Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Posted on by March 4, 2014

IMG_20131219_114315 We’d like to wish you all a really lovely Christmas and a happy new year. Here’s to some R&R, a bit of crap telly, too much food and some bracing walks. As it’s the season of giving and goodwill, we would encourage you to make a donation to OpenSure’s charity of the year, Megan Baker House. Instead of sending cards this year, we’re making a dotation to MBH and sending Christmas wishes by email and through this blog post.

This year has been all about lining up ducks for us, preparing to launch some new projects next year to complement our core hosting services. We’ll tell you more about those when we’re ready to whisk off the wraps. We have high hopes that this time next year we’ll be talking about our succesful launch of projects X, Y and Z while our hosting services go from strength to strength, we maintain our very high client loyalty levels and we continue to attract new clients looking for top quality UK-based managed services.

We hope next year is as big for you as it promises to be for us. We’re always happy to chat, so if you’re thinking about expanding your online services, changing how you do something or just wanting to pep things up, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss the options. We’re not here just to provide platforms – we want to do everything we can to help you squeeze every last drop of what the internet can do for your business. From e-commerce to social media, via security and collaboration services, we can help.

We look forward to chatting further in 2014, but of course in the meantime technical support continues uninterrupted over the holiday period. Please get in touch with any regular admin requests by December 23rd, as emergencies only will be handled over the bank holidays.

Big IT and Universal Credit

Posted on by January 8, 2014

Big IT and integration

“this is about management rather than technology”

What does this refer to? It’s apposite to so many projects (for instance the failure of Freiburg to adopt open source systems), but this instance is about the DWP’s nightmares getting the new Universal Credit systems running smoothly, as detailed by Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC this morning.

Why do big IT projects struggle?

Let’s not underestimate the scale of the task: creating the systems to run the new Universal Credit was always going to be a vast and complex job. However, systems have to be up the tasks required of them and to have been designed both for the material they will handle and for the people that will use them. Rather briefing against IDS, a civil service insider had this to say about the tremendous efforts being made by the staff at the frontline, referring to them:

“struggling so much with the number of times they have to re-key, systems are crashing. They’re not joined up, they just can’t cope with the messy reality of people’s lives”.

This project is struggling in part because it’s using a system heavily criticised by the National Audit Office. It’s proprietary, developed by Accenture and IBM. Why do I mention that it’s proprietary? Because among other things that means that it hasn’t been open to critical review and only the original authors can amend the code, and therefore supporting it is much harder work and ramps up the cost of ownership enormously. As Shameem Hameed says in this article on IT in healthcare:

With proprietary software, the amount of developer resources that can put into refinements may be limited to that one vendor’s resources. With open source software, countless companies and individuals are constantly collaborating to make the software easier to operate and more user-friendly for everyone.

Would open source benefit Big IT?

It would. Depending on how far you want to open source a project – ie all the processes that go into informing the design, just the source code or somewhere in-between – every element is open to peer review. Dodgy code is not obscured behind a veil of proprietary secrecy, but identified and corrected. No-one would claim that open source code is always perfect, but the openness means that problems are identified early on and a large body of expertise can apply itself to the problem.

Imagine if that had happened in this case? Would £300m have been written off? I don’t think so.

Megan Baker House newsletter

Posted on by March 4, 2014

Megan Baker House is OpenSure's 2013 CharityWe’ve just received the Megan Baker House newsletter, and thought you would be interested to take a look.

The stories of children’s improvement and the staff’s dedication are very motivating, and the fundraising efforts put in by many people are humbling. If you can make a donation this Christmas it would make a difference to very many peopole, including the adults with Parkinsons Disease, who also benefit from the conductive education provided by MBH.

The newsletter is available Here: MBH Newslttr Aut_Win 2013.