes to ‘do more with less’ could turn out to be a recipe for accelerated co-operation across public and private sectors.

It’s unlikely that the London Smart City board will spot The Next Big Thing. What’s more likely is that the board will be able to identify new ways to use previously disparate ideas, hardware and software applications.

The specific challenges that face London are not so different from the challenges that face developed cities globally -, a growing and ageing population, dated infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the need to reduce energy use. Re-configuring London to meet these central challenges will not be easy.

In recognising the need to consciously develop London into a smart city, our politicians could well be providing huge opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to take on large-scale problems and apply creative, sophisticated and long-term solutions to complex problems.

When building applications, we should do so with an eye on how they will ‘scale’, or grow over time. A smart-city has to be a scalable city.

Jump-starting a smart city ecosystem in London could lead to a halo effect of new ways of thinking being applied not only to those cities that are first to adopt new solutions, but also to component industries, not just technology, but healthcare, transport, education, finance and this could well scale from the local, up to the national and even international level.

Ideas that start in London have a habit of changing the world, and it’s great to know that London may well come out of the global recession as a world-leader in smart city thinking.

A version of this article was first published by icreon.co.uk

It shouldn’t be a surprise to me to see a smartphone in everyone’s hand, as India has been earmarked for massive economic growth. Even so, I imagine my own cultural biases were at play here. Actually visiting India has prompted me to directly address those biases, and doing so has given me huge food for thought in the process.

Getting a website ready for desktop, laptop and tablet-based browsing is usually the first thing on the agenda when thinking about web and application development. Get on any commuter train in the UK and you’ll see a range of smartphones, laptops and tablets being used for various work and entertainment purposes.

But what if the market is heading in a different direction? What if over the course of a few years, a large and growing percentage of global internet access will be via smartphone rather than through PC or tablet screens?

That would truly count as a paradigm shift, and it looks like it is happening.

In recent years, the rate of desktop and laptop sales has begun to slow down. At the same time, the rate of tablet sales is growing tremendously. This is pretty obvious stuff in mature markets like the UK and USA, but in regions like Africa and Asia mobile internet browsing is already becoming the norm (12.9% and 18% page views from mobile devices respectively, compared to 5.1% in Europe).

As we anticipate growth in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies, so too should we anticipate more interaction with those markets via smartphones as the populations of those countries bypass what Europe and the US would consider to be traditional computing tools (such as PCs, laptops and tablets) and head straight for smartphones instead.

The move towards increased smartphone interactions is likely to cause a lot of headaches for web and application designers and developers, particularly as there is a push in the opposite direction – towards internet TVs – which will make it important to present a cohesive browsing experience across multiple platforms and screen sizes, from tiny handheld devices, to huge widescreen TVs.

Organisations that ditch their previously held biases – towards desktop-based browsing, for example – and which recognise and address changes in customer habits as they are developing are much more likely to succeed in a global economy. Conversely, relying upon an assumption that most of your potential customers are sitting at a desk somewhere in Europe, or using a laptop or tablet computer, will act as a strong disincentive for potential customers of your products and services in other markets.

Making a geographically appropriate investment in smartphone-centric experiences for customers – wherever they are based globally – will better position organisations to take advantage of new and growing markets over the next 5 to 10 years.

This article was first published on the Internet World blog here.