IT Matters
Steve Burrows wrote the IT Matters page for the Business News section of the Isle of Man Newspapers Examiner newspaper between July 2014 and June 2018 - 100 articles - as a pro-bono initiative to raise awareness of the importance of corporate IT matters in business within the Isle of Man.
All Change!
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- Created on 17 April 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
A few months back I wrote to the effect that I wasn’t seeing much “new” technology emerging, the current trend is more about exploiting the technologies we already have. That remains true however the world of corporate IT is undergoing a period of immense change. Corporate IT in the future - within five years, will look very different to the common implementation of IT over the past thirty years.
Yet Another Cyber Leak
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- Created on 05 April 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
In January last year I wrote “The Isle of Man, in common with other so-called tax havens, is a prime target for professional information theft. Switzerland, Jersey, Luxembourg and the BVIs are amongst those recently targeted for the theft of customer data from banks and CSPs, so imagining that it probably won’t happen here is delusional”. Well now we can add Panama to the list of victims. I’m sure the board of Mossack Fonseca have been busily managing their crisis and ensuring that the door is more firmly bolted. At the time of writing I’ve no idea how this leak happened, suggestions seem to be that an email server was exploited but the scope and scale of the documents exposed would indicate that there’s far more to it than this - apparently the leak is of around 2.6 terabytes of data, that’s 2,858,730,232,217 bytes, encompassing c. 11,500,000 documents.
The Ascendancy of Linux
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- Created on 22 March 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
You’ve probably heard of Linux, used by techie hobbyists and for some things on the Internet, but serious businesses like yours probably use Microsoft. Linux, you will likely have been told, is unsupported, too risky, insecure, not ready for prime time, for geeks, skills are too rare or whatever.
Bring Me Your Women
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- Created on 05 March 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
We are periodically reminded of the huge crisis faced by employers of ICT workers. The European Commission says “It is estimated that there will be 825,000 unfilled vacancies for ICT professionals by 2020”. The Isle of Man Government controversially recently removed work permit restrictions for all but the most junior and unqualified of ICT workers (and perhaps even more controversially we discovered that the Minister for Economic Development cannot tell the difference between a half and a quarter) with, we are told, the support of the Institute of Directors, the Chamber of Commerce, the Manx eGaming Association and other employer representatives. Obviously there is a desperate shortage, employers simply cannot find enough techie workers to go around.
Build or Buy
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- Created on 22 February 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
One of the perennial, and often most difficult, questions faced by organisations when considering new software to automate business processes is whether to buy off the shelf, or build their own. It is rare that off the shelf software functionality is a perfect match for business needs so the temptation to commission a bespoke package, either developed in-house or by a third party, is common.
Agile and Customer Focused
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- Created on 08 February 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
Agile and Customer Focused - this has to be a major aspiration for many companies but how many really achieve it? Both of these attributes are tough to deliver, but at least one IT company in the island is succeeding.
Antelle IT was formed in 2004 by Tony Jones, as a developer of business software. The company started life in Tony’s bedroom, with him as the sole employee, before graduating to the garage (the clichéd first home of so many IT companies).
An Authentically Digital Company
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- Created on 25 January 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
An Island Destined for Digital Success
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- Created on 12 January 2016
- Written by Steve Burrows
From time to time many of us pause for breath, look around, and ask how we are doing compared to our competitors, so I thought it might be interesting to take a quick look at the tech scene in Jersey.
IT's a Social Thing
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- Created on 30 December 2015
- Written by Steve Burrows
In my last article I touched on “Digital”, which became one of the most dominant business buzzwords of 2015. Over the last few years we have seen the emergence of Digital, and the Chief Digital Officer, (CDO) in government and business, as organisations start to respond to the new world order and realise that in order to engage with people they must be online and that their organisations must become online citizens. Of course there are plenty of people engaging with each other in the “old” ways, and the majority of organisations are a long way from embracing Digital or appointing CDOs, but the transition is underway. Over the past five years the Digitalisation (can that really be a word?) of organisations has acquired unstoppable momentum in response to society’s usage of ICT.
