the strategic developer
DESCRIPTION
Slides for a talk on "The Strategic Developer" given by Paul Walk at UKOLN’s IWMW 2011 event held at the University of Reading on 25-26 July 2011. See http://iwmw.ukoln.ac.uk/iwmw2011/talks/walk/TRANSCRIPT
UKOLN is supported by:
www.ukoln.ac.uk
A centre of expertise in digital information management
Paul Walk
Strategic innovation in a local context
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nearly the end of the
workshop for this year,
and you must be a little tired....
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content•local innovation in a recession
•DevCSI and the developer community
•the strategic developer
•web-managers and local developers working together
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technical innovati
on
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is local IT expertise a sunk cost or an
investment?
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cost or investment?•IT often regarded as a sunk cost in HEIs....
•...but a capacity for technical innovation is a strategic resource which needs investment
• in the institution
• in the sector
•maintaining the capacity for technical innovation is, itself, an investment
•outsourcing IT has a cost
• reduced capacity to innovate
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what do the following have in common?•Colgate 1806
•Lilly 1876 (invented concept of prescription drugs)
•General Electric 1892
•Hershey’s 1894
•Microsoft 1975
•3M 1902
•Black and Decker 1910
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“successful companies innovate in a down market”
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“Established companies sometimes perceive
disruptive innovation to be risky. But success is
possible. In fact, the greater risk comes from assuming that
business as usual will allow companies to
achieve their strategic aims....”Scott Anthony, Can Established Companies Disrupt?
http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2008/12/can_established_companies_disr.html
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innovation happens in a local context
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how established orgs innovate•“Put the customer, and their important, unsatisfied job-
to-be-done at the centre of the innovation equation”
• local context, customer facing
•“Embrace simplicity, convenience, and affordability”
• local context, convenience
•“Create organisational space for disruptive growth”
• invest locally in capacity to innovate
•“Consider innovation levers beyond features & functions”
•“Become world class at testing, iterating & adjusting”
• local integration, tweaking SaaS, rapid innovationScott Anthony, Can Established Companies Disrupt?
http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2008/12/can_established_companies_disr.html
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is this possible without a local capacity to do
technical innovation?
given limited resources, how do we make the most of what local
technical expertise we do have?
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DevCSI•building capacity among HE developers
•cost-effective training
•community-based peer support
•raising the profile of developers within H/FEIs
•showcasing the technical innovation of HE developers
•dev8D - like IWMW for developers :-)
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stakeholder survey•495 respondents including developers, their
managers, IT directors, vendors, funders, users (academics, librarians, researchers)
• 75%+ agreement that local developers understand the local context and act as a bridge between remote service providers, open source communities, and local end users, and add value by integrating into local contexts
• 75% agreement that local developers work closely with end users to deliver innovation (more work needed though)
• 70% agreement that local developers are undervalued as evidenced by short term contracts, lack of professional development or career opportunities and poor management
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barn-raising
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events!
engaging developers with open source software
developing for the mobile web
dev8D
pair programming
reading list hackdayOpen Repositories
developer challenges
developing phone based applications
agile prototyping techniques
workflow tools
OER hackday
eBook/ePub Hackday
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building stuff together•building stuff as
free-form R&D
•doing so in a very open environment
•contributing ideas
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building capacity
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the manager’s view•"They gained a huge amount. They came
back very enthusiastic and full of good ideas. It did a great deal for morale and motivation…. It's a very powerful thing when your peers say that you are doing something the best,"
•“...decided to use the momentum of Dev8D to move forward with agile working and the List8D project by providing the development team with two very important assets: physical and mental space.”
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the power of networks•peer-peer training (£85K at
one 2 day event!)
•collaborative development
•pooling of expertise
•knowledge-transfer to non-developers (librarians, web managers, researchers)
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value for money!•having
local/institutional developer resource available is valuable
•that local resource, while limited, can be backed-up by a community of peers
•a well connected community of developers is greater than the sum of its parts!
•developers can empower users
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responsive innovation•agile & embedded
• frequent F2F between developers & users - finely tuned & tailored solutions
•responsive - perpetual beta
• small, responsive incremental changes are possible
• “if you want to keep incrementally improving the user experience then you need to retain a local capacity to do this”
•gluing - the day job! (AKA enterprise integration)
• from gluing locally installed vendor software to gluing SaaS
• bespoke interfaces on common platforms
•innovation happens in a local context
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strategic develop
er
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case of the missing career path
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a strategic role
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student as producer?•Lincoln University
(Mike Neary, Joss Winn)
•Students actively innovating for the University, with official blessing and strategic investment
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finally...
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web managers and developers, sitting
in a tree....?
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integration....
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...means the Web
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devs & web management•URLs have become more important to
developers
•good management of URLs is going to become very important
•there is some convergence between CMS and application platform - e.g. Drupal
•tension between the desire to hide complexity from the user (e.g. Google Chrome disguising the ‘location bar’) and good practice on the read/write web - making URLs ‘cool’ and ‘hackable’
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“linking you”•Research on how
institutions currently arrange their identifiers
•URI 101
•Recommendations & data model
• Space-time
• domains and institutional URIs
http://lncn.eu/toolkit
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open institutional data•Open Data and the Institutional Web at
IWMW 2011
• Chris Gutteridge
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key information sets•together with the general trend towards open
data, KIS is likely to drive better information management practice in HEIs
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the mobile campus
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your local developer
might just be a super-
hero - get to know them just in case!
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image credits•All images (c) Paul Walk and licensed CC-BY except for:
•General Electric: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ooocha/2780071340/sizes/s/in/photostream/
•Colgate: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/3909708551/sizes/s/in/photostream/
•Microsoft: http://www.flickr.com/photos/techshownetwork/2961688276/sizes/s/in/photostream/
•3M: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/42905995/sizes/s/in/photostream/
•Black & Decker: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toolstop/4514199590/sizes/s/in/photostream/
•Cook book: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigcrow/3381550945/